“I still think science is looking for answers and art is looking for questions.” ⠀ Quinn sees the skeleton as representative of an everyman, an abstraction of a person since it is the part of the body which transcends death. The sculptures Angel and Waiting for Godot take the form of a praying skeleton and are an ironic reference to the idea of waiting for answers – or for some kind of external power to guide our life. ⠀ Marc Quinn Waiting for Godot 2006 Patinated bronze 77h x 37w x 76.5d cm
“I don’t think it’s necessary to be original. It’s necessary to be honest.”
Martin Creed: What’s the point of it? is the first major retrospective of Creed’s ingenious and often highly provocative work. Since the beginning of his career, when he made small objects that could be placed anywhere, Creed has made work that questions the very nature of art and challenges taboos. His work takes on a multitude of forms—from sculpture, paintings, neons, films and installations, to music and performance—appearing both in the art gallery and in broader public circulation. At once rigorous and humorous, his art continually surprises, disrupts and overturns our expectations. It reflects on the unease we face in making choices, the comfort we find in repetition, the desire to control, and the inevitable losses of control that shape existence.
Martin Creed Work No. 88 1995 A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball.
“Real art doesn’t have a message, doesn’t necessarily say anything. It is an arrangement of shapes, a pattern of words. If you want an antidote to this idea of art, watch Bob Dylan manically arranging and rearranging words on a shop sign he and the band spotted one day. That is art.”
Ideas have fathers One of the many destructive assumptions nowadays is that ideas have no fathers. But ideas are thought up by someone. For example, the concept of placing a sculpture on the ground without a plinth was one of Judd’s ideas; it is now very common and no one is aware of this. Another one of his ideas was the concept of the installation, the use of the whole space. Many artists devalue this idea. Once again there is no discussion at all and mediocre works are created. Art historians who are concerned with the past are at least still interested in chronology, those who work with contemporary art are not, and they see art as the subject for their own speculations.
Artist Donald Judd (1928 – 1994) held the 1993 Mondrian Lecture called ‘Some aspects of colour in general and red and black in particular’.
“A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”
“One could consider that the choices made are like a paradox. It can be seen as a paradox for the painter to not choose the color of his canvas, but I want the charge-taker to decide, since ultimately he has to live with it.”— Claude Rutault
Claude Rutault was a French both minimalist and conceptual artist, best known for the original way of expression he created and named definition-method, which is basically a manual how to create his art piece.
Installation view of After the Masters: A Tribute to Claude Rutault (1941–2022) at Musée d’Orsay, 2023
“The whole thing [about] art and money is ridiculous. The value of a painting at auction is not necessarily the value of the painting. It’s the value of two people bidding against each other because they really want the painting.”
Bischoff, who in 1976 told Paul Karlstrom: “I’m still supporting myself by teaching,” had only two one man shows before his first New York show at Staempfli Gallery in 1960, including a 1955 show at the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles from which nothing sold. In contrast, leading artists in New York benefitted from a booming art market. For example, Willem de Kooning’s 1959 New York show sold out on the first day, bringing in about $150,000 (about $1.2 million dollars today, when adjusted for inflation).
Of course, de Kooning was a sensation, but many other New York artists sold well while California artists struggled. In this situation, decently paying teaching jobs were a rare and precious commodity. When it was rumored in 1955 that David Park had been offered $10,000 per year to teach at UC Berkeley, artist Nathan Oliveira – who at the time was earning $2.50 per hour teaching art 18 hours per week – thought that Park had been given “the opportunity of a lifetime.” As it turns out, Park’s actual starting annual salary was $5,300.00.
Elmer Bischoff Seated Figure in Garden 1958 Oil on canvas 47 ¾ × 56 3/4in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
