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I am not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell I am interested in? I must be interested in that process that I am talking about.. I don’t keep the studio very tidy. You have on the floor like cow dung in the field.. ..and I look down at this stuff on the floor and it’s just a lot of inert matter, inert paint. Then what is it? I look back on the canvas, and it’s not inert, it’s active, moving and living.. ..Why I need this kind of miracle, I don’t know it, but I need it. my conviction is that this is the act of creation to me. That’s how I have it.
--
transcript of a public forum at Boston university, conducted by Joseph Ablow, 1966; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, pp. 63-75

 

Phillip Guston

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I have a studio in the country - in the woods – but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert, even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible if you can move that inch.

 

Phillip Guston

 

The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.

 

Robertson Davies

 

Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth,, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? – 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It’s not an idea, it’s a sense of something you know, a demarked place. Somehow I think I always thought of it going that way, rather than an idea of a narrowing triangle going to the center of the earth... ...I have nothing to do with conceptual art. I’m not interested in ideas. If I were interested in ideas, I’d be in a field where what we think in is ideas... ...I don’t really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way. (December 1969, talking with the audience)

 

Carl Andre

 

No talent is required to reproduce. Nature has done a tremendous job in creating this extraordinary piece — the body. The body does not want to learn anything from culture. It doesn't want to know anything from us. We are always interested in telling this body how to function. All our experiences, spiritual or otherwise, are the basic cause of our suffering. The body is not interested in your bliss or your ecstasies. It is not interested in your pleasure. It is not in interested in anything that you are interested in. And that is the battle that is going on all the time. But there seems to be no way out.

 

U. G. Krishnamurti

 

He smiled a kind of sickly smile and curled up on the floor
And the subsequent proceedings interested him no more.

 

Bret Harte