Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
The impulse for me to want to make sculpture is because I want to make statements, really, on a purely emotional level. And it’s also somewhat of a challenge to see how that can be done with materials and objects that really are not emotional, in and of themselves.
Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I’d done even years ago doing people. I couldn’t get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.
Well, what I’m doing is really clothing. I’m not doing sculpture.
Every model is a living sculpture – art in-vivo.
The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer’s movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
Until film is just as easily accessible as a pen or pencil, then it’s not completely an art form. In painting, you can just pick up a piece of chalk, a stick, or whatever. In sculpture, you can get a rock. Writing, you just need a pencil and paper. Film has been a very elitist medium. It costs so much money.
I have the deepest admiration for Angela Palmer and her work so having my helmet as her subject has been a true honour for me. I think the sculpture is stunning and very striking, it’s the most incredible combination of strength with fragility.
I love reality TV and everything, and it’s something that I truly love to do, and I love the outcome of it; it’s like my art. I consider my reality show as my art piece, and it’s like a sculpture that I built; it’s my baby.
You can’t copyright a urinal. But you could probably copyright a sculpture of a urinal. And like Duchamp’s famous work, code is both, at the same time.
I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.
I like the Alice in Wonderland sculpture in Central Park. I love how it’s been rained on forever and looks worn down by time.
I want people to get inspired by public space – their space. People tend to forget about it because they do the daily thing, but putting up these sculptures breaks the routine.
Cars are the sculptures of our everyday lives.
We used to make patterns in the dirt, hanging our feet off the horse-drawn farm equipment. We made endless hourglass figures that I now see as the forms within forms in my crocheted wire sculptures.
A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can’t stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can’t live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff – mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.
You have to create your life. You have to carve it, like a sculpture.
A chair, it’s like a sculpture. It starts as a thought and then becomes an idea, something I might think about for years. When the time is right, I express it on paper, usually as a simple line in space. Finally, it takes shape.
Writing, film, sculpture, music: it’s all make-believe, really.
We do need sculpture. People always say: ‘Well, that sculpture could have paid for a cot in a maternity ward.’ But if the world had been run on those lines, there’d only be about four books, and they’d be seed-drill manuals.
There is something that always will be true about painting and sculpture – that in order to really get it, you have to show up. That is something that is both sad and kind of beautiful about it. It remains analog. It remains special and irreducible.
I can actually feel the interior body of a dancer. I have the ability to capture a split second… I want you to be hit with whatever the essence is of this sculpture.
And certainly the history of public sculpture has been disastrous but that doesn’t mean it ought not to continue and the only way it even has a chance to continue is if the work gets out into the public.
I feel like I became an artist by default. I went to art college, but my interest was always more towards film than painting or sculpture.
I made all sorts of things: drawings, sculptures – I was doing origami before I even knew the word. I was constantly creating.
I had no intentions of going into sculpture but found that sculpture was just an extension of drawing.
Let us together create the new building of the future, which will be everything in one form: architecture and sculpture and painting.
I’m a very positive person, but this whole concept of having to always be nice, always smiling, always happy, that’s not real. It was like I was wearing a mask. I was becoming this perfectly chiselled sculpture, and that was bad. That took a long time to understand.
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.
Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber’s wax dummy is to sculpture.
I hate all those celebrity sculptures like Tussauds, where everyone is dressed in spangly suits and they are all smiling.
I really don’t have a theme when I start a sculpture. The rock guides me to the final sculpture. I think that is true for many creative sculpture artists.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.
Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
I’m in deep in everything, every moment of the day. I create the systems and oversee every aspect of the execution. Every mark on a sculpture and every brush-stroke on a painting is in a controlled situation, exactly as they’d be if I’d have done them myself.
When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination.
It’s extremely difficult to say what one actually means by ‘sculpture’ other than, in a provisional sense, it’s something that goes on the floor or a pedestal, and loosely applies to a certain history of the use of that term.
Nobody complains that Bernini’s sculptures are too darn real, right? Or that Norman Rockwell’s paintings are too creepy. Well, robots can seem real and be loved, too. We’re trying to make a new art medium out of robotics.
I love my sculptures, and I was lucky I had them for 50 years because no one would look at them, and I really liked having them around.
My great-grandparents have some beautiful sculptures which have come down the generations. They are priceless and whenever I look at them, I am inspired.
I’m amazed by how angry people get about new art, particularly new sculptures in their town. The people who hate new sculpture usually find their type of art on birthday cards, pictures of a vintage car going round a hairpin bend and suchlike.
‘6 Times’ is an attempt to reinvestigate the social responsibility of sculpture. The body in question is a particular body, but it doesn’t really matter whose it is.
I started doing sculpture in 1959. I had no commissions then. They were painted, similar in style to the paintings… At a certain point, I decided I didn’t want an edge between two colors, I wanted color differences in literal space.
I was looking to explore the theme of good and evil, so what better inspiration than the comics? I’d developed a relationship with DC and Warner Bros. when I donated a sculpture of Catwoman to the ‘We Can Be Heroes’ campaign a few years ago. That’s what started it.
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire – but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.
I came from an intellectual Parisian family. My father was a watchmaker; my mother was a housewife. We discussed politics, art, sculpture – never fashion.
Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.
It’s hard for people to understand editing, I think. It’s absolutely like sculpture. You get a big lump of clay, and you have to form it – this raw, unedited, very long footage.
Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you’ll find it. It’s there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.
Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.
Talent grips us. We are overtaken by the beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture, riveted by Mariah Carey’s angelic voice, doubled over in laughter by the comedy of Robin Williams, and captivated by the on screen performances of Denzel Washington.
The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.
