QUOTE - Eva Hesse

Untitled statement (1968)  

in Eva Hesse (New York: Fischbach Gallery, 1968)

"I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions. (...)"

Untitled statement (1969) 

in Art in Process IV (Finch College, 1969)

"(...) I remember I wanted to get to non art, non connotive, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort. from a total reference point. is it possible? I have learned anything is possible. I know that."

READING 004 - The Andy Warhol Diaries

"Tuesday, June 28, 1977 (...) I haven´t peed on any canvases this week. This is for the Piss paintings. I told Ronnie [Ronnie Cutrone] not to pee when he gets up in the morning- to try to hold it until he gets to the office, because he takes lots of vitamin B so the canvas turns a really pretty color when it´s his piss. (...)"

ARTE POVERA

'The name means literally 'poor art' but the word poor here refers to the movement's signature exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the quasi-precious traditional ones of oil paint on canvas, or bronze, or carved marble. Arte Povera therefore denotes not an impoverished art, but an art made without restraints, a laboratory situation in which any theoretical basis was rejected in favour of a complete openness towards materials and processes.' - www.tate.org.uk/collections/glossary/definition.jsp?entryId=31

QUOTE - Fernando Pessoa

" Tenho pensamentos que, se conseguissse realizá-los e torná-los vivos, acrescentariam uma nova luz ás estrelas, uma nova beleza ao mundo e um maior amor ao coração dos homens."

QUOTE- Yoko Ono

Beginning of Yoko Ono's Snow Piece (Tape piece III):

Take a tape of the sound of the snow falling. This should be done in the evening. Do not listen to the tape. Cut it and use it as strings to tie gifts with. 

Yoke One stated:

 "The only sound that exists to me is the sound of the mind. My works are only to induce music of the mind in people.' ...'There is a wind that never dies.'... 

 The wind is the moving mind, the mind that according to John Cage, 'is part of the air',the mind that is able to transcend 'the falsehood of consciousness' and fly. (Jacqueline Baas, The Sound of the Mind, 2005. Published in Chance, Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Margaret Iversen, published by The Whitechapel Gallery)

QUOTE- Jean Tinguely

'In his 1959 Manifesto For Statics Tinguely exhorted his fellow artists to "stop painting time. Cease building cathedrals and pyramids that crumble away like sugar decorations. Breathe deeply, live in the now, live on and in time. For a beautiful and absolute reality." He then abridged his manifesto, had 150,000 copies printed and dropped them from airplanee over Dusseldorf.'

- extract from Art of the 20th Century, Taschen

Jean Tinguely - Homage to New York (1960) from Stephen Cornford on Vimeo.

QUOTE- Man Ray

"...a certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realisation of this idea..." - Man Ray 1934

QUOTE- Rimbaud

"The artist makes himself a seer, by long, prodigious and rational disordering of senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him and keeps only their quintessence. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed- and the great learned one among men. For he drives at the unknown." 

QUOTE- Louise Bourgeois

"I do, I undo, I redo."  

- Louise Bourgeois, sculptor (25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010)

QUOTE- J.G Ballard

" We Live in quantified non-linear terms- we switch on television sets, switch them half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream and so forth. We don't live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did."