Artists Speak Out
Artists Speak Out
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, May 13, 1987
OF SUCH interest are written and spoken statements by visual artists, that a cult-like influx of books, films, videos, and other mass-media compilations has thrived on them for years. The painter's verbal mystique is an age-old paradox. The mute, the mime, the painter, all seduce the public with their silence, so much so that when they do speak, the world — perhaps out of sheer curiosity — listens.
What follows here is a small collection of statements, aphorisms, and fragments from personal correspondence that bear witness to the painter's literacy:
MARCEL DUCHAMP, 1946: "I was interested in ideas — not merely in visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind. ... I am sick of the expression 'bête comme un peintre' — stupid as a painter."
MICHEL TAPIE, 1952: "Since Nietzsche and Dada, art appears from beginning to end as the most inhuman of adventures."
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO, 1919: "It is an axiomatic truth that madness is an inherent phenomenon in all profound artistic manifestations."
MARC CHAGALL, 1944: "I am against the terms 'fantasy' and 'symbolism' in themselves. All our interior world is reality — and that, perhaps, more so than the apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical, 'fantasy', or fairy-tale, or chimera — would be practically to admit not understanding nature."
CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, 1925: "When we are no longer children, we are already dead."
CONSTANT, 1949: "It is impossible to know a desire other than by satisfying it, and the satisfaction of our basic desire is revolution. Therefore, any real activity — that is, cultural activity, in the 20th Century — must have its roots in revolution."
ANDRE MASSON, 1944: "Extremes cannot enslave genius; on the contrary, genius contains and masters them."
AUGUST STRINDBERG, 1895: "The moment you were approved and admired and had supporters, they would classify you, put you in your place and give your art a name which, five years later, the younger generation would be using as a tag for designating a super-annuated art — an art they would do everything to render still more out of date."
PABLO PICASSO, 1945: "The value of a work resides precisely in what it is not."
FRANCIS BACON, 1963: "Man now realizes that he is an accident, that he is a completely futile being, that he has to play out the game without reason. I think that even when Velasquez was painting, even when Rembrandt was painting, they were still ... conditioned by certain types of religious possibilities, which man ... has had cancelled out for him. Man now can only attempt to beguile himself, for a time, by prolonging his life — by buying a kind of immortality through the doctors. You see, painting has become, all art has become, a game by which man distracts himself."
ROBERT MOTHERWELL, 1948: "There is a certain point in anguish where one encounters the comic — I think of Miro, of the late Paul Klee, of Charlie Chaplin, of what healthy and human values their wit displays...."
PAUL GAUGUIN, 1903: "The savage is decidedly better than us .... I am a savage. And the civilized foresee it, for there is nothing surprising or confusing in my work except this savage-in-spite-of-myself. For that reason, it is inimitable."
MARSDEN HARTLEY, 1919: "I have learned a great deal about art and its meaning since I conceived a kind of contempt for what the idolaters would have the world think it is. I have learned that it is an aristocratic privilege and that it is wrong to be driven to make a mercantile commodity of it. The French are doomed because they have learned to make a business of art...."
CLAES OLDENBURG, 1964: "Pop imagery, as I understand it, ... is a way of getting around a dilemma of painting and yet not painting. It is a way of bringing in an image that you didn't create. It is a way of being impersonal. I think that the reaction to the painting of the last generation, which is generally believed to have been a highly subjective generation, is impersonality. So one tries to get oneself out of the painting."
BRICE MARDEN, 1974: "Painters are amongst the priests — worker priests of the cult of man — searching to understand but never to know."
FUTURIST MANIFESTO, 1910: "We demand, for ten years, the suppression of the nude in painting!"
HENRY MOORE, 1937: "It is a mistake for the sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work."
ANDY WARHOL, 1968: "I never wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a tap dancar."
* * *
Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Artists Speak Out” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, May 13, 1987
