I recognize that it is through the engagement with my craft - by recognizing an idea and drawing it out, building physical models, collaborating with experts, constructing the sculptures at urban scale, and maintaining them through years of weather a...
In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.
I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.
I've always enjoyed feeling a connection to the avant-garde, such as Dada and surrealism and pop art. The only thing the artist can do is be honest with themselves and make the art they want to make. That's what I've always done.
I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising.
All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.
Well, I'd say that the beginning of this thing came through with Art of This Century, Peggy Guggenheim's, where she opened this gallery and began showing some things that caused a little talk, amongst a lot of other things.
I've zeroed in on what you would call action and excellence... Everybody who does anything to try to succeed has to give the best of themselves, and art has made me pull the best out of myself.
An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been i...
We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.
Even in modern art, artists have used methods based on calculation, inasmuch as these elements, alongside those of a more personal and emotional nature, give balance and harmony to any work of art.
I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.
A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward, eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.
I think my masks reference artists who reference primitivism. They're not directly connected to tribal arts. I think they look more like third-grade art projects.
Contemporary curators orbit in the place of distribution and consumption, and less and less in the space of artists. I think it has become a lazy profession in regard to its relationship to the artists and the vigorous state of art making.
You have to have conviction and completely question everything and anything you do. No matter how much you study, no matter how much you know, the side of your brain that has the smarts won't necessarily help you in making art.
Most of the musicians that I know almost to the man everybody uses Apple computers. They've thought of the steps that you're going to think of when you're trying to create your thing. And that's where the tools get invented to make better art.
I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.
Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.
Doing my art came out of something very solitary and something that I had no intention of showing anybody, and yet once people saw pieces in my house, it became really clear that there was a great demand for my art.
