"The artist is responsible for his history and his nature. His history is part of his nature." Ad Reinhardt
"One's mind and the earth are in constant state of erosion: mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs or thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason." Robert Smithson
"Is painting a mode of thought? Is there a philosophy that extends beyond the confines of a medium? Where does the edge of the canvas and the edge of the world begin?" Walker Art Center Painting at the Edge of the World
"Systems were laid over life the way a rectangular format is laid over the seen paintings, for focus." Lucy Lippard
"La musique a son rythme, l’immensité le sien, tout s’éclaire en mer, c’est là qu’on trouve le temps de voir ce qui est vrai et ce qui ne l’est pas. Mets les voiles... et le reste suivra." Bernard Moitessier
"The purpose of painting is to represent objects as they really are; that is to say differently from the way we see them." Jacques Rivière
"The poem is not a thing we see -it is, rather, a light by which we may see -and what we see is life." Robert Penn Warren
"Painting might not be dead. Its vitality will only be tested once we are cured of our mania and melancholy, and we believe once again in our ability to act in history: accepting our project of working through the end again, rather than evading it through increasingly elaborate mechanisms of defense." Yve-Alain Bois
"A fundamental assumption in much recent past art was that things have stable properties, i.e. boundaries... Boundaries, however, are only the fabrication of our desire to detect them." Mel Bochner
"Painting stands for the evidence of the act of creation." Tony Godfrey
“Statistics are to bodies and social types what maps are to territories: they flatten and enclose.” Arjun Appadurai
"A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that is the reader, not the author." Roland Barthes
"Language is form and not substance." Ferdinand de Saussure
“Tug hard enough on any story and you will find it connected to another story, and then another, ad infinitum, across the palimpsest of the world. Moving through headlines at three miles an hour reveals this intimate warp and weft. It’s not just about the rewards of immersion to be gained by living for years at boot-level with the ordinary farmers, artists, soldiers, students, and unemployed factory hands who inhabit global events; walking exposes the integument that binds our narratives together. Absorbing this requires surrendering speed.” Paul Salopek
"The role of art is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real." Nicolas Bourriaud
"In arrogating to themselves the centre of the world, when in fact the center is everywhere, the contemporary victors are speaking to the universe on behalf of everyone, and speaking badly." Ben Okri
"Fear always springs from ignorance." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial leading to human truth." Gerhard Richter
"No-one in the pre-digital cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to him- or herself in the way that we are routinely able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation becomes a mere fragment of a bigger memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion." Jaron Lanier
"I must create a system or be enslav'd by another Man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create." William Blake
"The only acceptable and purpose of human activities is the production of a subjectivity that is forever self-enriching its relationship with the world." Félix Guattari
"Loin de me nuire, ta différence m'enrichit." Antoine de St Exupéry
"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." Nelson Mandela
"People believe in medicine, but don't believe in art, without questioning either." Damien Hirst
"When the close attention paid to trend is diverted to personal methods and issues, when explorations into form become explorations into being and spiritual values, only then will art be somewhat enlightened -such a very long road." Ai Weiwei
A "sculpture" that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reaches beyond the space it materially occupies. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a "system" of interdependent processes." Hans Haacke
"The hardest thing is to something that is close to nothing." Marina Abramović
"Ce qui compte ne peut pas toujours être compté, et ce qui peux être compté ne compte pas forcément." Albert Einstein
"The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know." Harry Truman
“Not everything is beyond the reach of words, but the living truth. Words only say exactly what can be said, which has been known for a long time.” Eugen Ionescu
“ Solvitur ambulando” | “It is resolved by walking “ Diogenes
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." Mark Twain
"Devant me résoudre à ne pouvoir refaire ce Monde, je me contenterais de redessiner l'Univers tout entier." Jean Vincent
"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." Immanuel Kant
"Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own." Judith Butler
"Le dépaysement est tel que l'experience permet de clarifier une partie de ses désirs et de se désincarcérer de la prison du moi. Là-bas, beaucoup ont cessé de fouiller leur âme. Ils ont oublié leurs angoisses et remué leurs certitudes. Sous l'influence des terres rudes, ils ont vu, eux aussi, le monde "depuis l'extérieur" comme neuf: un monde non pas intact mais différent, bien plus vaste et peuplé d'une infinité d'autres présences. Ils sont devenus membre d'une planète qui n'appartient à personne." Oliver Renaud Penser comme un iceberg
“La seul façon de ne pas devenir fou, est de vivre ses folies.” Jean Vincent
"C'est à 73 ans que j'ai commencé à comprendre la véritable forme des animaux, des insectes et des poissons, et la nature des plantes et des arbres. En conséquence, à 86 ans, j'aurais pénétré plus en avant dans l'essence de l'art. À 100 ans, j'aurais définitivement atteint un niveau merveilleux et, quand j'aurais 110 ans, je tracerai une ligne et ce sera la vie." Katsushika Hokusai
“The letter x in algebra is definitely an abstraction in relationship to the numbers with which it can intermingle as a factor… Yet this letter functions in all of the calculations as a real quantity. In other words, we have a symbol that admittedly represents the unknown. Yet our faith in the system is so great…” Mark Rothko
“The formation of thought is already sculpture.” Joseph Beuys
"Art is 99% thinking and 1% making." Alfredo Jaar
"All I make are models. The actual works of art are ideas." Joseph Kosuth
"Silence alone is worth hearing." Henry David Thoreau
