Ken Vandermark

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Design Q&A with Charles Eames

KEN VANDERMARK interview – Mutiny #13, by Raine Liimakka

Interview with Joe Maneri, by Stu Vandermark.

Eero Saarinen And The Analysis Of Creativity.

Evan Parker discusses John Coltrane

Interview with Ken Vandermark, Andrew Morgan and David Ryan.

KV 'Illustrated' part 1

KV 'Illustrated' part 2

IN ADDITION: Archive

AN ARGUMENT FOR JAZZ, by Ken Vandermark.

Exclaim! interview with Peter Brötzmann

'Verb List', 'Parcel Images' - Richard Serra

'Principles' - John Cage

Joe Morris Interview (from AudioOne, Vol.1)

Interview with Joe Morris (originally from AudioOne)

Brouillon For Socrate, by Erik Satie.

ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION, interview by Lloyd Peterson

GEORGE LEWIS, as interviewed by Lloyd Peterson

A CONVERSATION WITH HAMID DRAKE: Part 1

A CONVERSATION WITH HAMID DRAKE: Part 2

THIS IS OUR MUSIC: PETER BRÖTZMANN by John Corbett

MUSICIANS TALK ABOUT MUSICIANS

INTERVIEW: PAUL LYTTON

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL ZERANG

EVAN PARKER, as interviewed by Lloyd Peterson

JIMMY GIUFFRE INTERVIEW

PETER BRÖTZMANN INTERVIEW WITH KEN VANDERMARK

“Dada was a rejection and a protest. I was not particularly interested in it. Your own “no” just makes you dependent on what you reject- a common “no” means nothing. Dada was based on dead forms, yet it was perhaps a bit too much ado about something that was already dead. My Fountain was not a “no”- I was only trying to create a new idea for an object which everybody thought they knew. Everything can be something else, that is what I wanted to prove.”

-Marcel Duchamp, in a conversation with Ulf Linde, 1961, from Marcel Duchamp (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), edited by Muller-Alsbach, Stahlhut, and Szeemann, pg. 90.
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“Hollywood is not failing. It has failed. The fact is that filmmaking, although unquestionably predicated on profit and loss like any other industry, cannot survive without individual expression… Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world. The answer cannot be left in the hands of money men… the answer must come from the artist himself. He must become aware that the fault is his own, that art and the respect due his vocation as an artist is his own responsibility… Only by allowing the artist full and free creative expression will the art and the business of motion pictures survive.”

-John Cassavetes, from Accidental Genius, How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film (New York: Hyperion, 2005) by Marshall Fine, pg. 106.
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“Early on I had the feeling that there was enough room for everybody, and no two people had to do it in the same way. Besides which I couldn’t really emulate something I was so in awe of. I saw Pollock and all that other work, and I said, Okay, I can’t go that way. It’s possible that I discovered my own originality through a series of self-imposed detours.”

-Robert Rauschenberg, from Off The Wall, A Portrait Of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), by Calvin Tomkins, pg. 58.
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“[There was a] shift from aesthetics to ethics; the picture was no longer supposed to be Beautiful, but True- an accurate representation or equivalence of the artist’s interior sensation and experience. If this meant that a painting had to look vulgar, battered, and clumsy- so much the better.”

-Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1968.
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"The painters to whom the term “Abstract Expressionist” was applied, in 1946, by The New Yorker art critic Robert Coates, did not represent a movement or a school. They ranged in style and attitude from Willem de Kooning, whose work was rarely altogether abstract, to Barnett Newman, who was never an expressionist. What drew them together was a common experience, an aesthetic breakthrough in middle life that led to the forging of a radical new style.”

-Calvin Tomkins, from Off The Wall, A Portrait Of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), pg. 32.
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“Painting is a way of living, that is where the form of it lies.”

-Willem de Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, XVIII, No. 3 (Spring 1951).
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“Marcel Duchamp claimed that the creative act is bipolar, in that it requires not only the artist who sets it in motion but also the spectator who interprets it, and by doing so completes the process. In that spirit, for the last forty years it’s been my ambition to write about contemporary art not as a critic or a judge, but as a participant.”

-Calvin Tomkins, from Off The Wall, A Portrait Of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), pg. xiii-xiv.
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“So many people could do so many things if they would just try, but they’re frightened off because they haven’t been trained to do this or that… I just picked up a $7.50 camera and went to work.”

-Gordon Parks, from “Black Renaissance, Gordon Parks (1912-2006)” by Mark Randolph, Waxpoetics #17 (June/July 2006), pg. 20.
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“To compose the Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable undertaking, necessary and perhaps even unavoidable; at the beginning of the twentieth, it is almost impossible. It is not in vain that three hundred years have gone by, filled with exceedingly complex events. Amongst them, to mention only one, is the Quixote itself.”

-Jorge Luis Borges, from “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Labyrinths, Selected Stories & Other Writings (New York: New Directions , 1964), by Jorge Luis Borges, pg. 41-42.
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“In art, making demands on people means believing in them.”

-Helmut Lachenmann, from his liner notes to “Das Madchen mit den Schwefelholzern,” (ECM New Series 1858/59, 2004), pg. 26.
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“One of the most common mistakes about Stravinsky is, in my opinion, the incomprehension of his final works. People write absurd diatribes, the most ridiculous things about the period when, according to them, he “embraced the serial system,” or something like that. That’s ridiculous. Stravinsky never changed. What counted for him was his “method.” The fact that he considered music as an ensemble of rhythmic intervals led him logically to that method- I don’t believe in the word “system,” twelve-tone writing was not a system but a method, that’s a much more interesting word. Stravinsky was interested in all sorts of things: mechanical, natural, human, inhuman, sacred, diabolical… He could tackle anything. He arrived very late at the serial method but in the music he composed at that point are some of his best works… What is more important for an artist than to be able to say to others: “go fuck yourselves, I’m going to do my thing in my own way.” Stravinsky understood that very young. I don’t know where he learned that but it’s fundamental, and he helped me to learn it too. It’s a matter of courage, guts, audacity; it has to do with having confidence in one’s “equipment” or with developing it to the point that one can have confidence. He was a very methodical worker. He turned his back on the critics. Sometimes he tossed off letters to answer them, but in general, at the moment they attacked him, he was already far away, elsewhere, they couldn’t reach him. That drove them crazy.”

-Steve Lacy, from “He Flew,” in Conversations (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2006), edited by Jason Weiss, pg. 253-254.
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“I don’t want to sit around and wait for that wand to touch me and tell me what to do. The only way to photograph is to photograph, that’s all… By working at it- I hate to saying working at it, because it is play for me- by doing it, I think that’s how you discover. And that’s the only way for me.”

-Harry Callahan, from Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work (Tuscon: Center for Creative Photography, in association with Yale University Press, 2006) by John Szarkowski, pg. 16 and 34.
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"To paint Gothic in 1400 in Florence was wonderful, but those still painting Gothic in 1450 were poor painters."

-Lionello Venturi, from "Hofmann," by Emily Farnham, (Provincetown: Shank Painter Co., Inc., 1999), 5.
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"A plastic painting has form which is free, suspended. Yet pictorial form must exist on one surface, which has only two dimensions... The edge of the canvas is the beginning and the end of the composition."

-Hans Hofmann (1949-1953), from "Hofmann," by Emily Farnham, (Provincetown: Shank Painter Co., Inc., 1999), 51-53.
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"I believe that the use of noise to make music will continue and increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard. Photoelectric, film and mechanical mediums for the synthetic production of music will be explored. Whereas, in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds. The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to particular steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound. New methods will be discovered, bearing a definite relation to Schoenberg's twelve-tone system and present methods of writing percussion music and any other methods which are free from the concept of a fundamental tone. The principle of form will be our only constant connection with the past. although the great form of the future will not be as it was in the past, at one time the fugue and at another the sonata, it will be related to these as they are to each other: through the principle of organization or man's common ability to think."

-John Cage (1937), "Silence," (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 3-6.
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"I'm sure critics have their purpose, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what he did."

-Duke Ellington (1960's), from "The World of Duke Ellington," by Stanley Dance, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 6.
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"Perhaps also my letters shock you because you find in them only talk and no style. It is because in the end I disdain what has for a long time been called style in all arts and limit it to the expression off what is necessary and personal. Discipline and personality - those are the limits of style as I understand it; beyond that, there is only imitation not of nature, but of an earlier work of art. Canons seem to me to be useful only in the artillery; in art they are above all hobbles on style..."

-Guillaume Apollinaire (1915-1916), from "The Banquet Years," by Roger Shattuck (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 300-01.
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"We write black marks on white paper- the mere facts of frequency; but music is a communication much more subtle than mere facts. The best a composer can do when within him he hears a great melody is to put it on paper. We call it music, but that is not music; that is only paper. Some believe that one should merely mechanically reproduce the marks on the paper, but I don not believe in that. One must go much further than that. We must defend the composer against the mechanical conception of life which is becoming more and more strong today."

-Leopold Stokowski (1969), from "The Glenn Gould Reader," edited by Tim Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 264.
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"There is nothing so futile as the attempt to make a work of art serve a system of analysis for the conformation of which it was not created."

-Glenn Gould (1967), from "The Glenn Gould Reader," edited by Tim Page (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), 139.
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"His entire repertoire, from "Minutiae," 1954, to "Ocean," 1994, is thus a search for the indefinable: the creation or performance of a work that doesn't exist and cannot exist because it is automatically destined to be negated by subsequent work. If for Cunningham, dance is the representation of what is entirely possible, it is also the representation of what is impossible, the attempt to do what cannot be done. If one interprets this process correctly, from the chance language of 1953 to the 1990 definition of a gesturalism that is impossible, because it is inspired by by a computer logic that imposes solutions that are impossible for the human body, one can understand that, similar to Samuel Beckett, his way working addresses the dimension of failure. In order to continue to exist, dance, like writing, must resolve to fail, it must come to a realization that is so extreme it cannot be achieved. The attainment of this goal, without hope, is a propensity to throw oneself into a void, as Cage threw himself into silence, in order to achieve the impossible. The hope is to be able to reveal a new dimension of movement that is free from time and space, and above all from the language of dance. The struggle and effort are directed toward its annihilation, which constitutes a continuous promise of rebirth of a new dimension of activity and existence."

-Germano Celant (1999), from "Merce Cunningham," edited by Germano Celant (Barcelona: Charta, 1999), 24.
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"Imitation, influence, and inspiration? Where do you draw the lines now? That's one thing I'd like to know. Yes, just about everybody has been inspired by another musician, has adopted characteristics of his style and clothed them in his own personality. Some people have done it very skillfully and deliberately. Others have done it, you might say, grabbing at a straw! It may surprise you, but I think those who have done it, grabbing at a straw, are the ones who have come up with the nearest thing to something new."

-Duke Ellington (1960's), from "The World of Duke Ellington," by Stanley Dance, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 6.
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"This note is barely meeting the dateline for material to be published in this book for this reason: I don't want to examine and flatten by classification, and description a continuous moment of collaboration that exists in a group soul. Details are fickle and political and tend to destroy the total events. The rare experience of working with such exceptional people under always unique conditions and in totally unpredictable places (all acceptable because of a mutual compulsive desire to make and share) should not, by me, be shortchanged by memory or two-dimensional facts. All of us worked totally committed, shared every intense emotion and, I think, performed miracles, for love only."

-Robert Rauschenberg, on his work with Merce Cunningham (1974), from "Merce Cunningham," edited by Germano Celant (Barcelona: Charta, 1999), 139.
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"That is the reason that accident always has to enter into this activity, because the moment you know what to do, you're making just another form of illustration."

-Francis Bacon (1966), from "The Impact of Chaim Soutine," edited by Galerie Gmurzynska (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 88.
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"Well, thank God, art tends to be less what critics write than what artists make."

-Jasper Johns (1959), from "Barnett Newmann," edited by Ann Temkinrn(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 51.
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"We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from "above," from "below," from in "front" of us, from "behind" us, from our "right," from our "left." We can't shut out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships."

-Marshall McLuhan (1967), from "The Medium Is The Massage," (Corte Madera: Gingko Press, 2001), 111.
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"We have all let anthropologists, philosophers, historians, connoisseurs and mercenaries, and everybody else tell us what art is or what it should be. But I think we ought to very simply let it be what the artist says it is. And what the artist says it is, you can see by his work. I would like to leave it just like that."

-David Smith (1952), from "David Smith By David Smith, Sculpture and Writings," edited by Cleve Gray (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1988), 139.
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"Years ago, back in 1914, the people who were then identified with jazz had had practically no training, but they did some very wonderful and very interesting things. I believe in the personalities very strongly, in the great personalities of jazz. But today, when you have people coming into it with tremendous academic backgrounds, I can't help feeling that the music has outgrown the word "jazz." It's necessary for some people to study, but others don't have to go to school to learn how to think. Beyond writing which is more or less elementary and that which is a little further advanced in harmonic devices and so forth, it's a matter of studying what someone else has done. If you have an inclination towards a new approach and you go to school, then in my opinion there's a risk of the original thought being modified by scholastic training, because then you're apt to apply the devices of someone in the past in order to express what you have to do."

-Duke Ellington (1960's), from "The World of Duke Ellington," by Stanley Dance, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 22.
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"You are lost the instant you know what the result will be."

-Juan Gris, from "The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell," edited by Stephanie Terenzio (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1992), 256.
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"With known criteria, the work of the artist is difficult enough; with no know criteria, with criteria instead in the process of becoming, the creative situation generates an anxiety close to madness; but also a strangely exhilarating and sane sense too, one of being free- free from dogma, from history, from the terrible load of the past; and above all a sense of nowness, of each moment focused and real, outside the reach of the past and the future.

-Robert Motherwell, (1983), from "The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell," edited by Stephanie Terenzio (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1992), 257.
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"New music: new listening. Not an attempt to understand something that is being said, for, if something were being said, the sounds would be given the shapes of words. Just an attention to the activity of sounds‚Ä¶ It goes without saying that dissonances and noises are welcome in this new music. But so is the dominant seventh chord if it happens to put in an appearance."

-John Cage (1957), "Silence," (Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 10-11.
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"Criticism must come from those who are around it, who are not shocked that someone should be doing it at all. It should be exciting, and in a way that excitement comes from, in looking at it, that it's not that fall scene you love, it's not that portrait of your grandmother."

-Franz Kline, (1958), from "Franz Kline, 1910-1962," edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Milano: Skira Ediore S.p.A., 2004), 120.
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"Yet we cannot speak of the breakdown of a linguistic system with Mallarm?©, or the decline of French. The "breakdown of tonality" is similarly a fiction. Between Mozart and Schoenberg, what disappeared was the possibility of using large blocks of prefabricated material in music."

-Charles Rosen (1974), "Arnold Schoenberg," (New York: The Viking Press, 1975), 20.
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"You know, I've been making records with Max Roach and Eric Dolphy and them cats lately‚Ä¶ They hit this chord and all the time they got this other thing goin' down there‚Ä¶ then they say, "Go, you got it, Bean." Got what? What the hell can you get? What can you play between these two things? But it's interesting. That's what music is- interesting. That's what music's all about anyway. Finding those things; the adventure."

-Coleman Hawkins (1961), from "Eric Dolphy: A Musical Biography & Discography," by Vladimir Simosko and Barry Tepperman (New York: Da Capo Paperback, 1979), 54.
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"Art is a paradox that has no laws to bind it. Laws set can always be violated. That confuses the pragmatic mind. There may exist conventionalized terminologies and common designations for periods, but no rules bind, either to the material substances from which it is made or the mental process of its concept. It is created by man's imagination in relation to his time. When art exists, it becomes tradition. When it is created, it represents a unity that did not exist before."

-David Smith (1947), from "David Smith By David Smith, Sculpture and Writings," edited by Cleve Gray (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1988), 133.
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"At the Merce Cunningham recital we did that one number with only drums and the dance. It was something like my solo work but, of course, here was someone else I had to keep up with. Sometimes I'd have to hit the cymbal on the jumps and on the turns I would make a roll. Of course the dance was all his idea and I didn't know exactly what he would do next. That's like other shows, too, because you can never depend on what an actor will do. He may do something altogether different from what he rehearsed if he thinks it will make the act go over. That is, if he's versatile. And I had to be versatile enough to change with them. But I followed Merce Cunningham's routine quite easily. That came naturally to me. When you have drummed as long as I had you just sort of feel those things. You don't have to know exactly what you're going to do but it just works out that way. I got a big kick out of playing for that dance recital and the number went over very big, too."

-Baby Dodds (1953), from "The Baby Dodds Story," by Larry Gara (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 90-91.
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"You see it in Barney Newman too, that he knows what a painting should be. He paints as he thinks painting should be, which is pretty heroic."

-Franz Kline (1958), from "Franz Kline, 1910-1962," edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Milano: Skira Ediore S.p.A., 2004), 119.
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"Once, we spent a summer with Steuermann and Kolisch... down in the mountains in a village, and we analyzed the whole Third Quartet, bar by bar, note to note, and in these nearly thousand bars, to our great satisfaction, we found two places where there is a misprint or, if not a misprint, Schoenberg made a grave mistake.... So, no sooner we came to Berlin, the first time we went to Schoenberg, we... showed it to him. "Is that a misprint?"... I don't know the notes; let's say it was an F-sharp into an F-natural and a B-flat instead of a B-natural.... And so he called his wife to bring the manuscript. So she found the manuscript. "...That's correct; it is F-sharp." "And this other place?" "No, no, that's correct." So, we said, "Oh, it's not a misprint, then it's a mistake, because it must be an F-natural and a B-flat." And then we explained to him and I don't know, that's the third transposition and that is the fifth note..... And Schoenberg gets mad‚Äîred in the face! "You want to say‚Äîif I hear an F-sharp, I will write an F-sharp. If I hear an F-natural, I will write an F-natural. Just because of your stupid... theory, are you telling to me what I should write?"

-Eugen Lehner, from "Schoenberg and His Circle, A Viennese Portrait," by Joan Allen Smith [Schirmer Books 1986, New York, pg. 215-16].
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"Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or doing it better."

-John Updike, quoted from the Springfield, Mo., News-Leader in "The Week," Voume 6, Issue 252, March 31, 2006, pg. 19.
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"The other night I heard a cat on the radio, and he was talking about 'modern' jazz. So he played a record to illustrate his point, and there were devices in that music I heard cats using in the 1920's. These large words like 'modern' don't mean anything. Everybody who's had anything to say in this music- all the way back- has been an individualist. I mean musicians like Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins. Then what happens is that hundreds of other musicians begin to be shaped by that one man. They fall in behind him and you've got what people call a category. But I don't listen in terms like 'modern' jazz. I listen for those individualists. Like Charlie Parker was."

-Duke Ellington, from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg.14].
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"'You are with a group or movement,' he said in 1949, 'because you cannot help it.' The group or movement he was with was one of those that have in common a certain stance, not a certain style."

-David Sylvester, regarding Willem DeKooning, from "About Modern Art," by David Sylvester [Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, pg. 333].
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"The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and cooperation required in a jazz ensemble, carry with them philosophical implications.... It is as if jazz were saying tornus that not only is far greater individaulity possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a cooperative social structure, can actually enhance society."

-Martin Williams, from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg.18].
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"Where's jazz going? I don't know where it's going. Maybe it's going to hell. You can't make anything go anywhere. It just happens."

-Thelonious Monk, from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg.128-29].
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"The originals in jazz, the strong new creators, are no longer going to be of exclusively American origin. There's no telling now where the shaping forces will come from."

-John Lewis, from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg. 235].
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Calder's work during these years was sometimes exhibited with that of the European Surrealists, but he wanted it clearly understood that he was an independent artist, "not to be confused with the surrealists, the neo-romantics, the concretionists, or the automobilists, or the garagistes."

-Alexander Calder, from, "Calder in Connecticut," by Eric M. Zafran [Rizzoli International, New York 2000, pg. 28].
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"I dig to play Monk because Monk's tunes make you improvise on melody and not on chords. They have you thinking without thinking, like some kind of conscious unconscious."

-Don Cherry, from from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg. 267].
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"Of course we need time to understand any picture, but when we've looked at it for years it's only ourselves that have changed, not the picture. To look at a Pollock over a period of time is not to acquire a deeper understanding of a finished thing but to observe and assist in its growth."

-David Sylvester, from his book, "About Modern Art," [Yale University Press, New Haven 2001, pg. 63].
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"I say play your own way. Don't play what the public wants- you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing, even if it does take them fiteen, twenty years."

-Thelonious Monk, from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg.146-47].
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"The listener- and obviously, he's the one all us musicians are trying to reach- doesn't have to be able to 'analyze.' He doesn't necessarily have to know how it's put together. But if we can reach him emotionally, he becomes part of the music. He adds his responses to the continuum of experience that keeps alive what a musician does. I mean, the music is out there, becoming part of so many different people's experiences, affecting so many different kinds of consciousnesses in ways the musician can't possibly conceive. Reaching is what counts, not the listener's ability to analyze."

-Gil Evans, from from "Jazz Is," by Nat Hentoff [Limelight Editions, New York 1984, pg.196].
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"Understanding the principles used in any period of creativity is a must before one is able to replace them (understanding empirically orrnintuitively). Once any strong position is secured, solidifying with the whole becomes important. It is with this relationship that we are able to see the total progression as well as the significance of whatever our activity is about. Seen in this light the music we call jazz takes on a special importance. It is in this music that the human spontaneous vibration can be attached to both the direct situation of the music and also understanding of the total context of the environment itself... not to mention the fact that the whole gamut of the music is equally beautiful as well as rewarding to play. It is because of this that jazz from Louis Armstrong to Albert Ayler is new music... The reality hasn't changed, only the spectacle. Our music then outlines diversion 508 and Fats Waller covers 327. The "diversion from" is what we put our attention on."

-Anthony Braxton, from his album liner notes to "Donna Lee," on Free America Records, 1972.
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"In our form of society, audience and understanding for advanced painting have been produced, both here and abroad, first of all by the tiny circle of poets, musicians, theoreticians, men of letters, who have sensed in their own work the presence of the new creative principle.

So far, the silence of American literature on the new painting amounts to a scandal."

-Harold Rosenberg (1952), from "de Kooning, An American Master," by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 353.
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"If you want to be an artist, it's not by having original ideas, but by working your way through it... I'm not what you call an innovator.. You can put something new in a painting, but Rubens is still better than most new painters."

-Willem De Kooning, (1964), from "Willem De Kooning: Paintings," by Marla Prather (Washington: National Gallery Of Art, 1994), 127.
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"If there is any absolute, it is never more than this one, you, this instant, in action."

-Charles Olson, (1951), from "Franz Kline: Black & White 1950-1961," by David Anfam (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1994), 9.
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"To think of ways of disorganizing can be a form of organization, you know."

-Franz Kline (1957), from "Franz Kline: Black & White 1950-1961," by David Anfam (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1994), 9.
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"My work has always been in process. Finishing a dance has left me with the idea, often slim in the beginning, for the next one. In that way, I do not think of each dance as an object, rather a short stop on the way."

-Merce Cunningham (1994), from "Merce Cunningham, Fifty Years," by David Vaughan (New York: Aperture, 1997), 276.
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"...it does remind me, for the thousandth time, how the past in being reconstructed by people who were not present, undergoes unwitting distortion, and each distortion, when it appears in print, spreads like the Hong Kong flu."

-Robert Motherwell (1970), from "The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell," edited by Stephanie Terenzio (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University Of California Press, 1992), 183.
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"The things Picasso and I said to one another during those years will never be said again, and even if they were no one would understand them anymore. It was like being roped together on a mountain."

-Georges Braque, from "Picasso, A Biography," by Patrick O'Brian (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 162.
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"Art is a crucial, dangerous operation we perform on ourselves. Unless we take a chance, we die in art.

It becomes increasingly obvious that to these fellows, music is not an art. It is a process of teaching teachers to teach teachers. In this process it is only natural that the music of the teacher will be no different from that of the teacher he's teaching. Academic freedom seems to be the comfort of knowing one is free to be academic.

A painter who continually turned out paintings exactly like Jackson Pollock would soon be on his way to Rockland State Hospital. In music they make him the chairman of a department...

You can't buck the system, especially if it works. And this system does work. You can put it in a test tube and prove it. You can feed it to a synthesizer and hear Foundations shake. These men are their own audience. They are their own fame. Yet they have created a climate that has brought the musical activity of an entire nation down to a college level."

-Morton Feldman, (1966), from "Give My Regards to Eighth Street, Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, edited by B. H. Friedman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), 47-48.
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"My work, [American critics] say, is anti-art, when what they really mean is that it is anti-dogma, that it is anti-the kind of stereotyped picture they expect..."

-Barnett Newman, (1957), from "Barnett Newmann," edited by Ann Temkin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 87.
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"Disorder is merely the order you are not looking for."

-Henri Bergson, from the album liner notes written by Art Lange for "Morton Feldmen: String Quartet (II)," on hat[now]ART, 2001.
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"The arts are not isolated from one another but engage in "dialogue." Much of the new music (composing means that are indeterminate, notations that are graphic) is a reply to modern painting and sculpture (Marcel Duchamp, painting on glass, which is not separate from its environment; the "found object"; the dropped strings). However, each art can do what another cannot."

-John Cage, (1964), from "John Cage: An Anthology," edited by Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 149-50.
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"Back when I was starting out as a composer there were only about thirty or forty serious composers in the United States. It was hard going; we didn't get many performances. You didn't think of being a composer as any sort of profession, you wrote music because you had to. It's unfortunate that some young composers today are so inclined to a careerist approach, deciding what kind of music to write based on the grants or commissions they might garner as a result. Instead of concerning themselves with being rich or successful, I wish they'd spend more time thinking about what they had to say as composers. I understand that there are many more composers trying to get their music performed, but I still don't think it's the right attitude."

-Elliot Carter (2005), from "Fountain Of Youth," Signal To Noise, Spring 2006/Issue 41, pg. 19.
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"If you are a painter, meaning [is] the paintings you make; if you are an observer, meaning [is] what you see."

-Jasper Johns, from "Jasper Johns: An Appraisal," by Joseph E. Young, Art International 13/no. 7, pg. 54.
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"Art is produced by a succession of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress. Progress is an enormous pretension on our part."

-Marcel Duchamp, "The Writings of Marcel Duchamp," ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson, (Da Capo Press, 1988), pg. 123.
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"Individualism makes itself more rugged, not less, by learning where to merge itself in a common effort."

-A. Hyatt Mayor, in Stanley William Hayter et al., "Atelier 17," (Wittenborn, Schultz, 1949), pg 4, 6.
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"Every one of us has the urge to be creative in relation to our time- the time to which we belong may work out to be our thing in common."

-Hans Hofmann, in Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt, eds., "Modern Artists in America, No. 1," (Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), pg. 10.
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"Innovators come at the end of a period. Cezanne gave the finishing touches to Impressionism before he came face to face with his ‚Äòlittle sensation.'"

-Willem de Kooning, from "The Collected Writings of Willem de Kooning," (Hanuman Books, 1988), pg. 56.
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"Painting is ‚Äòimpure.' It is the adjustment of ‚Äòimpurities' which forces painting's continuity."

-Philip Guston, (1960) quoted in "It Is," Spring 1960, pg. 38.
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"The concepts of my school are fundamental. But a true artist could violate them all."

-Hans Hofmann, quoted by Harold Rosenberg, printed in "Art News," April 1966, pg. 21.
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"Being anti-traditional is just as corny as being traditional."

-Willem de Kooning, (1958), from "Is Today's Artist With or Against the Past?," Art News, Summer 1958, pg. 27.
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"Too mechanical an historical approach, with its nineteenth-century idea of progress may be responsible for the ‚Äòtradition of the new' and the resulting idea of ‚Äòobsolescence in art.'"

-Ilya Bolotowsky (1969), from "On Neoplasticism and My Own Work: A Memoir," in Leonardo, July 1969, pg. 221-22.
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"Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it."

-Jasper Johns, from "Sketchbook Notes," Art and Literature, Springrn1965, pg. 192.
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"You belong to a certain time. You are yourself the result of this time. You are also the creator of this time."

-Hans Hofmann, from "A Conversation with Hans Hofmann," by Irma Jaffe, Artforum, January 1971, pg. 37.',0,'2006-09-05 12:59:52')
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“The aspirations of yesterday were valid for yesterday’s ego, not for today’s.”

-Samuel Beckett, “Proust” (New York: Grove Press, 1931), pg. 3.
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”In an essay published in the late 1960s, Bolotowsky worried about the application to art of “too mechanical an historical approach, with its nineteenth-century idea of progress,” because it “may” be responsible for the “tradition of the new” and the resulting idea of “obsolescence in art.”” Bolotowsky complained about the tendency “to search for a monolithic, one-goal development among our more important artists, as a sign of their greatness. The nature of the creative process is quite different.”

-Jed Perl, “New Art City” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pg. 322.
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“Critical accent has been placed upon who was first in iron or welding. This speculation is no more valid than the Renaissance oil paint controversy. Gonzalez was an apprentice in his father’s shop, his work with metal starts in childhood. It is not innovation that makes art but inspiration.”

-David Smith, “David Smith,” ed. Garnett McCoy (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974) , pg. 142.
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”Alfred Barr believed that “far from appearing esoteric and beyond ordinary understanding, this new art could be described and characterized and, in part, illuminated through knowledge of its place in history, of its relation to preceding art, and of new experiences of the artists and the community at large.”

-Meyer Schapiro, statement in “Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: A Memorial Tribute, October 21, 1981” (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), unpaged.
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“The writers were really psyched for their roles as actors in history, and they wanted the scenes to change fast, so that they would have a new situation in which to play.”

-Jed Perl, “New Art City” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pg. 452.
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“In these more advanced times the danger to High Culture is not so much from Masscult as from a peculiar hybrid bred from the latter’s unnatural intercourse with the former. A whole middle culture has come into existence and threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form- let us call it Midcult- has the essential qualities of Masscult- the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity- but it decently covers them with a cultural fig leaf. In Masscult the trick is plain- to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.”

-Dwight Macdonald, “Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture” (New York: Random House, 1962), pg. 37.
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"Art is produced by a succession of individuals expressing themselves; it is not a question of progress. Progress is an enormous pretension on our part.”

-Marcel Duchamp, “The Writings of Marcel Duchamp,” ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988 [1st ed., 1973]), pg. 123.
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"[Mercedes Matter] worried that the art student was caught in “a particularly confusing situation. The extraordinary kaleidoscope of events of the twentieth century, of movements following so closely one upon another, of extremes absurd and great, of ideas canceling each other out and of recurrent Dada and ant-art, all this breaks at his feet in waves of cynicism, jaded feeling and no-belief.” She saw students “flung into the spotlight of fashion.” A student, she observed, could “go through art school and gain an acute perception of “what is going on,” a fairly intelligent grasp of the situation, and yet have never departed a single step from his original naiveté of vision.” She worried that art schools were not supporting “the continuity of work in a studio. Take this away,” she announced, “and art has been taken out of the education, and the art school becomes ready-made for the Ready Made.”

-Mercedes Matter, “What’s Wrong with U.S. Art Schools”,” Art News, September 1963, pg. 40-41. Quoted from -Jed Perl, “New Art City” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pg. 474.
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"In order to exist, international art has to be embedded. Styles must have location, even if they have no names. Art must have a centripetal focus, both in time and in geography. There must be a home- even if it is seldom visited. Place is a precondition for work.”

-Thomas B. Hess, “A Tale of Two Cities,” Location, Summer 1964, pg. 40.
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"The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact.”

-Wallace Stevens, “Poetry and War,” in “Opus Posthumous: Revised, Enlarged and Corrected Edition,” ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1989), pg. 242.
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"In an early brochure, [Mercedes Matter’s] school was said to reestablish “a simple and ancient premise for the training of an artist: learning through practice. Continuity of work in the studio replaces the fragmented curricula of most modern schools.” What mattered was not a particular old idea of form or structure, but the idea of the art as being in the practice. “In drawing,” she wrote, “it is not the shape of an idea as it exists in the mind which finally counts, but the marks on the paper, and these are not merely symbols for what is in the mind, as in mathematics, but sensible facts capable of projecting sensation.”

-Jed Perl, “New Art City” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pg. 477.
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"Greenberg [is] very ready to tell painters what they may or may not do, without enough understanding of what they have done or are doing. Sometimes he says “we” when “I” would be more accurate” As a war is not won by brilliant retreats, so creativeness is not advanced by imposed limitations.”

-Fairfield Porter, “Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975,” ed. Rackstraw Downes, (New York: Taplinger Publishing, 1979), pg. 233, 236.
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“I’ve been going to your concerts for ten years and feeling like an idiot all that time. Like an idiot! But I know in my heart you can do no wrong.”

-Willem De Kooning to Morton Feldman, from Off The Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), by Calvin Tomkins, pg. 91.
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“I don’t believe in art, I believe in artists.”

-Marcel Duchamp, from Off The Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), by Calvin Tomkins, pg. 118.
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“There is no excuse whatever for uncritically accepting what one takes over from others. For no thing is good or bad in itself, only as it relates to specific circumstances and to our own intentions. This fact means that there is nothing guaranteed or absolute about conventions; it gives us the daily responsibility of distinguishing good from bad."

-Gerhard Richter, from The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, translated by David Britt, pg. 11.
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“You get ‘way out there, so far out that after a time the audience begins to drop off, but you still have some of it left. If you tried to come back, you feel you’d lose everything, so the outwards direction continues, and it becomes hard to play just a regular thing anymore. The people who are out there with you wouldn’t accept it. ‘What happened to him?’ they’d ask one another. He sounds like Sammy Kay now.’ So you get out on that limb and you’ve got to stay there. You live or die on it.”

-Nat Pierce, from The World Of Swing, An Oral History of Big Band Jazz (Da Capo Press, 1974), by Stanley Dance, pg. 344.
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“The material is never wrong. It’s only me that can be wrong.”

-Robert Rauschenberg, from Off The Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), by Calvin Tomkins, pg. 194.
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"…the art world was never as large or as expansive as it appeared, even in those boom years of the middle and later sixties. Alan Solomon, shortly before his death of heart disease in 1970, estimated the number of ‘significant activists’ at about two dozen artists, ‘three or four dealers, four or five critics, five or six museum people, maybe ten collectors. And no more.’"

-quoted from New York: The New Art Scene (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967) by Alan Soloman; from Off The Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), by Calvin Tomkins, pg. 234.
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“I believe that the only way for me to develop myself is the way thoroughly proven by the men who have made jazz what it is- that is, to play as often and as publicly as possible with as good musicians as will tolerate me.”

-Steve Lacy, from Steve Lacy: Coversations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Jason Weiss, pg. 16.
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“At some point in the sixties the art world ceased to have a geographical basis. The old New York-Paris rivalry became obsolete; contemporary art is as much at home today in Tokyo or in Dusseldorf. The artist can live anywhere and do his work, and his work seems to lie, in many instances, outside the studio.”

Calvin Tomkins, Off The Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), pg. 260.
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“In its most limited sense, modern art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period. In its larger and to me irrevocable sense it is the art of all time; of definite personalities, that remain forever modern by the fundamental truth that is in them. It makes Moliere at his greatest as new as Ibsen, or Giotto as modern as Cezanne.”

-Edward Hopper, from Edward Hopper (1949), by Lloyd Goodrich, pg. 162.
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“Improvisation is an attitude.”

-Paul Lytton in conversation with Ken Vandermark.
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“[Photography] is not the image of Secretary Dulles descending from a plane. It is not cute cats, nor touchdowns, nor nudes; motherhood; arrangements of manufacturer’s products. Under no circumstances is it anything ever anywhere near a beach. In short it is not a lie- a cliché- somebody else’s idea. It is prime vision combined with quality of feeling, no less.”

-Walker Evans, from Walker Evans (Basic Books, 1999), by James R. Mellow, pg. 553.
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“Cubism is not different from any other school of painting. The same principles and the same elements are common to all. The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?”

-Pablo Picasso, from Picasso On Art, A Selection of Views (Da Capo Press, 1972), edited by Dore Ashton, pg. 4.
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“I’m not interested in ‘abstracting’ or taking things out or reducing painting. I paint this way because I can keep putting more and more things in it- drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space.”

-Willem De Kooning, in the New York Times Magazine, January 21, 1951; section 6, page 27.
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“I do what I do because I want to, because painting is the best way I’ve found to get along with myself. And it’s the moment of doing it that counts. When a painting is finished it’s already something I’ve done, no longer what I’m doing.”

-Robert Rauschenberg from Off The Wall, A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Picador, 2005), by Calvin Tomkins, pg. 166.
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“And if you’re going to reduce something, you’d better get to the essence of it or not bother.”

-Steve Lacy, from Steve Lacy: Coversations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Jason Weiss, pg. 21.
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“Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.”

-Marcel Duchamp, from The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962), by Arturo Schwarz.
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“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and do the work.”

-Chuck Close on the Charlie Rose Show, broadcast March 13, 2007.
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“It is, then, these composers [i.e., Schoenberg, Bartok, and Stravinsky] above all who accomplished the revolution of which I spoke at the beginning of this chapter. I want to stress this fact because the next generation- my own- is not at all in the same sense a revolutionary one. It is rather one in which the materials yielded by the revolution must be assimilated anew and given new shapes; one in which the revolution must be appraised and consolidated, in which its various elements must be regrouped and its problems provided with fresh solutions. For the older generation was an extraordinary one; it not only posed the questions which contemporary music faces, it provided the first solutions of them.”

-Roger Sessions, from his book, The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener, (Reprint Services Corp, 1950), pg. 113.
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“There is no such thing as abstraction. It is extraction, gravitation toward a certain direction, and minding your own business. If the extract be clear enough its value will exist."

-Arthr Dove, quoted from the exhibition catalog for his 1929 show at the Stieglitz Intimate Gallery on an Art Institute of Chicago information card for one of Dove’s paintings.
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“When we invented cubism we had no intention whatever of inventing cubism. We wanted simply to express what was in us. Not on of us drew up a plan of campaign, and our friends, the poets, followed our efforts attentively, but they never dictated to us. Young painters today often draw up a program to follow, and apply themselves like diligent students to performing their tasks.”

-Pablo Picasso, from Picasso On Art, A Selection of Views (Da Capo Press, 1972), edited by Dore Ashton, pg.10.
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“Talk about painting: there’s no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language, you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can’t be said but are always the most important.”

-Gerhard Richter, from The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings 1962-1993 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, translated by David Britt, pg. 39.
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“When a man talks to me about technique in music, I’m sorry to say I think of him as a fool. Obviously, if you settle for a system, which is like settling for a form of government, you cannot go farther than that system allows, you cannot go out of it, so you are immediately back where we began. You could be someone like Stockhausen who would use many particular systems, many particular stances in the same piece, but they all define themselves immediately… So don’t talk to me about systems, don’t talk to me about aesthetics, don’t talk to me about art, and let’s end it with this thought: that it all has to do with nerve, nothing else, that’s what it’s all about; so in a sense it’s a character problem.”

-Morton Feldman, from Morton Feldman Says, selected interviews and lectures, 1964-1987 (London: Hyphen Press, 2006), edited by Chris Villars, pg. 33.
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“Most people who believe that I’m interested in chance don’t realize that I use chance as a discipline. They think I use it- I don’t know- as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask.”

-John Cage, Conversing With Cage (New York: Limelight Editions, 1994), edited by Richard Kostelanetz, pg. 17.
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[We came back to the Jazz Composers’ Guild of the night before, and he told me that they played Carla Bley’s “Radio,” among other things. I asked him if he had a solo on “Radio,” and he nodded, and I asked him how it related to the composition.]

“I don’t know- ha! The composition had a lot of melodies. It had a collective melody, a displaced melody with several aspects of itself at one time, like a cubist painting. And chance was involved in it all. The rhythm wasn’t pre-set. The length of time wasn’t really suggested for the different elements, the different events that took place. That had a lot to with the success or failure of it, the proportions that happened. Very interesting!”

What do you mean by proportions?

“Relative sizes, volumes, lengths. In time. Three seconds for this and five minutes for this, and the whole in three quarters of an hour. Certain amounts of high and low, and dynamics, fasts and slows. Relative sizes of things from the whole range of possibilities. A lot of the proportions of last night were chance, and a lot of it was motivated by what was written. It was a very beguiling mixture of these two provocations: what was caused first by what was written, and what was caused by who was there and how they were feeling at the moment.”

Material and response.

“Yeah. Subject and situation.”

-Steve Lacy in conversation with Garth W. Caylor, Jr., from from Steve Lacy: Coversations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Jason Weiss, pg. 28-29.

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"People ask what the avant-garde is and whether it's finished. It isn't. There will always be one. The avant-garde is flexibility of mind and it follows like day the night from not falling prey to government and education. Without the avant-garde nothing would get invented."

-John Cage, "Diary; How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)," from The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), edited by Steven Johnson, pg. 128.

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I think the '70s were a bad period for jazz.

"I think it was a period when it was best to be busy doing your own thing, because you couldn't count on any community support. It was a very tough time, yet glorious. That was when we did the research that was necessary to refine what we did in the '60s, the breakthrough period, a revolutionary period in jazz. The '70s was the time you couldn't continue what you did, you had to make it go into a more modern direction in a more acceptable way. What we had found was too chaotic, we had to start shaping it."

If you can describe it to me, what ways did you personally find to shape your music?

"Composition! By finding the appropriate structures to contain the type of improvisational material that we had discovered. What Monk had was the appropriate containers. He wrote the lines that made the guys sound good and that they liked to play. They developed a language and improvisation came naturally out of that material and it was a coherent whole. That was what I was after."

-Steve Lacy: Conversations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Jason
Weiss, pg. 136.

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"You have to set up a formal structure, it makes the sculpture interesting. If we hang new material on old forms it's boring."

-Richard Serra, from "Monumental Scale In A Crystal Palace," by Steven Erlanger, International Herald Tribune, Thursday, May 8, 2008, pg. 22.

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"Treasure variety for its own sake... not from a lamentable failure of thought that accepts all beliefs on the absurd rationale that disagreement must imply disrespect. Excellence is a range of differences, not a spot. Each location on the range can be occupied by an excellent or an inadequate representative- and we must struggle for excellence at each of these varied locations. In a society driven, often unconsciously, to impose a uniform mediocrity upon a former richness of excellences... an understanding and defense of full ranges as natural reality might help to preserve the rich raw material of any evolving system: variation."

-Steven Jay Gould, from The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), edited by Steven Johnson, pg. 135.

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"One can never experience art through descriptions. Explanations and analyses are at best an intellectual preparation. They may, however, encourage one to make a direct contact with works of art."

-The New Vision, Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), by László Moholy-Nagy, pg. 9.

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"After about a year or so of playing completely free," he says, "the music started to sound the same every night. And then it was no longer free. That's when we had to start making another revolution." In retrospect, he categorizes the work after 'hermetic free' into two sequential types: 'post-free'- which began to put fences up in the music, to "groom" the total improvisation- and eventually 'poly-free.' "The C major scale came right back. I thought I'd never see it again. But when it came back it was wide open with possibilities. We started adding melodies, written things, modes, rhythms. Sometimes it was free, and sometimes it was free not to be free."

-Steve Lacy: Conversations (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Jason
Weiss, pg. 189.

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"It is many years now since painting freed itself from the constraints of pure representation and description and from academic rules. Painters responded to the world- the completely different world- in which they found themselves, while music was still fitting itself into arbitrary patterns called forms, and following obsolete rules."

-Edgard Varèse, from The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), edited by Steven Johnson, pg. 2.

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"But Kline's greatest efforts were always engaged in pictorial problems, rather than the pursuit of perfection. He was not at all interested in pursuing a style toward the dead-end of expertise. When problems did not exist, he created them."

-Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: George Braziller, 1990), by Frank O'Hara, pg. 46.

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"For a while I came under the spell of John Cage and, whilst there's undoubtedly something refreshing about 'allowing sounds to be themselves,' it soon became clear that for improvisation to make sense, sounds must be put to work."

-John Butcher, from his liner notes to, "Fixations (14)- solo saxophone improvisations 1997-2000," (Emanem 4045, 2001).

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"For any music's future, you don't go to the devices, you don't go to the procedures, you go to the attitude. And you do not find your own attitude; that's what you inherit. I'm not my own man. I'm a compilation of all the important people in my life. I once had a seven-hour conversation with Boulez; unknown to him, it affected my life. I admire his attitude. Varese's attitude. Wolpe's attitude. Cage's attitude. I spent one afternoon with Beckett; it will be with me forever. Not his work; not his commitment; not his marvelous face, but his attitude."

-Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews And Lectures 1964-1987 (London: Hyphen Press), edited by Chris Villars, pg. 94.

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"Being correct is never the point."

-Robert Rauschenberg, from "Robert Rauschenberg, Prolific American Artist," by Michael Kimmelman, International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, May 14, 2008, pg. 4.

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"Do you know what Picasso said when asked why he left Cubism? 'Because,' he answered, 'I wanted to be a painter. I didn't want to be a Cubist.'"

-Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews And Lectures 1964-1987 (London: Hyphen Press), edited by Chris Villars, pg. 121.

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Artists Statements #11:

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no direction. I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes, or variations that lead to mastery.

I steer clear of definitions. I don’t know what I want. I am inconsistent, non-committal, passive; I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn- as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts, and names for things.

Now that there are now priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world. That is the only thing that interests me.”

-Gerhard Richter, from The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings and Interviews1962-1993 (MIT Press: 1995), edited by Hans-Ulrich Obrist, translated from the German by David Britt, pg. 58.

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“Learn to be articulate.”

-Man Ray, from Man Ray, American Artist (Da Capo: 1988), by Neil Baldwin, pg. 55.

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>>How do you rate composition, arrangement, and performance in importance?

“All are interdependent on each other. Composition depends a great deal on the subsequent arrangement, but neither should burden the performers, for if the performance fails all is lost.”

-Duke Ellington, from Music Is My Mistress (Da Capo: 1973), by Duke Ellington with assistance from Stanley Dance, pg. 457.

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“I don’t paint things, I only paint differences between things.”

-Henri Matisse, from About Rothko (Da Capo: 1983), by Dore Ashton, pg. 114.

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“The improvised solo coming out of one musician, with others supporting him, is a dead end… In front of us we have many years of the collective improvised effort, the intuitive and adult collaboration between peers.”

-Warne Marsh, from Lee Konitz, Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (University of Michigan Press: 2007), by Andy Hamilton, pg. 57.

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“Cézanne never really finished anything. He went as far as he could, then abandoned the job. That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.”

-Alberto Giacometti, from A Giacometti Portrait (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1965), by James Lord, pg. 11.

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“It takes five years just to become a good student. Another five to become a dancer, and who knows how long, if ever, to become an artist.”

-Margaret Craske, from Chance and Circumstance (Alfred A. Knopf: 2007), by Carolyn Brown, pg. 29.

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“The forces that are bringing on war, that are preparing for larger and better economic depressions in the future, are at odds with the forces of human culture. The time has come for the people who love life and culture to form a united front against them, to be ready to protect, and gauge, and if necessary, fight for the human heritage which we, as artists, embody”

-Lewis Mumford, opening address for the American Artists’ Congress, February 1936, from About Rothko (Da Capo: 1983), by Dore Ashton, pg. 36.

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“Being unable to reach the top of the scale of values, I smashed the scale.”

-Pablo Picasso, from A Giacometti Portrait (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1965), by James Lord, pg. 53.

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“It was Maurice Nadeau who said it was an influence ab contrario. I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, subtracting rather than adding. When I first met Joyce, I didn’t intend to be a writer. That only came later when I found out that I was no good at all at teaching. When I found I simply couldn’t teach. But I do remember speaking about Joyce’s heroic achievement. I had a great admiration for him. That’s what it was: epic, heroic, what he achieved. I realized that I couldn’t go down that same road.”

-Samuel Beckett, from Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett, A Centenary Celebration (Arcade Publishing: 2006), edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, pg. 47.

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“A painting is not about an experience, it is an experience.”

-Mark Rothko, from About Rothko (Da Capo: 1983), by Dore Ashton, pg. 135.

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“One day (according to Maurice Jardot) Picasso told Michel Leiris that he felt that the work of their old friend Giacometti was becoming increasingly monotonous and repetitive. Trying to explain and excuse this, Leiris spoke of Giacometti’s consuming and intense desire ‘to find a new solution to the problem of figuration.’ Picasso answered: ‘In the first place there isn’t any solution, there never is a solution, and that’s as it should be.’”

-From About Modern Art, second edition (Yale University Press: 2001), by David Sylvester, pg. 33-34.

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“I remember suddenly coming on a cubist Picasso at the end of a small room at Paul Rosenberg’s Gallery. It must have been a 1915 painting- it was what seemed to me then, completely abstract. And in the centre there was an absolutely miraculous green- very deep, very potent and absolutely real. In fact, none of the actual events in one’s life have been more real than that…”

-Ben Nicholson quoted in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (Constable: 2008), by Michael Peppiatt, pg. 65.

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“To understand a work of art, it must be seen and perceived, not worded. Words can be used to place art historically… But the actual understanding of a work of art only comes through the process by which it was created- and that was by perception.”

-David Smith, from David Smith: A Centennial (Guggenheim Museum Publications: 2006), pg. ix.

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“I prefer to think of my work as: between categories. Between Time and Space. Between painting and music. Between the music’s construction, and its surface.”

-Morton Feldman, from The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (Routledge: 2002), edited by Steven Johnson, pg. 179.

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“Anyone who does not make his own rules is an ass.”

-Edgard Varése, from Varése: Astronomer in Sound (Kahn & Averill: 2003), by Malcolm MacDonald, pg. xi.

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“Nothing can destroy the word, it will always remain on record, just as a book cannot be destroyed by burning it.”

-Man Ray, from Man Ray: American Artist (Da Capo Press: 2000), by Neil Baldwin, pg. 181.

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“To make the contrast between [John] Coltrane and Sonny [Rollins], which generally we’re obliged to make, Coltrane created new vocabulary, while Sonny developed the existing material- I think there’s a comparison there between him and me.”

-Lee Konitz, from Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (The University of Michigan Press: 2007), by Andy Hamilton, pg. 92.

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“For me the most powerful Surrealist image is, I must admit, that which displays the highest degree of arbitrariness- which takes longest to translate into practical language either because one of its terms is mysteriously missing, or because it promises to be sensational and then appears to fizzle out, or because it promises to be sensational and then appears to fizzle out, or because it suddenly narrows its field, or because it is hallucinatory by nature, or because it finds in itself some ridiculous formal justification, or because it quite naturally makes the abstract masquerade as concrete, or because it implies the negation of some elementary property or, finally, because it touches off laughter.”

-André Breton, quoted in Marcel Brion, Modern Painting, trans. S. Hood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1958), pp. 35-36.

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“Composition consists principally of injecting a system of links into naïve musical ideas.”

-György Ligeti, from György Ligeti: Music of the Imagination (Northeastern University Press: 2003), by Richard Steinitz, pg. 167.

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Wouldn’t it be marvelous to develop a study center similar to those Frank Lloyd Wright set up in Arizona and Wisconsin for young people to study architecture, so that what you began and accomplished in music may be continued?

“I am not a teacher.”

-Duke Ellington in response, from Music Is My Mistress (Da Capo Press: 1973), by Duke Ellington with assistance from Stanley Dance, pg. 460.

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“In the early fifties, no matter what modern-dance group one danced with, it was a privilege on paid for; paid for by outside work, any kind one could get that would allow time for daily classes and rehearsals and the infrequent performance. Rarely was anything paid beyond a token fee. In those days, because the dancers (and, of course, the choreographers) themselves subsidized modern dance- not the NEA, NYSCA, the Ford Foundation, Exxon, Phillip Morris, or any other establishment Santa Claus- the climate was radically different. The passion to dance was what sustained them.”

-from Chance And Circumstance: Twenty Years With Cage And Cunningham (Alfred A. Knopf: 2007), by Carolyn Brown, pg. 56.

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“We experience more than we can analyse.”

-A. N. Whitehead, quoted in Richard Serra: Writings Interviews (University of Chicago Press: 1994), by Richard Serra, pg. 8.

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“In terms of existing, everything is equal.”

-Donald Judd, from MoMA Highlights (Museum of Modern Art: 1999), edited by Harriet Schoenholz Bee, pg. 289.

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“Nonconformity is the basic pre-condition of art, as it is the pre-condition of good thinking and therefore of growth and greatness in a people. The degree of nonconformity present- and tolerated- in a society might be looked upon as a symptom of its state of health.”

-from “The Shape Of Content,” (Harvard University Press: 1957), by Ben Shahn, pg. 87.

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“You know, when I was in England, I gave a lecture someplace, and a young man got up during the question period and he said, “In reference to Mr. Cage's remark, is everything music, Mr. Feldman?” And I thought for a moment and I said, “Well, I can't speak for Mr. Cage, but maybe I might take the responsibility, and add to the remark of his and say: Yes, everything is music, but not everyone is an artist.”

-Morton Feldman, from “John Cage-Morton Feldman: Radio Happenings,” recorded at WBAI, New York City, July 1966-January 1967, transcribed by Laura Kuhn (Edition MusikTexte: 1993), pg. 141.

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“I saw that everything had been done. One had to break to make one's revolution and start at zero. I made myself go towards the new movement. The problem is now to pass, to go around the object, and give a plastic expression to the result.” He looked around him and said: “All of this is my struggle to break with the two-dimensional aspect.”

-Pablo Picasso regarding Cubism, from “Picasso On Art: A Selection of Views,” (Da Capo Press: 1972), edited by Dore Ashton, pg. 61.

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“It's the extreme that's important. Only at the extreme can you get to grips with the real problem.”

-Samuel Beckett in conversation with Patrick Bowles, from “Beckett Remembering Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration,” (Arcade Publishing: 2006), edited by James and Elizabeth Knowlson, pg. 110.

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“An artist paints so that he will have something to look at: at times he must write so that he will also have something to read.”

-Barnett Newman, from “The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning,” (University Of California Press: 1972), by Dore Ashton, pg. 185.

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“Your ideal would be an instantaneous tradition. The new is immediately attached to a school. Its life is over at the time. You classify and name it, and since you don't allow an artist to experiment, you demand that he repeat himself and you replace him when he tires you. In that way you kill the flies.”

-Jean Cocteau commenting on American cultural attitudes, circa the 1950's, from “The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning,” (University Of California Press: 1972), by Dore Ashton, pg. 214.

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“The jazz I like is a mixture of prepared and unprepared. The unprepared is also prepared, and the prepared is also unprepared. There are four edges. Improvisation is a tool, not an end in itself. It's a way of finding music that can't be found by composing. And composing is a way of finding music that you can't improvise.... This is what Monk is about: a prepared structure that can be played in an improvised manner and can be elaborated upon improvisationally. It promulgates improvisation; the tune is not complete without improvisation.... Monk told me: the inside of a tune is what makes the outside sound good. That's a very succinct definition of form, but it's true!”

-Steve Lacy, from “Steve Lacy: conversations,” (Duke University Press: 2006), edited by Jason Weiss, pg. 189-190.

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“[Art] is concerned with something that cannot be explained by words or literal description... art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition.... Art is concerned with the HOW, not the WHAT; not with literal content, but with the performance of the factual content. The performance- how it is done- that is the content of art.”

-Josef Albers, from “black mountain: An Exploration In Community,” (Northwestern University Press: 2009), by Martin Duberman, pg. 47.

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What does making sculpture mean to you right now?

“I guess it means a lifetime involvement, that's what it means. It means to follow up the direction of the work I opened up early on for myself and try to make the most abstract moves within that.... To work out of my own work, and to build whatever's necessary so that the work remains open and vital and challenging to myself, and hopefully to others who're interested in the direction that I'm working in. To make sculpture right now is to distinguish what I do from other activities.”

-Richard Serra, from “Richard Serra: Writings Interviews,” (The University Of Chicago Press: 1994), edited by Richard Serra, pg. 35.

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“I started with the idea that first of all any kind of movement could be dancing. I didn't express it that way at the time [mid 1940's], but I thought that any kind of movement could be used as dance movement, that there was no limit in that sense. Then I went on to the idea that each dance should be different. That is, what you find for each dance as movement should be different from what you had used in previous dances. What I am trying to say by that is that in looking for movement, I would look for something I didn't know about rather than something I did know about. Now when you find something you don't know about or don't know how to do, you have to find a way to do it, like a child stumbling and trying to walk, or a little colt getting up. You find that you have this awkward thing which is often interesting, and I would think, 'Oh, I must practice that. There's something there I don't know about, some kind of life.' Then maybe something would come which I would think lively. And I would see how it worked within the structure but, as I say the structure is not something that pinned us down. It was something underneath, that you had to play with.”

-Merce Cunningham, from “The Dancer And The Dance: Merce Cunningham in conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve,” (Marion Boyars: 1985), edited by Henry Nathan, pg. 39-40.
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“Only by going too far will you get anywhere at all.”

-Francis Bacon, from “Francis Bacon: Anatomy Of An Enigma,” (Constable: 2008), by Michael Peppiatt, pg. 134.
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“All opinion is transient and all work is permanent.”

-Man Ray, from “Man Ray: American Artist,” (Da Capo Press: 1988), by Neil Baldwin, pg. 263.
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IN ROTATION: ARCHIVE