Tobias Smollet - Friedrich Nietzsche - Jules Verne - Waldemar Januszczak TV - Matthew Collings TV - Andrew Graham-Dixon TV -
I grow up – Am hated by my relations – Sent to School – Neglected by my Grandfather – Maltreated by my Master – Seasoned to Adversity – I form Cabals against the Pedant – Am debarred access to my Grandfather – Hunted by his Heir – I demolish the teeth of his Tutor. Tobias Smollet, The Adventures of Roderick Random, 1748
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book. Friedrich Nietzsche
A well-used minimum suffices for everything. Jules Verne, Around the World in Eighty Days
Minimalist: ‘A search for core values.’ Waldemar Januszczak, interview Great Artists in Their Own Words, BBC 2013
In all these places I was looking at and thinking deeply about nothing. In the world of now there are artists painting blank canvases – paintings of nothing. Because in modern art shocks matter, beauty matters, but nothing matters too. Why does modern art endlessly return to blanks and emptiness? Matthew Collings, What is Modern Art? IV: Nothing Matters
Modern artists making something out of nothing. ibid.
Robert Rauschenberg: ‘There’s the meaning of the experience of seeing it [white canvass].’ ibid.
Rothko was appalled by a lot of modern art. The way it was going … And we’ve given him the job of being our tragic artist of nothingness. ibid.
The Rothko Chapel: His paintings here are the grandest, darkest, blackest, most unfathomable ones he ever made. Bloody hell, they’re black. ibid.
Yves Klein: This is International Klein Blue (IKB), an ultra-marine pigment Klein patented in his own name to make monograms with. The sound you’re hearing is the sound of an orchestra playing, a whole orchestra, one note. ibid.
Klein’s theatracality is very much in tune with nowadays. ibid.
He really was a judo expert. He really was a member of the secret society of Rosicrucians. ibid.
Klein was a performer, an alchemist, an inspired fantasist. His void was a theatrical void and a magic void. ibid.
And now the blue void which Yves Klein finally disappeared into June 6th 1962, aged 34, after his 3rd heart attack. ibid.
Nothingness became very big in New York’ art, almost the main thing. ibid.
Minimal Art and Conceptual Art – the other two big movements in New York art of the ’60s after Pop Art. ibid.
Minimalism came out in the early 1960s: it was the hardest look modern art had yet come up with. ibid.
Was the object still art when nobody was looking at it? ibid.
The Tate Gallery bricks: Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre … Andre’s stripping down to almost nothing. ibid.
[Donald] Judd: he’s one of modern art’s most powerful father figures: no-one can kill him. He’s certainly an authority for me – boxes live on. ibid.
The trademark Judd look is a factory-fabricated, machine-made look. It had to be made just so, and it had to be placed just so. ibid.
But if Donald Judd is awesome, a modern art father figure, he is a rather Old Testament figure … His own art is becoming part of a tourist industry [Texas]. ibid.
[Richard] Serra was a mythic artist in the last ’60s movement of Post-minimalism … Post-minimalism, a type of minimalism [Richard] Serra stands for, was minimalism that was curvy or scattered rather than square or cubified. ibid.
Emptiness: post-modern art of the ’70s and ’80s was an art where all the old meanings were drained out. ibid.
Glenn Brown: Zombies of the Stratosphere, 1998. ibid.
The minimalists ... What the minimalists hated about pop art was its apparent celebration of the bright, gaudy tacky packaging in which American consumerism wrapped itself. Andrew Graham-Dixon, Art of America: What Lies Beneath 3/3, BBC 2011