(via hedlunds)
You're Just As Sane As I
"As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?"
-Ollie Weeks, The Mist
Henrique Oliveira, the Brazilian emerging artist known for his spatial wooden pieces whose irregular forms devour large spaces which give you the sense that you are actually inhabiting someone’s body
”I believe that the message is never art itself, but instead, the lack of a message is a characteristic that makes some creations interesting to me…my works may propose a spatial experience, an aesthetic feeling, a language development and many more nominations to refer to the relation it establishes with the viewer. But, any attempt to find a message would fail.”. - Henrique Oliveira
I really like this quote.
One of the things that really irked me when I took a course Modern Art in NYC was the BS that artists (and curators) spewed about some of the works. There’s one gallery in Chelsey that has burned itself into my memory, because it was essentially a room full of jars of the artist’s urine, placed around precariously on shelves, above doorframes, etc.
There were also a collection of charcoal scribbles the artist drew with his feet.
Now, if the artist had just been honest and said something like “I was totally wasted and I thought it would be funny to piss in a jar and draw with my feet,” that might have actually been a more entertaining visit. But no, he had made up this really elaborate “deep” explanation for peeing in jars and the teacher wanted us to write a review about it.
I think it must take a lot of courage for modern artists to actually say “There is no intrinsic meaning to my work. I create for the sake of creating, I do what I want to, what feels right.” I would really respect an an artist who could admit that. (As opposed to peeing in a jar and then making up some “deep” meaning behind it and expecting people to pay to see it.)
