Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol Lewitt

1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
4. Formal art is essentially rational.
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
14. The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.
15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.
17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the convention of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23. The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.
24. Perception is subjective.
25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.
32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

Franz Erhard Walther

Franz Erhard Walther was born in 1939 in Fulda, Germany, where he lives and works. Walther studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1962-64, and lived in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He has exhibited extensively worldwide since 1967. He participated in documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 8 (1987), and his work was included in the landmark 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern. A major retrospective of his work since 1958 is currently on view at Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva. An exhibition of Walther's work from the 1960s will open at Peter Freeman, Inc. New York, on March 11 and remains on view until May 1, 2010.

Images: Franz Erhard Walther, Sockel, vier Bereiche (Keeping the Canvas Square in Shape), number 49 from 1.Werksatz, 1967 & Franz Erhard Walther, Connection (Head), number 31 from 1.Werksatz, 1967, cotton Photos: Timm Rautert. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc.

The show is devoted to the artist’s early works from the 1960s, most of which were created when Walther

lived in New York City from 1967 to 1971.

The exhibition presents four elements from Walther’s “1.Werksatz” (“First Set of Works”), a

series of fifty-eight canvas objects intended for use. Each work in the series – whether a

kilometer-long cord meant to be unrolled, a bag with pockets in which to collect objects while

walking, or a padded curtain hanging in a doorway through which the visitor must pass – draws

attention to the body as sculptural form by guiding the participants through specific actions.

When several works from the group were shown in Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition

“When Attitudes Become Form” (1968), Walther noted: “These objects are only instruments,

they have little perceptual significance. The objects are important only through the possibilities

originating from their use.”

The works presented at Peter Freeman, Inc. span the entirety of Walther’s early production,

beginning with his first participatory piece: “Two Cardboard Rolls (Piece to Overcome

Embarrassment)” (1962), which consists of tubes meant to be handled. In “Connection (Head)”

(1967), two viewers place their heads through a single piece of canvas, while facing each other.

In “Plinth, Four Areas” (1969), participants stand in the corners of a canvas block, pulling it taut.

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan All, 2007 Marble. Installation view Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2nd floor Photo: Markus Tretter © Maurizio Cattelan, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Contemporary Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) is known for his witty embrace of semantic shifts that result from imaginative plays with materials, objects, and actions. In his work, contradictions in the space between what the artist describes as softness and perversity wage a sarcastic critique on political power structures, from notions of nationalism or the authorities of organized religion to the conceit of the museum and art history. Like the traditions established by Dada and Surrealism, his uncanny juxtapositions uproot stable understandings of the world around us. For Cattelan even the banal is absurd. As he has said, “Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality. Whereas I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art.”

The exhibition at The Menil Collection, organized by Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art, will be the artist’s first solo show in Texas. The exhibition will focus on recent large-scale works that premiered in Europe in 2007 and will feature sculptures that range in tone from the melancholic and politically contentious to the decidedly irreverent. It will include Ave Maria, 2007, a series of saluting arms that extend from the wall; the translated title “Hail Mary” remains intentionally ambiguous, much like the various cultural meanings conjured up by gestures of allegiance.

Cattelan will also realize additional works for the exhibition in response to site visits to The Menil Collection campus and the museum’s world-famous collection of Surrealist works. Significantly, these pieces will also mark the artist’s return to sculpture-based practice. For the last five years his work has largely centered on publishing and curating. Projects have included the founding of “The Wrong Gallery” in 2002 and its subsequent display within the collection of the Tate Modern from 2005 to 2007; collaborations on the publications Permanent Food, 1996– 2007, and Charley, 2002–present (the former an occasional journal comprising a pastiche of pages torn from other magazines, the latter a series on contemporary artists); and the curating of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999 and the Berlin Biennial in 2006.

Curated by Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

.........................................................................................................................................................................

A few months ago one of Cattelan's most significant sculptures, “Him” (pictured left), traded behind the scenes for $10m, a sum that few living artists of his generation can command. Smaller than life-size, “Him” is a spookily realistic depiction of Hitler kneeling in prayer. Among other things, it poses the question: if the Führer asked for absolution, would God forgive him? Stefan Edlis, a Viennese-born Holocaust survivor and eminent American collector, is a proud owner an edition of the work. “When people see this piece,” says Edlis, “they react with gasps, tears, disbelief. The impact is stunning. Politics aside, that is how you judge art.”

BRITISH ART SHOW - TRAMWAY

Artists I found interesting were:

karla black

varda CAIVANO

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

CULLINAN RICHARDS

LUKE FOWLER

ROGER HIORNS

DAVID NOONAN

MAAIKE SCHOOREL

EMILY WARDILL

KARLA BLACK

Formed mainly from loose materials – such as soil, plaster of Paris, powder paint, and soap powder – Karla Black’s sculptures are poised between fragility and robustness. She works with such unstable and impermanent materials ‘not because they easily change and decay but because 'I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’ Whether earth-bound or suspended in space, her works are, as she explains, ‘actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating’ and she emphasizes that she prioritises material experience over language as a way of learning and understanding. Despite their psychologically loaded titles, her sculptures are the result of ‘a need to just grab the world.’

VARDA CAIVANO

Varda Caivano’s abstract paintings are explorations into colour, texture and mark-making. Describing her works as ‘thoughts or monologues, moments that grow over time’, she points out that they also demand ‘time and interaction from the viewer to reveal and unfold. I never know what's going to happen.’ Though there are suggestions of images in her paintings, form is ultimately elusive and deceptive. ‘Painting for me is a way of questioning images, where visible objects with a secret depth appear to reveal a kind of irrational truth,’ she remarks. ‘The paintings operate as a bridge, a transitional space that evokes an inner world.’

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

Duncan Campbell’s works combine traditionally different styles of filmmaking. Documentary portraits of complex historical figures, composed of archival footage and animation in cinéma vérité style, are integrated into more abstract scenes, influenced by avant-garde writers and artists. By combining them, Campbell intends to ‘allow this difference rather than homogenise it.’

Bernadette (2006) is Campbell’s study of the turbulent relationship between the Northern Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devlin and the media during the 1970s, disclosed through the contradictory press coverage of her as a martyr, victim, and troublemaker by broadcasters who championed and later targeted her.'

CULLINAN RICHARDS

Cullinan and Jeanine Richards create mixed-media installations that foreground the aspects of art and exhibition-making that other artists might wish to conceal. Tools of the technician’s trade, such as tape, touch-up paint and plastic sheeting, feature prominently in their work, along with old newspapers spattered with accidental drips of paint in the studio.

In the grand stairwell of Nottingham Castle Museum, plastic sheeting forms a thin membrane between the walls and the canvases on display. The paintings include two images of young women on horseback performing high dives into a swimming pool, an apparently popular spectacle in Atlantic City in the 1920s.

LUKE FOWLER

Composition for Flutter screen (2008) is a collaboration with Toshiya Tsunoda, an artist and composer who works with field recordings that seek to capture the sounds of objects. The sculptural installation features a flimsy handmade screen which is subjected to a series of interventions. Fixed images - a moth, a meniscus, a candle flame - projected onto it are caused to move because the screen itself is in constant motion, blown about by electric fans. From time to time, bright light and amplified sound interrupt the choreographed flow of the work, revealing the mechanisms of its illusions.

ROGER HIORNS

Roger Hiorns investigates alchemical transformations of ideas, actions and materials. Organic matter and chemical compounds and processes – brains, fire, crystals, sperm and drugs – are introduced into man-made structures, among them buildings, engines and street furniture. His crystallisations of copper sulphate have produced encrustations of ultra-blue on car engines and, most spectacularly, invaded a council flat in South London.

In Glasgow, Hiorns places a generic municipal bench in the gallery. At unspecified intervals, a flame will flare at one end of the bench, occasionally tended by a naked young man. Elsewhere in the gallery space, a thin slit in the wall becomes a receptacle for bovine brain matter.

DAVID NOONAN

The complex imagery in David Noonan’s large-scale monochrome works is sourced from archival photographs, film stills, textiles, books, magazines and ephemera. This tapestry reproduces a densely layered collage, in which images and patterns are superimposed in a play of positive and negative, subterfuge and camouflage. The resulting tableau possesses a disquieting dream-logic of its own. For Noonan, it evokes a time he spent in an Ashram in India and the parallel reality of that experience: ‘there is a guru sitting in the middle and an arm offering her flowers. And the peacocks: there were peacocks all around the Ashram...

MAAIKE SCHOOREL

Maaike Schoorel’s atmospheric figurative paintings give up their secrets slowly. These apparently abstract, predominantly white-on-white (or, in one case, black-on-black) canvases contain elusive, barely legible images that emerge, fleetingly, the longer one looks, like forms that can only be made out once the eye has adapted to bright light or darkness. Intent on slowing down looking and intensifying the process of perception, these works also address the ephemeral nature of memory and the difficulty of fixing a person’s image in the mind. Based on photographs that Schoorel has taken of herself, each of these self-portraits – once glimpsed – recalls an archetypal pose from historical art.

EMILY WARDILL

Emily Wardill's films examine the combined force of rhetoric and melodrama in media and politics. Her work upsets the rhythm of traditional filmmaking through exaggerations or strategic diversions in script, set and editing.

Gamekeepers without Game is based on a play, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), 1635, by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Wardill relocates this story of prodigal children and patricide to contemporary London. Here, a father tries to reintegrate his daughter into the family home, after nine years of her life in social care. The artist says she wanted to shoot the film like airline food, so you have this sense that everything is separate and nothing ever touches.

The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

To withdraw into one’s corner is undoubtedly a meager expression. But despite its meagerness, it has numerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, images that are psychologically primitive. At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dreams.

… by changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating.

Günther Uecker

Gunter Uecker

A German artist who wants you to feel the pain

Gunther Uecker is one of the most prominent members of the German art movement Zero and is presenting some of his works at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum

By David Momphard

In Thus Spake ZarathustraFriedrich Nietzsche opined that anyone whose task it is to create has first to destroy and "break values into pieces". This same belief lies at the heart of works by the artist Gunther Uecker, whose collection of 17 works of art are installed at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum now through Jan. 11.

Uecker's star rose in the international art scene during the 1960s as a core member of the group Zero, along with Heinz Marck and Otto Piene. The Dusseldorf-based group was strongly influenced by French artist Yves Klein and advocated taking art to its root -- starting from zero.

His first use of techniques radically invasive to his materials came when he began shooting arrows at the paintings adorning the walls of his studio. He was thrilled by the way the stark shadows of the arrow shafts divided the picture visually and shared his discovery with other Zero members.

The group would later experiment with embedding packets of paint under a huge canvas covered with white distemper, then firing rifles at it. Bullets that happened to strike a paint packet would result in paint splattering and oozing from the "wound" -- a visceral reaction that fascina-ted Uecker.

Thus, "inhumanity" became a central theme of Uecker' s work and nails invading wood became his preferred means to convey man's relationship with the world around him -- a fact which is obvious to visitors to the exhibition. What is not obvious is the inspiration for the works on display, each of which was created between 1990 and 1992.

The wall dividing Uecker's native Germany had fallen the year before and it was among the more turbulent times the country has known.

One event in particular that struck Uecker was a period of about a week, when hundreds of neo-Nazis went on a rampage chasing, beating and in some cases killing migrant workers in the country. Skinheads pulled foreigners from their homes into the street and their violence was cheered on by thousands of onlookers.

Piles of tires burned while music was played nearby and hawkers sold beer out of carts on the street.

Uecker holed himself up in his studio following the riots and began producing works of striking, disturbing visual textures: Tree, a 90cm-tall stump with topped by a canopy of tangled nails;

Painterly Garden, a 2m-wide panel of wood brushed with white distemper with sharp, fist-sized stones pounded through; and one of the more disturbing,Aggressive Field, a 2m-square panel with a grid penciled onto it of 5cm squares. At each of the pencil-mark intersections, a large nail has been driven from behind.

The varying shadows from the protruding nails combine with the perfectly straight graphite pencil markings to create a dizzying effect akin to an optical illusion. Like many of Uecker' s works, it' s simultaneously intriguing and off-putting.

Of note in the exhibition is a work that Uecker has transcribed for a Chinese-speaking audience. 60 Words from the Old Testament gleans from that work a complex vocabulary regarding hurt and pain. The Chinese characters for each word have been brushed onto separate panels to replace their German counterparts from the original.

Gunther Uecker Cuscino 1965.

TRA; the edge of becoming, palazzo fortuny

...Uecker began to investigate the potential of nails as a material for his art. Initially, his experiments were an extension of his monochromes, as he embedded the nails into the surface of single-colored paintings and objects. Although he sometimes applied them in informal patterns across the picture plane, in many works the nails mapped a gridlike pattern, fusing the monochrome and the grid. Uecker has noted that he regarded nails "as structural elements," and was "trying . . . to create vibrations by using these materials in an ordered relationship to one another, one that disturbs the geometric order and may even irritate."¹

While he could elicit a sensation of vibration through the play of light across the nails—especially when he created circles with nails inserted at varying depths—he achieved even more effective results by setting his compositions in motion. Simple motors rendered some works kinetic, and others, such as Tactile Rotating Structure (Taktile Struktur Rotierend, 1961), required the viewer's manual activation. In this piece the viewer turns a nail-studded circular relief in the center of a silver burlap background. When at rest, the porcupine-like protrusion of nails seems at once comical and threatening; but once it is animated, the combination of light and motion generates a series of ever changing, dematerialized images that, according to Uecker, embody a spiritual potential.

1. Günther Uecker, "Die Schöenheit der Bewegung" (1961), in Günther Uecker, Schriften (St. Gallen, Switzerland: Erker, 1979), p. 105. In German.

Gunther Uecker Cuscino 1965.

TRA; the edge of becoming, palazzo fortuny

László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light

László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light

June 09, 2011. - September 25, 2011.

---

László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) is a world-famous figure of twentieth-century avant-garde art. As a most versatile artist he had a radically experimental practice in the field of painting, sculpture, photography and film as well as commercial and industrial design and scenography. His visual art together with his theoretical and educational work:

, his photographs, films and photograms - now synonymous with his name - were of such significance that they have transformed our thinking about art. In the series of Hungarian artists who accomplished world fame - Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi, György Kepes - the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art now presents the work of László Moholy-Nagy in an impressive exhibition.

The central organising principle in Moholy-Nagy’s diverse activities was light: light defined his paintings, sculptures, photoplastics, photograms, photographs, typography and theatre sets. He did not regard photography as a tool for the perfect imaging of reality; rather, it was his conviction that the camera offered new possibilities for modern people, and finally liberates art from the obligation to depict, to copy reality. The years at the Bauhaus proved to be an experience that defined his entire life. He settled in Chicago in 1937, where he founded the ‘New Bauhaus’ and soon the Institute of Design and worked until the end of his life as an experimental, innovative artist, theorist and teacher. László Moholy-Nagy regarded art as a non-hierarchical, widely accessible and cultivatable activity that embraced the whole of life, and he firmly believed in the educational significance of it.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Paintings such as The Big Wheel (1920–1), with its letters and numbers and diagramlike structure, and Black Quarter Circle with Red Stripes (1921), with its seemingly translucent planes, show Moholy’s distinctive take on Dada and Constructivism. This period also saw Moholy’s first experiments with camera-less photography, describing his so-called photograms as ‘painting with light’. By arranging mundane objects such as spring coils and cog wheels into geometric compositions and exposing specially coated photographic paper to light of varying intensities, Moholy created ghost-like images of peculiar intensity.

Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback
Blue Day-glo Corner Piece,
1968/2004
1/32" Elastic Cord & Spring Steel

14 x 12 x 6 inches
(35.6 x 30.5 x 15.2 cm)

Using nothing but ‘air and edges’ he magically alters our experience of the space. In his words, ‘the inherent mysticism resides in persisting in wanting to make something as factual as possible and having it turn out just the other way… the realisation that the simplest and most comfortable of perceptions are shadows’. This installation, conceived with the Fred Sandback Estate, offers a unique spatial experience.

extract of a 1960's text by Sandback:

The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire, was the outline of a rectangular solid—a 2 x 4 inch—lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.
I think my first attraction to this situation was to the way it allowed me to play with something both existing and not existing at the same time. The thing itself—the 2 x 4 inch—was just as material as it could be—a volume of air and light above the surface of the floor. Yet my forming of it, the shape and dimension of that figure, had an ambiguous and transient quality. It was funny too—it had an anecdotal quality on the order of “first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. . . .” but in reverse.

1975 Notes This text was first published in Fred Sandback. Munich: Kunstraum, 1975, pp. 11-12. My work isn’t environmental. It’s present in pedestrian space, but is not so strong or elaborate that it obscures its context. It doesn’t take over a space, but rather coexists with it. Environmental art makes a new environment and obscures the old one, and that’s as far from what I want as realistic painting is. Most paintings and environmental art are aesthetically discontinuous with ordinary space, which is a quality I don’t want in my work. My work is not illusionistic in the normal sense of the word. It doesn’t refer away from itself to something that isn’t present. Its illusions are simply present aspects of it. Illusions are just as real as facts, and facts just as ephemeral as illusions. Illusionism is making a picture of something. Possibly the trapezoids and rectangles I made were pictures of something, but the open pieces aren’t. I’d rather be in the middle of a situation than over on one side either looking in or looking out. Surfaces seem to imply that what’s interesting is either in front of them or behind them. Interiors are elusive. You can’t ever see an interior. Like eating an artichoke, you keep peeling away exteriors until there’s nothing left, looking for the essence of something. The interior is something you can only believe in, which holds all the parts together as a whole, you hope. There’s an inherent transience to my work. Many larger pieces may only exist for a few days in a particular place, before being put away indefinitely. They are in principle always able to come into existence again at a future time, but will then be part of a new situation. If I remake a piece in a new place, it’s a different piece. If I remake a piece in the same place, it’s still bound to be a different piece than before. The line is a whole, an identity, for a particular place and time. I assume that this identity can be sensed by others. What I object to in a lot of art is its illustrative quality, the quality of being an execution of an idea. I don’t have an idea first and then find a way to express it. That happens all at once. That notion of executing an idea is the same as giving form to material, and it’s a confusion of terms. Ideas are executions. I don’t make “dematerialized art.” I complicate actual situations, and this is as material as anything else. It’s the same false distinction of paring away the matter to get at the idea which allows people to talk of something getting “dematerialized.” The use of numbers or systems in what I do is very casual and incidental. Sometimes pieces have even-numbered sets of measurements if size isn’t critical within general limits. More often, though, pieces are only measured after they’re completed. What I’m doing really doesn’t have anything to do with geometry, and it doesn’t have anything to do with deductive reasoning. The series of pieces for the Kunstraum is a series only because, after the important three-dimensional decisions had been made about the piece, it had a natural ambiguity about it—the parts could equally well be in any one of several positions. So the series is a consequence of those options; it comes after the fact. My work always exists in an interior space. This two-part being in a place is a given condition of all my work. Pieces are conditioned by and bound to a particular place. Still, they are not commentary—they don’t tell a story about a place—they are just there. There’s finally no reason for a piece being here or there. They are limited by the structure of a place, but not deduced from it. The scale I work on is large enough, but it’s particular, too. Large pieces can’t be transferred from place to place without being re-done. That’s a reduction in scale from a lot of sculpture in that it precludes, to an extent, a piece being uprooted from its point of origin without my being involved in it. More and more, working seems to be like performance; not in the sense of presenting a process, but in the conditions required to complete a piece. Some things are done and complete in my studio, but others are ambiguous until done in a particular place. A studio is necessarily vague and hypothetical for pieces like that. I like the connectedness of that kind of piece—you can’t stick it under your arm and carry it home. It has its own place and lifespan. 1977 Statement Notes A sculpture made with just a few lines may seem very purist or geometrical at first. My work isn’t either of these things. My lines aren’t distillations or refinements of anything. They are simple facts, issues of my activity that don’t represent anything beyond themselves. My pieces are offered as concrete, literal situations, and not as indications of any other sort or order. Lately much of my work has been executed in and for a specific place. It’s always been conceived with at least a generalized sort of place in mind, but these pieces are now bound to one site. This doesn’t mean that a piece can’t be redone in a different location, but just that it will be a completely different situation when it is. Of course there are things I’m interested in doing that I don’t have a place for, but because of that they remain necessarily vague and indeterminate. Most of these larger pieces have a rather limited lifespan—existing for a week or a month and then to a large extent disappearing permanently. It’s not that I place any value on their transience—quite the contrary. It’s just that that’s part of the scale of the whole endeavor. A consequence of the inclusivity or complexity that I desire is that there is a good deal of decision making for me about my control over a piece—deciding the limits beyond which my specific intentions can no longer have an influence. This might seem vague or incomplete, though of course I don’t find it so, and I’m certainly not interested in any formalized notion of “indeterminacy.” It’s simply a matter of penetration—making the situation as dense and complex as possible without faking anything. This text was first published in English and Flemish in Plan & Space, exh. cat. (Gent: Koninklijke Academie, 1977). 1989 Children’s Guide to Seeing We all need a place for play, whether it’s jump rope, baseball, or making a sculpture. I’m lucky enough to have the whole Contemporary Arts Museum in which to build my sculptures that are made out of knitting yarn. I need a big space like this because I mean my sculptures to take space and make it into a place—a place that people will move around in and be in. Knitting yarn is great for making the proportions, intervals, and shapes that build the places I want to see and to be in. It’s like a box of colored pencils, only I can use it to make a three-dimensional sculpture instead of making a drawing on paper. My knitting-yarn sculpture is a somewhat distant cousin to some other string games. Maybe the one that uses the most space is kite flying. But the one that is the oldest, and the most universal, is cat’s cradle. Indians, Eskimos, Bushmen, and many other cultures around the world have had games like cat’s cradle since before anyone can remember. Often cat’s cradle is about making a little place—just for yourself, or to share with someone. If you don’t know any of the moves, you can probably learn some from a friend, a relative, or from your mom or dad, if they remember them. If you ask the attendant here in the Museum now, he or she will give you some yarn to use while you are here and to take home. Your fingers might do some thinking while you wander around and look at my sculptures. And here are a few cat’s cradle ideas. Cat’s cradle is nice because you can put it in your pocket when you’re busy with something else, and take it out again when you’re not. Although, as you can see, it’s not so hard to build big things like my sculpture. All it takes is a ball of string. If you were feeling a little adventurous, you could even wrap up your whole house. This text was published in Children’s Guide to Seeing. Fred Sandback: Sculpture, (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1989).