Robert Irwin:
The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject- all that is out there- and the pure potential of the individual perceiver- all that is in here. Where the strength (clarity) of this inquiry lies is in its single motive – the desire to know.
Louise Bourgeois:
A lot of people are so obsessed by the past, they die of it. This is the attitude of the poet who never finds the lost heaven, and it is really the situation of artists who work for a reason that nobody can grasp. Except that they might want to reconstruct something of the past. It is that the past for certain people has such a hold and such a beauty… you cannot arrest the present. You just have to abandon every day your past. And accept it. And if you can’t accept it, the you have to recreate it. Which is exactly what I have been doing. I am not a surrealist; I am a existentialist.
Louise Bourgeois:
I need my memories. They are my documents. I keep watch over them….you have to differentiate between memories. Are you going to them or are they coming to you here? If you are going to them you are waisting time. Nostalgia is not productive. If they come to you, they are the seeds for sculptures.
Robert Irwin:
That we make and remake (choose) our own reality (at least in part) may well be the only truly creative human action.
Louise Bourgeois:
The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. What happens to my body has to be given a formal abstract shape. So you might say, pain is a ransom of formalism.
The existence of pains cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. I simply want to look at them and tal about them. I know I can’t do anything to eliminate or suppress them. I can’t make them dissappear; they are hear to stay.
Robert Irwin:
Where the qualities and duration of phenomenal perception are fully extended in an interactive state of flux, never fully predictable, and never fully resolved, and may exist only as long as the individual perceiver keeeps them in play.
Louise Bourgeois:
People feel each other, perceive each other, turn toward or away from each other…fated to work together as part of an ongoing phenomenon…always perceiving others and adjusting to them.
Robert Irwin:
This transference of responsibility to the individual observer to complete the work of art is the implicit meaning integral to so-called abstraction.
