Jackson Pollock - Blue Poles 1956

Ellsworth Kelly - Black and White

Agnes Martin

http://members.aol.com/mindwebart4/agnes2.h

It is for this reason that I am quite unable to understand those painters who, whilst declaring an active interest in modern problems, still continue even today to confront a painting as if it was s surface to be filled with colour and forms according to an aesthetic taste which can be more or less appreciated, more or less guessed at. They paint a line in, step back, look at their work with head on one side and half-closed eye, they jump forward again and add another line or colour; and these gymnastics continue until the painting is filled in and the canvas is covered: the painting is finished: a surface of unlimited possibilities is now reduced to a kind of receptacle into which unnatural colours and artificial meanings are forced. Why shouldn't this receptacle be emptied? Why shouldn't this surface be freed. Why not seek to discover the unlimited meaning of total space, of pure and absolute lightIt is not a question of shaping things, nor of articulating messages (and one can't resort to extraneous interventions, parascientific mechanicalities, psychoanalytic intimacies, graphic compositions, ethnographical fantasies, etc. . . . every discipline carries within it the elements of its own solution). For are not fantasizing, abstraction and self-expression empty fictions? There is nothing to be said: there is only to be, to live.

Pierro Manzoni- Azimuth 1960

"The art I call conceptual is such because it is based on an inquiry into the nature of art," Kosuth has written. "Thus, it is . . . a working out, a thinking out, of all the implications of all aspects of the concept 'art,' . . . Fundamental to this idea of art is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions, be they past or present, and regardless of the elements used in their construction."

Bas Jan Ader http://editions.patrickpainter.com/artists/Ader _BasJan/work-10.html

Clark's attitude toward the object now developed in three linked directions which implied three resounding negations as far as reining notions of art were concerned. She conceived of an object that, first, would dissolve any idea of speculative financial value or collectibility by being made of everyday, cheap components obtainable anywhere, expendable through use and renewable. Second, the object would have meaning and structure only in the moment of direct bodily interaction with the spectator, now more accurately called participant. And third, the object would no longer privilege the visual sense, but treat the mind and body as one. The "work" became the "proposition."

A Portable Hole http://www.fluxus.org/FluxusMidwest/ PortableHole/index.html