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FranÇois Morellet
“I believed in God until I was twenty, then in progress until I was forty and then… in nothing at all. My first ‘electric works,’ which were created when I was about thirty-seven, are therefore more or less guaranteed to be without transcendence; they neither glorify God nor the electricity fairy and only touched upon the sciences of the future such as kinetics, cybernetics, computer technology or quite simply mathematics. […] At that time I was also entertaining myself by conjuring up, by means of mechanical combiners, equally thrown together, a succession of neon shapes and letters, fixed onto three panels. It looked as though this swift, confusing scroll of images was dictated by chance. But as my technical equipment did not stretch to a truly random system at that time, it was actually only a parody of chance that made those geometric shapes succeed each other irregularly—and the four words cul – con – non – nul [arse, cunt, no, useless].”
— Esthétique éléctrique et pratique éclectique, 1991
“For about twenty years, I doggedly produced systematic works, the constant guiding principle being to reduce my arbitrary decisions to a minimum. In order to channel my sensibility as an ‘Artist,’ I did away with composition, removed any interesting aspects from the execution and rigorously applied simple, straightforward systems that could either develop by fluke or by means of audience participation. These ‘works of art,’ in reaction to the flood of messages conveyed by the vogue for Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction twenty years ago, were a complete flop when they were first presented in a range of specialised venues. They occasioned no comment. In the recent past, however, even though they cannot be ranked among the new fashionable trends which, more than ever before, cultivate the myth of the ‘Artist’ (now it is no longer his gestures that are analysed and admired but his attitudes, his body, his concepts), they are triggering increasingly substantial and positive comments. Analysis specialists see in them rigour, joy, nihilism, anguish, virtuosity, asceticism, etc. […] The plastic arts should allow the spectator to find what he wants, in other words what he brings to them. Artworks are picnic areas, places where you take potluck, consuming whatever you’ve brought along. Pure Art, Art for Art’s Sake, is there to express nothing (or everything).”
— Du spectateur au spectateur ou l’art de déballer son piquenique, 1971
“Over the last seven or eight years, I have ceased to regard my ‘pictures’ as perfect geometric planes (immaterial and infinite), which needless to say they had never been in the first place. I have turned towards all the basic material limitations: the thick, heavy picture that requires hanging. Following the limitations of geometry, I started concentrating on the geometry of limitations. One of the limitations I played with a great deal was the overwhelming presence of the wallfloor couple, the verticality-horizontality with which the canvases usually comply in the most docile manner. It was sheer delight to make the modest ‘picture-neutral medium’ disobey, turning it, with its unusual position and slant, into a work of art, and reduce the pretentious ‘information bearing painting’ to an unassuming role of horizontality-verticality indicator.”
— Depuis sept ou huit ans, 1982
“What are the qualities of this Baroque art from Bavaria-Austria (to put it simply) that so appeal to me, that I endeavour to transpose into my work? Humour, frivolity, joie de vivre, which are all impossible to find to this degree in any Western church. […] And also a wonderful disrespect for architecture, with its clever lack of balance and its volumes, which counter one another by ignoring and severing any symmetry. To such an extent that an ordinary item of architecture can be ‘Baroqued’ with equal nonchalance and success.”
— BarocKonKret, 1994
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