Jasper Johns - Art Quotes

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Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

Jasper Johns
Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ('for myself') but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object".

Jasper Johns
I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.

Jasper Johns
His [Marcel Duchamp's] idea was that anything could be art by focusing the mind to think of it as art. My images are similar but at the time my work was first being shown, 1958-'59, I was unfamiliar with Duchamp and Dada. Everyone said my work was Dada, so I read on it, went to Philadelphia to see the Arensberg Duchamp collection, was delighted by it and later met him (Duchamp)... But it was all more a coincidence. Perhaps it's that certain ideas get into the air, ideas that come out of our living and out of the environment automatically

Jasper Johns