P.O. : The artistic interest of the idea always ‘exceeds’ its embodiments.
A. L. : Then the embodiments need to be reconsidered. And all the tools one the disposal to artist, should be used.
C. D. : L. C. constantly questioned the stable identities of the author, of the object and of the spectator of the aesthetic equation, and defined the radical nature of the work by its potential to bring the capacity of transforming the consciousness of its recipient.
L. C. : What’s important is the act of doing in the present; the artist is dissolved into the world.
C. B. : The world of contemporary art is fast moving and superficial and demands constant feeding.
H. A. : It is indeed the mark of all labouring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent. And yet this effort, despite its futility, is born of a great urgency and motivated by a more powerful drive than anything else, because life itself depends upon it.
J. B. : To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration. If you want to express yourself you must present something tangible. But after a while this has only the function of a historic document. Objects aren’t very important any more. I want to get to the origin of matter, to the thought behind it.
L. G. : Recent focus upon the documentary, educational models, and engaged social collaborations have attempted to establish and describe new relationships that operate outside and in opposition to the apparently loose boundaries of the contemporary. These are engaged structures that propose limits and boundaries and take over new territories, from the curatorial to the neo-institutional, in direct opposition to the loose assumptions of the contemporary (in both its instrumentalized and capitalized forms).
M. S. : There is no art without consequences. You have to learn to manipulate what is manipulating with you.
J. L. G. : Don’t make political art, do art politically!
G. U. : I experienced this notion not from theories, but through my life. The transformation of the political, social, economic and value systems all had an enormous effect on the formation of myself as an artist.
R. S. : The arrow of time is broken: in an economy under constant restructuring that is based on the short-term and hates routine, definite trajectories no longer exist. People miss stable human relations and long-term objectives.
K. M. : The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such- and conceives human activity itself as objective activity.
P. O. : The work is a fragment of an infinite project that attempts to embody the artist’s full sense of self and self-awareness. As such, the project is infinite, and the series can only be grasped as an infinite approximation. Contemporary art, then, considered as a non-conformist, critical activity, is a post-conceptual art of series and ephemeral categorizations (‘mediations’).
M. L. : Only an interruption in the flow of temporality can change subjectivity, which can in turn be reoriented. At that moment a new process begins, a constitutive process out of which a different form of subjectivity arises. We have to consider the instruments at our disposal to create these partial interruptions in temporality. It’s essential that we break out of the market’s temporality.
J. R. : The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.
A. L. : Art is claiming the territory with (cultural and political) imagination.
C. A. : I am not interested in real time and also not in the dramatic and codified time of cinema that manipulated duration. Let’s say I take ‘my time’.