Robert Barry
Robert Barry
Robert Barryis an American artist. Since 1967, Barry has produced non-material works of art, installations, and performance art using a variety of otherwise invisible media. In 1968, Robert Barry is quoted as saying "Nothing seems to me the most potent thing in the world."...
ProfessionPerformance Artist
Date of Birth9 March 1936
mean ideas drawing
The words represent ideas first of all. That is something you have to understand. I mean, it is not just an object, but it is an object with a history and it is loaded with all kinds of implications and ideas. They exist in the world in a very special way. So they kind of represent some aspect of the world that we perceive, as do photographs, as do drawings of trees or whatever. And they are not a one to one. They are not the world, but they kind of refer to the world and they also exist in the world.
saws firsts influence
Agnes Martin is a big influence in my work actually, when I first saw her, these fine grids.
art aspect term
I always thought there was a - even in the most, quote, "conceptual art," there is always a physical aspect to it. I never knew what the term meant.
home thinking feels
I think I feel much more at home in studio.
mean artist doe
And when you see artists like Donald Judd and so forth being referred to as conceptual, what the hell does that mean? It's a totally meaningless term.
moving gears certain
You can't just suddenly change gears and reverse yourself or go to the left or the right because there is no left or right. There's always a certain direction that you're moving in.
art stupid war
I didn't like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn't like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid - as art.
nuts
I was always - I was a movie nut. I lived in the movies, really.
interesting style important
Developing your own style became something very interesting, very important to me.
art mean trying
I mean, part of the justification for art is art history, the fact that you're part of this tradition. You can't really operate outside of it. So looking for what this work is really about, if I look at Velázquez, if I look at Las Meninas or The Tapestry Weavers [1657] or something and really study it and try to figure out what that painting is really about, then I find relationships between what I'm trying to do and what he was doing.
memories grandparent grandfather
I didn't know my grandparents. They were - my grandfather - my maternal grandfather died when I was five. I have very little memory of him. All my other grandparents were dead by the time I was of any age to remember anything.
satisfied
Everybody is always satisfied with what I do.
art want should
If you want to know about what's good in art, you should talk to an artist.
thinking artist curator
I relied mainly on other artists, who I think are smarter than critics, any critics or curators or anybody like that. They really know.