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
film made filmmaker
I was a filmmaker. I made movies. I made films. And I always took photos and made films, always from the beginning.
art way needed
I really wasn't about to get a Ph.D. in art history, you know, which you'd absolutely needed. And that was not something I wanted. And I loved art history, but not that way.
art ideas two
I had always spoken about the space between the art object and the person looking at it as this dynamic space, which I referred to over and over. So the idea of the space between two things was sort of interesting to me.
wall ideas space
The idea of, say, the compressed space between the floor and the object hanging over it and then the long space between the object and the ceiling was a kind of interesting idea for me - the idea of compressing and expanding. That was an idea that I worked with, which you could only do sculpturally. You can't really do with a painting on the wall.
important artwork situation
Any artwork is part of something larger, grander and, you know, the situation that it's in is very important.
years space light
reaking up the space and using the space, using the length of the space, the height of it, whatever, the light, all of those things. It's something that you have to kind of slowly recognize in your work and develop over years of making work.
art new-york book
But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art.
ideas mind doe
How does any idea come to your mind? I don't know.
thinking people care
You can never really predict how people are going to react, what they're going to think about, whether they care.
thinking mind earth
The notion of a thing, materiality, was something that I think was something very in peoples' minds when they were dealing with earth and metal and different kinds of metals and the interaction of different sorts of material.
opportunity artist want
I am a very lucky artist in the sense that I have had all my life a lot of opportunities to do what I want to do.
space light giving
If somebody gives me a chance to do something, I am going to use that space, that time, that light, that whatever it is and try and work with it.
wall thinking color
I think words speak to us even though they may be written on a wall. So we hear them in our mind. We say it to ourselves. But they are also visual things. You draw them. They are designed. They are colored. They have a certain size. I put them in a certain place. So they are objects that have to be - artistic decisions have to be made in terms of the color and the size and the line and whatever.
opportunity thinking style
If you are operating in a certain way and you are thinking in a certain direction, suddenly opportunities arise. And if you are open to it, if you are not locked into your style too much or to what you think works.