Hasan M. Elahi Quotes

When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.

Art is changing. Again. Here. Now. Opportunities to witness this are rare, so attend and observe.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

The great art of the past became great because it started to go out of the perimeters that defined art and defined new territories.

To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.

I like people that challenge their art, not only in the purist way, but also in terms of how they could provoke and make something different.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

For a sculptor, a painter, a weaver, a potter, the dialogue between one's materials and what one makes from them is easy to see: discover a new material or a new way to use a familiar one, and new things can be made, sometimes leading to the discovery of more new material, leading to more creation.

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase - a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film.

I consider all my films experiments.

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

The basis for my own work during the years just before coming to America in 1915 was a desire to break up forms - to 'decompose' them much along the lines the cubists had done. But I wanted to go further - much further - in fact, in quite another direction altogether.

I am more interested in revolutionary beauty than in the great beauty, to be honest. Italian cinema is now mostly a bureau for tourism. We have given up that revolution of the contemporary.

For me, as an artist, I think you have to experiment.

You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

I'm not belittling the art world. Not at all. I take it quite seriously, actually. But the logic of art is a vanguard logic that pressures art to incorporate the quotient of risk.

New arts destroy the old.

The creation continues incessantly through the media of man. But man does not create... he discovers.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

It is vain for painters... to endeavour to invent without materials on which the mind may work.

The interesting thing about this is I don't know what my vision [ in Salome the play and Salomaybe] is yet about. I'm sensing something and I'm going along with it. It reminds me of a painting, the way Jackson Pollack painted - Jackson Pollack, the great, great artist.