art statement
Legrady bio
Legrady cv
Legrady's work
on the CCCA
Art Database
Kingston Proze
AGO Book
launch
view the entire series at https://legrady.com/concept/idea/index.html
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Why This Borderline Art? Art is always skill and experience, a mastery at the highest level of achievement. The expression “it’s as much of an art as a science” explains the importance of intuition in both the art of medicine and the art of conversation. Art being grounded in the physical world, the term “conceptual art” might seem an oxymoron, then we think of minimalism. Until a hundred years ago, decorative aspects of visual art were often overwrought. Now the rise of science leaps to minimalism in its search for basic principles. Of course balance is needed. Sol LeWitt was a gifted visual artist. He was also known as a father of Conceptual Art. His legendary “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” were published in Artforum in 1967. He wrote that in conceptual art the idea is dominant. “I dislike the term “work of art” because I am not in favor of work and the term sounds pretentious.” “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The person who proved Sol Lewitt wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt was, of course, Sol Lewitt himself, when he was deeply disappointed in perfunctory executions of his own work. He eventually realized that everyone has ideas, but few have ability. It is the execution that turns an idea into a work of art. In the 19th century there was speculation that concepts, the thoughts we think, were as dependable as external reality; since then we’ve learned that to be human is to err, and we correct our mistakes by testing them in the physical world, The Artist Certificates shown above explore conceptual at as an art form grounded in minimalism at its extreme, so extreme as to barely exist. A cubic meter of air as a work of art or a cubic kilogram of nothing do exist as concepts, and they are still grounded in reality, pushing the limits as far as possible. |