Paper Monument > Quotes

“These wonderings/wanderings by the students span poetry, experience, and politics. They remind us of the multiple meanings in the “facts” presented to our senses. Art is immersed in the welter of description and the pronouncements of desire.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“Much of the work of an institution is about holding artists, audiences, curators and other administrators, guards, handlers, writers, educators gallerists and other market makers, donors board members, foundation partners, civic leaders, activists, etc. in a dynamic and productive tension....I'm not going to lie to you. This approach requires effort, it only works for people who are open to a dialogical process, and it requires a strong commitment to two things--total reliance on collaboration and a strong institutional identity--that feel totally contradictory. We {A Blade of Grass] can do this because we have a strong institutional identity--we know who we are. At the same time, we don't assert. We fundamentally accept that the institution is a vessel for the expression of as many different types of people as possible...We helped to make these Two Americas. If we can own that, we get to do something really politically ambitious, like work toward One America. [written by Deborah Fisher]”
― Paper Monument, As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now?

“It is in the doldrums that our talents are most needed. The best training for desperation is to know early the feeling of no guidance. In photography the squeak of intention destroys serendipity. Don’t summon the demon of overdetermination. Stand there, present in the world, and make work.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“no talk about drawing, about great artists, about the history of art,” or about any other subjects which tend to establish verbalisms instead of drawing reactions.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“4. Make a protest painting. 5. Read an obituary (without a picture) and paint a portrait of the person described.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“Assignments are supposed to broaden your ideas about what your work can be, and to teach you how to solve problems in art. But they also, possibly, acclimatize you to the idea that failure and humiliation are part of the deal, and that without them you can’t be sure you’ve really exhausted a possibility. Maybe that’s the real lesson?”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“must reason your way through the problem. Using line only, draw one simple geometric shape, such as a square, triangle or circle. Without overlapping or intersecting, draw a different shape. Now, draw another. Choose your favorite. Make the other 2 like your favorite. Enlarge one of the shapes. Reduce one of them. Make one shape touch one edge of the page. Make the other”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“The best I could figure what art school and its assignments teach (and with great success!) is not how to be an artist, but how to act like one.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“When I taught photography, briefly, back in the late 90s, the most interesting thing someone said at the bar the night before class would become that day’s assignment. If, say, a painter told me about the saint who made the devil kneel and hold the Bible, then my assignment to the class would be: Make the devil kneel before you, so you can read him the word of God.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“The art institution can believe in another world or narrative and make this visual. And yet too often institutions are happy to parrot the accepted stories. Institutions will always deserve the trouble they receive if they cannot be more imaginative in their responses than to speak with the voice of expertise to their audiences. Administration can be a creative endeavor. What and whom do they administer to? [written by Anthony Elms]”
― Paper Monument, As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now?

“Make a large folded-paper airplane, paint on it a slogan which you think will revolutionize your life.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“9. Build a shrine and paint it.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“Reading Paul Thek’s “Teaching Notes: 4-Dimensional Design,” I realized that an artist defines oneself by her questions, and that asking “What are your questions?” was more apt than asking “What is your work?” So the assignment became to write our own sets of “Notes”—an unselfconscious way of producing personal manifestoes.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“But can a training regimen be designed to teach artists how to turn off their minds in the studio and become one with their process?”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“...[E]ven in cases where art institutions are not being actively menaced by the state there has nevertheless been a collapse of more classically political institutions, like churches and unions. The result is that--as Hito Steyerl discusses in "is the Museum a Factory?"--thins that usually were shown or done in union halls and church basements are now housed inside art institutions. This explains the anxiety lurking behind a question like "How can an institution address the dichotomy between art as cultural entertainment and art as political inquiry?" This anxiety is the anxiety of a host confronted with refugees who might not be able to return home anytime soon. Like police departments, or public school teachers, art institutions now seem expected to do the work of three or four different kinds of civil society organizations. Can we provide moral education, collective solace, and class-based advocacy in addition to our other mission of producing, collecting, and displaying works of art? Are we even doing these other things? Or just noticing a need that is going unmet but that exceeds our capacity to meet it? {written by Stephen Squibb]”
― Paper Monument, As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now?

“Indexical drawing (“index” in the sense of Pierce’s semiotics: a sign whose signifier and signified have a real and often physical relationship to one another prior to interpretation. Like, you might explain when introducing the assignment, smoke coming out of the window of a burning house, lipstick on a wine glass, or the Cage / Rauschenberg tire-track print made by a moving car)”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

“we understand these assignments not as “that which will produce work of value,” but as “that which will allow the work to happen, perhaps producing the conditions through which something of value might take place.”
― Paper Monument, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment