Agnes Denes Quotes

People always understand everything in retrospect.

Anything important has to be almost invisible. And underrated. So the understructure should be underrated, but strong enough to hold the earth.

Public art existed all along, but ecological art just naturally grew out of my thinking and writings in that area for years. I didn't get involved in it; I started what then became a movement.

People are always fighting reality until it's pushed down their throats.

Most wonderful things are unconscious.

When I'm gone, you'll be sitting in a cafe and say, "Do you remember Agnes?"

People have too many problems during the day; they don't want to think.

People don't hurt what they love.

I wish I didn't have daily problems to deal with, so that I could just concentrate on learning more, every single day.

I always was alone. And I'm alone today. It's fine. I have lots of friends, but not in terms of working together.

I'm mostly self-taught. I didn't learn much in school.

Thinking has an understructure and underpinnings.

I went through about six or seven painting methods just to see what I didn't want to do. And then I got off the wall, and went into the environment.

I had drawings that were the first time that mathematics was put into visual form.

Every one of my works, when I'm looking back, becomes some kind of solution, or something to concentrate on. Something to pay attention to and maybe change direction.

My work is about helping humanity.

Words are changing. I find that old expressions are outdated, so when I write something, I try to find a new expression that hasn't been born yet. It's difficult.

What I did for my last act as a painter, if you call me a painter, was to photograph the weave of the canvas, and enlarge it and enlarge it until it became like a landscape.

If I like a person, I like them. I may like the art and not like the person.

I hate to put tags on things, because tags change, and they change with the requirements made on them.

We use up words as we use up images. We use up everything, and that's good, because it makes us grow.

There's no precedent for women philosophers and there's no precedence for most of the things I did.

Philosophy gets its ugly head into everything, but I don't think we live philosophy anymore. It's done.

I never considered myself a performance artist.