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
people trying done
I try to create a kind of dynamic thing that hopefully some people will become interested in. And what they do with it after that is sort of up to them. But it's a specific item, it's a specific thing that I've done. And what they do with it is their problem.
interesting people guy
I was an adjunct. I never got tenure, never had it. I was a professor, though. But I never got tenure. I never really wanted tenure, to tell you the truth. Really wasn't - the guys who got - the tenured people were some of, like, the least interesting. And they were people I didn't really like very much anyway.
teacher jobs fall
Teaching I realized took up a lot of my time. I was a kind of a teacher that spent time with students, spoke to them after class, tried to help them out. I'd talk with them personally about their work and try to get out of them what they were thinking about, forcing them to thinking seriously and not just falling back on all the ideas that they had picked up someplace. And so I took my job teaching very seriously and that - as a result, it took up a lot of time.
art style important
And style, by the way, is a very important thing. It is like your signature, your handwriting or it is something that you develop that is your way of presenting yourself and also your way of looking at what art - of how to make art.
space darkness important
The space between things is important to me. The projections, that darkness between the words or the images is very important.
mistake perfect nothing-is-perfect
I know where the mistakes are. Nothing is perfect and I understand that.
masters relation
I'm always looking for relations between my work and the old masters.
museums trying firsts
The first place I try to go when I have free time is the museums. I'm a big museum person.
art school thinking
I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I'm really mad for art history and the masters mostly.
art space guy
I'm getting more and more into Chinese art and Japanese, some of those scroll paintings are amazing. You follow the change of the seasons. It's really something. These guys were great masters and of course the use of space.
dream thinking projects
I don't have a dream project. I don't really think in those terms, to tell you the truth.
challenges surprise finished
I make my own surprises and I'm always surprised to see what I do, to see it when it's finished and the biggest challenge is once I finish it, it's not a failure. It's not a flop.
kind language realms
And we live in a kind of realm of language and words and so forth. So we can sort of relate to them. They don't exist without us. We create words.
thinking interesting trying
I shoot a lot of video, first of all, whatever I think is interesting, just my travels; hard to say why. If something looks good, I take a picture or try to shoot it.