One of the things I find fascinating about California is that our state of 39 million people with its $2 trillion economy subsists largely on the bounty of five or six winter storms a year.

--Taryn Ravazzini

I like invoking the native rhythm an image suggests, and then not allowing the viewer to have it. I want people to question the motivation behind shot lengths. Playing with temporal expectations is what is most indigenous to cinema. And maybe indigenous to other kinds of thinking, I don’t know. Where you’re forcing someone to stay longer or shorter with something than they expect. That’s what I love most about cinema – manipulating the temporal plane.

--Deborah Stratman

The world is a mess. If you concentrate on a little bit of the world and you make a little composition, you’re effectively tidying it up. 

--Martin Creed

The Merced National Wildlife Refuge

The San Luis National Wildlife Refuge

There is a familiar rhetorical trap that occurs around the subject of political art. Artists who's work is too imaginative, reckless, wild, and beautifully useless are accused of being complicit within the structure of the status quo. Their own imagination ends up at war with the demands of their social conscience. On the flipside, artists whose work is straightforward and political are generally accused of being too didactic and lacking critical complexity. Their critic's arguments tend to quickly show themselves as protectors of the art world and capitalist status quo. In the end, it appears to be a lose/lose situation and as such, it has turned off many an artist to the demands of being political.

What is to be done? Anything looked at in and of itself will eventually resolve itself in failure. One object/practice/person/idea can not encompass all the elements which comprise a socially conscious revolutionary movement. Quite clearly, the modernist conception of art as a separate aspect from daily life fails miserably and contemporary art has yet to take this lesson to heart. In isolation all things stand alone and are mute. It is through the rich diverse fabric of collective action that private expression gains meaning. 


--The Department of Space and Land Reclamation (2001)

What I realized, partly because I didn’t go to art school, but also by engaging in a lot of different audiences and communities, is that people within the arts tend to have an extremely inflated sense of their own importance in the world, and that most people don’t give a shit about “Art.” 

--Josh MacPhee

"News stories don’t satisfy on a human level,” she said. “We know that Guantánamo is still open, but do we really know what that means? The idea is to experience an emotional understanding, so it’s not just an intellectual abstraction."

--Laura Poitras