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I really wasn't about to get a Ph.D. in art history, you know, which you'd absolutely needed. And that was not something I wanted. And I loved art history, but not that way.

Robert Barry

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Robert Barry
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More quotes by Robert Barry

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I didn't like anti-Vietnam War art. I didn't like feminist art. I thought it was heavy-handed and stupid - as art.
Robert Barry
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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.
Robert Barry
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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.
Robert Barry
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If somebody gives me a chance to do something, I am going to use that space, that time, that light, that whatever it is and try and work with it.
Robert Barry
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Developing your own style became something very interesting, very important to me.
Robert Barry
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I always took photographs. I photographed a lot of trees, by the way, which is another image I used often in my work, the tree image.
Robert Barry
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I made films from the - when I was a little kid, my father bought me a movie camera. I just wanted to. I don't know how. You just learn, you just do it. You just do it.
Robert Barry
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I was also very interested in music. I used to hang out in jazz joints, you know, the Five Spot and so forth when I was, you know, a senior, really, when I was a little bit older. And I thought, well, maybe I could, you know, work with music. I can't play at all.
Robert Barry
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I wanted my style to be very recognizable.
Robert Barry
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I had always spoken about the space between the art object and the person looking at it as this dynamic space, which I referred to over and over. So the idea of the space between two things was sort of interesting to me.
Robert Barry
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The notion of a thing, materiality, was something that I think was something very in peoples' minds when they were dealing with earth and metal and different kinds of metals and the interaction of different sorts of material.
Robert Barry
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You can't just suddenly change gears and reverse yourself or go to the left or the right because there is no left or right. There's always a certain direction that you're moving in.
Robert Barry
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How does any idea come to your mind? I don't know.
Robert Barry
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You can't make somebody care about what you're doing. Either they get it, either there's that connection - or they don't.
Robert Barry
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The drawings that I show - the drawings that I present to people are finished works in themselves. They're meant to be thought of that way and not necessarily lead to larger pieces or anything like that. And that's the way I work now.
Robert Barry
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But if I did read, say, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty, for instance, it always seemed to me that the parts that I understood in what he was talking about - and I read him because - well, he wrote a book, well, the Phenomenology of Perception [New York: Humanities Press, 1962]. And it seemed to me that perception had a lot do with how we take in art.
Robert Barry
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I usually, if I give a talk, I don't usually prepare anything. I just say - you know, I may stop talking by showing some video or slides of what I do but mainly I try to respond to what problems people have with my work.
Robert Barry
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The idea of, say, the compressed space between the floor and the object hanging over it and then the long space between the object and the ceiling was a kind of interesting idea for me - the idea of compressing and expanding. That was an idea that I worked with, which you could only do sculpturally. You can't really do with a painting on the wall.
Robert Barry
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The space between things is important to me. The projections, that darkness between the words or the images is very important.
Robert Barry
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I work sometimes with dealers and sometimes people just come to me. A lot of the commissions, they just know me. They have seen something and they just approach me.
Robert Barry