Quotes About The Body As Art

#1. Emphasizing the body as art, these artists amplified the role of process over product and shifted from representation objects to presentational modes of action.

Kristine Stiles

#2. The various parts of the body cannot be perceived as simple units and have no clear relationship to one another. In almost every detail the body is not the shape that art has led us to believe it should be.

Kenneth Clark

#3. As the imagination is set to look into the invisible and immaterial, it seems to attract something of their vitality; and though it can give nothing to the body to redeem it from years, it can give to the soul that freshness of youth in old age which is even more beautiful than youth in the young.

Henry Ward Beecher

#4. Just as a stool requires three legs to stand upright so the taekwondoist must cultivate basic skills, meaningful forms, and effective sparring in order to have both feet firmly planted in the art

Doug Cook

#5. Folk music is not so much a body of art as it is a process, an attitude, and a way of life; its distinguishing features lie not within the songs themselves, but in the relations of those songs to a folk culture.

Sam Hinton

#6. I started connecting things to my body during my childhood. I approached the computer as a mediating element, as a form of visual art.

Steve Mann

#7. I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.

Gustave Flaubert

#8. I believe dreams connect us to our ancestors and it is through creativity that we can tap into this in the conscious state. Creativity is a sort of trance that we have as artists that erases time and space.

Lorin Morgan-Richards

#9. Body art isn't a contest. The only person that has to like it is the person stuck with it for the rest of their life. As long as you love it when you see it, that's all that matters.

Jay Crownover

#10. With Gnaw I was thinking about traditional sculpture, about carving. I was also interested in figurative sculpture. I put those two ideas together and decided that rather than describing the body, I would use the body, my body, as a tool for making art.

Janine Antoni

#11. The noblest art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets. Only the dancer has forgotten it, who should remember it, as the instrument of [the dance] art is the human body itself.

Isadora Duncan

#12. Honesty in art inspires and moves me. I am passionate about creating truthful experiences as much as I love being the spectator to a brilliant body of work.

Crystal Reed

#13. The end of the republic is to enervate and to weaken all other bodies so as to increase its own body.

Niccolo Machiavelli

#14. Of all the hardships and deprivations a people can suffer, I am not sure if the deprivations of art and culture are not the most devastating. As meat and rice are food for the body, art and culture are food for the soul. Starve the body and the person dies; starve the soul and the spirit dies.

Gerard De Marigny

#15. Pythagoras said that the most divine art was that of healing. And if the healing art is most divine, it must occupy itself with the soul as well as with the body; for no creature can be sound so long as the higher part in it is sickly.

Apollonius Of Tyana

#16. As the eye of the body once put out, can never be restored by the creature's art, so neither can the spiritual eye lost by Adam's sin be restored by the teaching of men or angels. It is one of the diseases which Christ came to cure.

William Gurnall

#17. All of their faces are cluttered with the shrapnel of rebellion, as if a grenade of alienation has exploded in their midst, piercing every possible soft point of flesh-from earlobes and nostrils to eyebrows, lips, and tongues-with metal studs and rings.

Jonathan Tropper

#18. ONLY' having the Gift, people appreciate this madness as Art. Everybody wants to have Art in their lives, but no body wants to have what the Art came out from in their lives ...

Hiroko Sakai

#19. Art is aesthetic communication of the soul - in fact, it's the best of that communication - and taken in its entirety has formed a body of work to stand alongside Science and Religion as one of the three great constructs of culture to aid the individual in his or her struggle to survive in Nature.

Anthony Marais

#20. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.

Spider Webb

#21. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.

Radka Donnell

#22. Prior to Schneemann, the female body in art was mute and functioned almost exclusively as a mirror of masculine desire.

Jan Avgikos

#23. Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.

Henry Fielding

#24. She had stayed home and worked hard and a posthumous recognition had eventually followed. Not that Buck hadn't worked hard, sure he did, but in the end the body won't hold up as a work of art.

Duff Brenna

#25. I am intrigued by the basics of human life, by our vulnerability, our desires, our sexuality - as far as I am concerned, character is expressed through sexuality. Art is able to represent human existence stripped to its essence by showing us the naked human body.

Thomas Koerfer

#26. The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

Kenneth Tynan

#27. As he offered to advance, she exclaimed, Remain where thou art, proud Templar, or at thy choice advance!
one foot nearer, and I plunge myself from the precipice; my body shall be crushed out of the very form of humanity upon the stones of that courtyard ere it become the victim of thy brutality!

Walter Scott

#28. A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.

V. Vale

#29. Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the 'Not Me,' that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, 'Nature.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#30. Perhaps we might, within the anatomy of our imaginations, think once more of the naked body as a vessel of grace, taste and wonder. In the spotted history of art, stranger things have happened.

Robert Genn

#31. Lovemaking is the consolation for living in the body, just as art is the consolation for living in the world.

Laura Argiri

#32. The medium of poetry is a human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped into signifying sounds in the larynx and the mouth. In this sense, poetry is just as physical or bodily an art as dancing.

Robert Pinsky

#33. We should learn as a people to pay good money for the food that feeds the soul and mind, same as we do for the food that feeds the body.

Nana Awere Damoah

#34. As an artist, I think you always have to take care of yourself as a person probably even more than the average person because your body is so important to your art.

Josh Young

#35. A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated - as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Ayn Rand

#36. I'd always wanted to tell people that when I work on my body I'm thinking about classical sculpture, so I jumped at the chance to show off body building as an art form.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#37. Writing is the most disembodied art, and reading and writing are largely private and solitary experiences, so music and dance have always enchanted me as arts in which the body of the performer communicates directly to the audience, welding a kind of communion writers rarely experience.

Rebecca Solnit