Tony Tasset

Born :

1960

I make work that tries to sort of connect with something really, really familiar. I don't try to make work that's original. I try to make work that's quintessential. That's what I mean about the familiar. It operates with stuff that people already know or information that they already have and I try to just use that. Quintessential means like the perfect minimalist sculptor.

perfect mean people

I've been an artist forever. I started when I was in the third grade. I drew drawings of monsters and I sold them to my classmates for a dime. I studied painting. Originally I was a design and illustration major, but I met this girl. Back then, if you were a designer, you were a real sellout, and she was a real hardcore painter. I knew she would never take me seriously unless I was an art major, so I switched majors to fine arts. Anyway, we're married now. So it worked. How I got to my style? I'm a weird artist in that everything I do looks a little different.

I try to teach a modernist and postmodernist position. On one hand, if you're a painter, you need to know the history of painting. But I'm also interested in the moment we live in. I love television, and movies, and books, and music. So I also think of art as this cultural production along with all this other stuff that's happening. So that's a kind of postmodern, not media-specific, but the times, what is your art relevant to this moment we live in versus media specificity? That's my teaching philosophy, both of those things are important.

philosophy book art