I was invited to come here to speak about my idea of art, which is to enlarge the effectivity of art beyond the idea of art as coming out of art history — an art idea which contains the well-known disciplines like sculpture, architecture, painting, music, dancing, poetry and so on. I would like to declare why I feel that it's now necessary to establish a new kind of art, able to show the problems of the whole society, of every living being — and how this new discipline — which I call social sculpture — can realize the future of humankind. It could be a guarantee for the evolution of the earth as a planet, establish conditions for other planetarians too, and you can control it with your own thinking.

Let's finally try to talk about a system that transforms all the social organism into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included, whether it's work by Francisco Goya or Kounellis or mine, as well as agriculture, the sciences, or education or technology, something in which the principle of production and consumption really takes on a form of quality. One must not only transform the creation of paintings or sculptures, but the entire social form. It's a gigantic program.

The dominant tradition in the sociology of art... defines art as something more special, in which creativity comes to the surface and the essential character if the society expresses itself, especially in the great work of the genius.

Art will not only continue but will realise itself more and more. By the unification of architecture, sculpture and painting a new plastic reality will be created.

Art today can only be revolutionary, that is, it must aspire at the complete and radical reconstruction of society, even if for no other reason than to emancipate intellectual creation from the chains which obstruct it and to allow all mankind to rise to the heights that only geniuses could reach in the past.

The ultimate goal of all visual artistic activity is construction! Architects, painters and sculptors must learn again to know and understand the multi-faceted form of building in its entirety as well as its parts. Only then will they of their own accord fill their works with the architectonic spirit they have lost in the art of the salon. Let us establish a new guild of craftsmen without the presumption of class distinctions building a wall of arrogance between craftsmen and artists. Together let us call for, devise and create the construction of the future, comprising everything in one form: architecture, sculpture and painting.

Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of experience, with many facets of symbol and material and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and exciting extensions of our experience we always come back tot the fact that we are human beings of such and such a size, biologically the same as primitive man, and that it is through drawing and observing, or observing and drawing, that we equate our bodies with our landscape.

Art shouldn’t be only the aesthetics we hang on the wall, but a dynamic to shape the society.

Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace — it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a fireplace, let’s call it a fireplace too — the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children — if he has any — his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportunity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet. This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!

To be creative is to not know what one is doing. The process of creation resolves the imbalance or irritation that initiated the desire to create something. Sculpture is a way of exploring, amplifying, and giving form to my enthusiasms, which are wide-ranging and often intersect each other, technically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Sculpture is as free as the mind; as complex as life..

Here my idea is to declare that art is the only possibility for evolution, the only possibility to change the situation in the world. But then you have to enlarge the idea of art to include the whole creativity. And if you do that, it follows logically that every living being is an artist – an artist in the sense that he can develop his own capacity. And therefore it's necessary at first that society cares about the educational system, that equality of opportunity for self-realization is guaranteed.

To appreciate sculpture is to look, to touch, to sense, to learn and communicate.

Women are the real architects of society.