Carl Andre Quotes

People keep on wanting fetish figures, and things like that are very popular. That's Pop art. There was an enormous resistance to Abstract Expressionism and there still is to that school, which is not dead at all. But Pop art came as a reaction to that because kids can't paint abstract expressionism unless they're under five year of age. Because it really is tremendously hard work and it's very challenging. But the point is, people love an immediately recognizable word – if you put a word in anything, they lie it.. .I am not interested in culture at all. Once a work of art has gotten into the culture, its dead as far as I'm concerned. I think there is a difference between art and culture. Or as the sage once said, 'Art is what we do; culture is what is done to us'.

I'm an anti-Platonist, so I wouldn't say that stock was a stock of ideas or certainly not an ideal form, because I don't believe there is something out there, except out there. There's something in here and there's something out there, and there's mediation between the two.

Emerson writes in his Journal that all men try their hands at poetry, but few know which their poems are. The poets are not those who write poems, but those who know which of the things they write are poems.

Up to a certain time I was cutting into things. Then I realized that the thing I was cutting was the cut. Rather than cut into the material, I now use the material as the cut in space.

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen.. ..when you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things.

Fortunately, the less you have to rely on art materials – what are considered classic art materials which are all overpriced anyway – the more you can rely on materials at large in the culture and the more you should rely on them. The more free you are because you're not tied down to a higher-priced set of materials. That's the advantage of getting out in to the streets. I find that work I'm interested in now is made out of things which have been discarded by people – metals and things which I find in vacant lots. I don't want all of it. I want only certain kinds for certain purposes. But this is of interest to me now, just so I won't get into a trap where I have to work and continue with more and more expensive materials.

All I'm doing is putting Brancusi's 'Endless Column' on the ground, instead of in the sky. Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the air. In my work, Priapus is down on the floor. The engaged position is to run along the earth.

As I have said many times, for me an artist is a person who says he's an artist, and an artwork is what an artist says is an artwork. Although for myself, I am not interested in ideas as the burden of art.. ..the important thing about art is how it stimulates us. I think the more you are stimulated by more different kinds of art, the more demanding you're going to become on the level of your stimulation. The key to art is experience of it and proximity to it.

PROPOSAL FOR AN
EXPLOSION -
An appropriate contractor is
retained to place and fuse
an explosive charge sufficient
to produce a crater 12 inches
deep and 144 inches diameter.
The charge is detonated by the sculptor, Carl Andre
5-7- 67

Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? – 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It's not an idea, it's a sense of something you know, a demarked place. Somehow I think I always thought of it going that way, rather than an idea of a narrowing triangle going to the center of the earth.. .I have nothing to do with Conceptual art [in contrast to his Physical Art, as Carl Andre called his sculpture art already in 1969]]. I'm not interested in ideas. If I were interested in ideas, I'd be in a field where what we think in is ideas.. .I don't really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way. [quote from a talk with the audience, December 1969]

I want to warn against being seduced by technology. I don't think that the really interesting materials to use are those miracle plastics and miracle alloys or fiber composites or anything like that. The real miracle materials are the ones which have been abandoned by modern technology. Beautiful land and things like that. I am utterly disenchanted with technology, because the super uses of technology are the ones being used in Vietnam and that, to me, is not beautiful.. .I don't say no to the new technology, I don't say no to lasers, I don't say no to advanced plastics. The trouble is, people over and over again use new materials, new materials for old purposes. I'm not interested in that. I think by using old materials you've got to find new purposes. In a way, what is abandoned is more of a challenge than what has just been discovered.

The Duchamp thing is played both ways. The 'Urinal' [famous 'ready-made' of Marcel Duchamp ] signed R. Mutt, is played as an art object, and then as the opposite of a legitimate art object. And it vacillates back and forth. Well perhaps that is a nice thing, but I don't know. I find Duchampianism a bore. It's very adolescent. I was very much excited by it when I was a teenager.. .My tradition is quite different. My conscious tradition is through Constantin Brâncuși, and Brancusi just strikes me as an infinitely wiser and infinitely more talented, an infinitely stronger figure than Duchamp. I think I could have done my work if Duchamp had not lived. I could not have done my work if Brancusi had not lived.

Whole poems are made out of many single poems we call words.. .I am trying to recover a part of the poet's work which has been lost. Our first poets were the namers, not the rhymers.

Talking about the particles, I know I don't have any special theory of particles. It's just the way it came out and that's the way I want to do it. Also, there are advantages to particles: you can't break them; they don't break apart. They don’t have any rigid connections; there are no rigid connections to break. The particles are always shifting around a little bit and you have to kick them back into shape. It's like tuning a piano every once in a while. I like the idea of something being permanent by being non-rigid, being absolutely non-rigid but not having a rigid form that can be broken. But a theory of particles, I don’t know. Maybe late one night after a few drinks I explained to Lucy Lippard a theory of particles. I'm sure I didn't remember the next day.

There should be no one place or even a group of places where you should be. [quote, 1969]