Carl Andre Quotes
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The world is imperfect, and young people are always trying to perfect it and they always fail - which is a good thing. Who'd want to live in a perfect world?
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Every time you work, you have to do it all over again, to rid yourself of this dross. I suppose for a person who is not an artist or not attempting art, it is not dross, because it is the common exchange of everyday life.
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That's another way, perhaps, of an art poverty; one has to impoverish one's mind.
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I've often stopped working for long periods.
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My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.
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I was hanging out and drinking as long as I could afford it, or as long as somebody else could afford it.
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If you forge a Carl Andre, it's just another Carl Andre. It's not like a Vermeer.
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I think my work is very American because I'm American. But I found that Europeans like uncertainty and doubt.
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I had no place to put anything. I would give my sculpture away because I had no place to put it.
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You can always find somebody to beat up. This goes back to the schoolyard. Most men would think, Don't chum with girls. But I chummed with girls.
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I'm afraid we get a great deal of our exposure to art through magazines and through slides and I think this is dreadful, this is anti-art because art is direct experience with something in the world and photography is just a rumor, a kind of pornography of art.
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Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.
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Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting.. .His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting.
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SoHo was called Hell's Hundred Acres because it was full of sweatshops - without fire escapes. Completely not up to code. Every once in a while, these buildings would burn and 26 Puerto Ricans would be killed.
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Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, essentially Marxist.
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My works have always been unjoined. People were always making variations of my works, and I just said, "I don't want to know." You can't put limits on those pieces. You can't be there all of the time when they're installed.
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It is futile for an artist to try to create an environment because you have an environment around you all the time. Any living organism has an environment.
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A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.
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I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.
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My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.
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We live in a world of replicas, and I try desperately in a world of replicas to produce things that are not replicas of anything.
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Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!
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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.
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Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.