Carl Andre Quotes
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Look at the chaos of European history. Europeans cannot believe in certainty. But Americans believe in certainty. Americans think this can go on like this forever. Just as it is. No change.
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Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.
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I didn't study the piano - the piano studied me.
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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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Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?
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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.
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I realized the wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way by carving it.
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My work is atheistic, materialistic and communistic. It's atheistic because it's without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual quality. Materialistic because it's made out of it's own materials without pretension to other materials. And communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men.
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Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.
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That's wonderful, but my mind has been destroyed by alcohol.
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Money is a very complicated problem. The history of money is very curious.
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There should be no one place or even a group of places where you should be. quote, 1969
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Actually my ideal piece of sculpture is a road.
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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.
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FORM = STRUCTURE = PLACE
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The course of development
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You could own coins but you couldn't have bars of gold. We were on the gold standard. I think it was Nixon who took us off the gold standard.
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What I made depended on what I found on the street. At least in the beginning, my materials came from the street.
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It seems with progress you gain certain things and you lose certain things. The automobile replaced the horse and buggy but you lost all of that nice manure.
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I'm a feminist. I've always been in favor of women.
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A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.
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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.
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I didn't like men because they were so physically competitive. Men are always making a pecking order. "I can beat you up and you can beat him up ..."
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I was never good at painting. The great turning point came when I had a block of wood and I carved a shape into the wood and put a small piece of timber into that space - like a negative - and so it made an endless column, only inward.