Carl Andre Quotes
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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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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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I think it was Henry Moore who was asked where he got his ideas for his sculptures, and he said something like, "I continue to do as an adult the things I did as a child." I think that's what art is about.
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Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.
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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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I didn't study the piano - the piano studied me.
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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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Actually my ideal piece of sculpture is a road.
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FORM = STRUCTURE = PLACE
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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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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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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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Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?
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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.
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The course of development
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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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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.
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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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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'm a feminist. I've always been in favor of women.
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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 was one of the first post-studio artists. I used to do my works in the streets. I used to find them in the streets, and I used to leave them in the streets.
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What do little kids do? They crawl on the floor and they build with blocks. I just continued to do that for the rest of my life.