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Carl Andre Quotes
1935–2024 United States
Carl Andre (September 16, 1935 – January 24, 2024) was an artist of American Minimalism in art, recognized as sculptor for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His art-works involve the positioning of raw materials – such as bricks, blocks, ingots, or plates - Physical art, as he called it himself already in 1969.
United States Artists Sculptors Random Carl Andre quote
11 quotes
Actually my ideal piece of sculpture is a road.
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.
There should be no one place or even a group of places where you should be. [quote, 1969]
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.
I realized the wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way [by carving it].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting.