Carl Andre Quotes

Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.

A man climbs a mountain because it is there. An artist makes a work of art because it is not there.

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

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.

Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us. A photograph of an art object is not the art object. An essay about an artist's work is not the artist's work.

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

Once you turn something into something, its universal usage is over.

Why carve? It's a better sculpture that way. I'll never improve the block. So I just started using uncarved blocks.

If you're any good as an artist, you have to be doing something nobody else has interest in. Nobody would be interested in my work except a few crazy people.

The wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way.

If you forge a Carl Andre, it's just another Carl Andre. It's not like a Vermeer.

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.

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?

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

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.

Matter as matter rather than matter as symbol is a conscious political position, essentially Marxist.

An artist, to achieve anything in art, has to finally do the thing that nobody else wants to do and nobody else has thought to do.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

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.

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.

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.

I grew up in a brick house. What's wrong with bricks? An Englishman took me aside and said, "You have to understand, all the bricklayers in England are Irish, and the English hate the Irish."

People are always trading their excess for somebody else's excess. One country has a lot of aluminum so they trade aluminum for sugar. It's the law of supply and demand.

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.

Artists tend to be beyond embarrassment the way little children tend to be beyond embarrassment.

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.

That's wonderful, but my mind has been destroyed by alcohol.

I've often stopped working for long periods.

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.

Isn't it wonderful to be an artist whose works have mostly been lost?

I didn't study the piano - the piano studied me.

Lenin thought abstract art was a conspiracy by the bourgeois to demoralize the proletariat. Yeah, socialist realism!

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

We don't have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it.

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.

When I came to New York, it was cheap!

I never drove a car in my life. Given my drinking habits in those days, I would have been dead a long time ago - stumbling out of a bar at 4 a.m. and getting into a car.

The girls you picked up from the bars were not the girls you took home to mother.

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.

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.

I didn't like men, but I liked women.

I was hanging out and drinking as long as I could afford it, or as long as somebody else could afford it.

I'm a feminist. I've always been in favor of women.

I've never been a representational artist at all. Most artists have been representational. That's when you discover yourself.

Money is a very complicated problem. The history of money is very curious.

I think my work is very American because I'm American. But I found that Europeans like uncertainty and doubt.

I had no place to put anything. I would give my sculpture away because I had no place to put it.

I never stopped doing what I did as a child.

Americans understand better than the Europeans and the English that any publicity is good.