Carl Andre Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

New York is dead. It's too expensive.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I believe that woman are superior to men.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I've often stopped working for long periods.

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.

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.

When I came to New York, it was cheap!

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

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.

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

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

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

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 didn't like men, but I liked women.

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

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

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."

I never stopped doing what I did as a child.

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.

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

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 ..."

What I made depended on what I found on the street. At least in the beginning, my materials came from the street.

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.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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