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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

When I came to New York, it was cheap!

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 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 believe that woman are superior to men.

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.

New York is dead. It's too expensive.