Carl Andre Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ..."

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

I never stopped doing what I did as a child.

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

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.

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.

When I came to New York, it was cheap!

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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

I've often stopped working for long periods.

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.

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.