MODERN ART: Carl Andre Interview

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

AN INTERVIEW WITH CARL ANDRE

by Peter Fuller, 1978

Equivalent VIII, Carl Andre

Andre is an eminent 'minimalist’ sculptor who emerged in America in the 1960s. He achieved notoriety in Britain in 1976 when his sculpture Equivalent VIII — a pile of bricks - was acquired by the Tate Gallery. This interview was recorded in 1978, immediately before the opening of a major exhibition of Andre's work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

FULLER: The row over the Tate’s acquisition of Equivalent VIII, ‘the bricks affair’, took place two years ago: it served, as the catalyst for an outburst against ‘Late Modernism’ in Britain. How do you feel about all this now?

ANDRE: It had little to do with art and much to do with authority. Auberon Waugh wrote that the English middle classes were choosing my work as the barricade upon which they were going to fight to gain control of English cultural and political life.

Has this episode changed your way of working, or your attitude to your work, in any way?

Absolutely not. I’m glad I wasn’t in England at the time because the temptation to make a fool of myself would have been enormous. Mass media exposure like that is absolutely no use to an artist. It doesn’t even help commercially. You don’t have 100,000 brick pieces in a warehouse, like a rock and roll group’s albums. I don’t think I’ve sold a work in England since then.

You were involved in a similar controversy over here in the US when you made a permanent site sculpture in down-town Hartford, Connecticut, consisting of 36 boulders, weighing from 1,000 lbs to 11 tons, laid out in eight progressively smaller rows, weren’t you?

There was a lot of media attention again. But this does not have much to do with art. Then there was an initial reaction: I spent a week in August directing the placement of the boulders from large trucks, with a large crane. People came up and screamed at me that art couldn’t be made from boulders, and if it could, I wasn’t making it in any sensible way, and that I had no right to do this. I now believe that initial reaction of waves of vibrating, screaming rage had more to do with the fact that, like many cities of its size in America, Hartford has been gutted through bureaucratic decisions made by people who are remote from the general population, people who work in air-conditioned penthouses at the top of skyscrapers, and ride to their houses in the suburbs in limousines. The common population never meets these people at all. At last, they were seeing someone who was changing the face of their city. He was not just a crew member who could say, ‘Well, lady, I can’t do anything about this. I just work here.’ I was responsible for what I was doing. But I believe that the rage of working-men and women who went by was just initial. It occurred while I was working, and dissipated.

Who in Hartford benefits from the presence of your work, and how?

I hope the people of Hartford who pass that way benefit. What was formerly just a bleak stretch of lawn is now a place which invites loitering, standing about, taking of lunch, leaning against stones, and talking to your neighbour. I hope it’s helped to civilize that small section of Hartford. A park is a civilizing influence. It improves the aesthetic surround and raises the level of cultural expectation. The piece was commissioned by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, a private philanthropic trust which was celebrating its fiftieth birthday. They wanted to give a large sculpture to Hartford, and I was called upon to make proposals. Once the project had been originated, the National Endowment for the Arts put up half the cost. Thus, in a tactical sense it is a monument to the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and in the larger sense it is a gift to the people of Hartford.

Many left ‘social critics’ in Britain, myself included, criticize the Tate for pursuing an acquisition policy which treats art solely as the logical development of an autonomous continuum of art history, set apart from the material and social conditions of life. We regarded the acquisition of your bricks as a typical instance of this policy.

You are describing a formalist attitude on the part of museum people: but I don’t think they are that formalist. Certainly, I think that as a doctrine, formalism has done damage by leaving out the personal histories of artists. It relates one object to another object; but objects do not relate to each other like that. Objects relate to each other only through people, their makers and their audience. This is an almost apolitical objection to formalism, although it has political implications. My work really reflects my earliest experiences; an attempt to recapture the vividness of them. Art works don’t make art works; people make art works.

Do you accept that apart from the wrath of Auberon Waugh there was also a legitimate left criticism of the Tate’s acquisition of the bricks?

I would hope that after the revolution my work would be deemed worthy, as before. There are some things that are going to be, I hope, preserved by the revolution. I do not believe that progressive social change means the destruction of everything that is valued in the present society. I don’t think that’s a Marxist point of view either.

Andrew Brighton has recently argued that the way in which the Tate collects excludes virtually all contemporary artists whose work explicitly ‘services or evokes the emotional lives or beliefs of any section of the general public’. Does your work service or evoke the emotional lives or beliefs of any section of the British public?

The British public doesn’t have much to do with art. That’s because of the economically-determined conditions of society. There’s no money for the great capitalists in having people interested in art. There’s money in having them interested in television. Television can be used as an art medium, but the television we watch night after night is not art. It is the antithesis of art. So I think the general public is discouraged by all kinds of conscious and unconscious means from having a real, central relationship with art of any kind.

Do you agree that your work is a typical example of an ‘international style’ in modern art?

There are indeed stylistic bonds between my work and William Turnbull’s, for instance. He is an older artist, and a fine one. When I saw his work for the first time I recognized a kindred spirit. Richard Long is also an artist whom I admire enormously. There is an international art community. Actually, it’s a NATO art community, because it covers Western Europe and North America.

Don’t you think that this ‘NATO art’ might be at the service of international capital?

During the Roman Empire there was Roman Imperial art. Whenever you get a large, cosmopolitan exchange of information, with a centre of dominance — and certainly New York City could have been thought of as the financial and economic capital of this NATO empire — this is bound to happen. Today, it’s changing; America is slowly sinking back into a fairly normal country, rather than Number One. But art follows the surplus value; the reason why contemporary art flourished in New York was because all the surplus value had to go through New York.

Is it reasonable that the Tate should be acquiring your work, and Le Witt’s, when, for example, it has no picture by Edward Hopper?

I absolutely agree that they should have an Edward Hopper.

What’s your view of Hopper?

It has changed over the years. When I was very much younger, I admired Hopper. But for most of my adult life I just was not interested in his concerns. In 1960, I honestly believed abstract art was morally superior to representational art, because so much representational art was kitsch. Some of the work with the strongest commitment which I see is representational. Hopper is of this kind. Robert Rosenblum was once asked who was the most over-valued, and who was the most under-valued artist: he answered ‘Andrew Wyeth’ to both questions. Wyeth is very popular with the general public; Hopper much less so. But if you compare their paintings, I agree with you, Hopper is a profoundly more valuable artist.

Hopper was concerned with the material world, and the sensuous world, as you claim to be. He was also interested in the social world and the specific experience of alienation within it. But he was interested in a popular accessibility which you are not, surely?

I’m certain that Hopper was not interested in it, either. He said he was interested in light on the side of the barn. Artists follow their concerns rather obsessively, and their work, if it is valid, or done with energy, strength and quality, cannot help but touch upon ordinary, popular experience. That’s what I feel about my own work. If my efforts are so eccentric that they do not touch on concerns which will be valued by any human being, then my work is indeed defective. It may prove, in the long run, that my work does lack that quality, but for me, now, it does not because my work is from the sum of my own experience. I don’t feel it as an abstract exercise in design, or mental gymnastics. But I would accept your test that if, eventually, my work fails to awaken some un­prejudiced interest, then it has failed. The Tate got my work because they considered it representative of a certain style of practice that emerged because of certain objective conditions in the 1960s one of which was, in New York, that the so- called New York School, the Abstract Expressionists, were really the first group of artists from America of world- historical importance. The American imperial assertion was made through NATO, and the victories of the Second World War, and so on; the assertion of this art followed the surplus value and the capital of empire. It definitely happened that way. Now I came to New York in 1957. My work has never been a reaction against Abstract Expressionism nor was that of Frank Stella whom I knew very well and who was painting his black stripe paintings: it was rather an attempt to keep the aspiration of the older artists, and somehow to approach the power of their work through different means. We had seen the fiasco of the second generation of Abstract Expres­sionists: people were painting portraits of paintings by De Kooning, and portraits of other people’s paintings. From Frank Stella I learned that you have to make art as strong as the art you admire, but you can’t make it like the art you admire.

Don’t you think that the Abstract Expressionist movement was abused by the agencies of imperialism, and pushed throughout Europe as part of America’s imperial, cultural policy?

Absolutely. It is documented in the historical archives. During the Second World War the OSS, the secret operations branch of United States intelligence, was set up. One of the arguments for continuing the OSS as the CIA after the end of the war was the fact that cultural campaign money, imperial campaign money, could not be gotten through Congress because those who were interested in founding the CIA recognized that, whether they personally liked it or not, Abstract Expressionism would be seen in Europe as the dominant art of the time, and they wanted it to be shown. United States Congress, however, almost to a man thought that abstract art was a Communist plot, and therefore did not want to give any money to it. So you had to form a secret organization that would propagate the American art image, a wonderful contradiction!

It is sometimes said that your work constitutes a decisive rupture in the Fine Art tradition, but Richard Morphet’s apologia for the Tate’s purchase of the bricks claimed they should be valued for classical sculptural qualities. Where do you stand on this?

I may be absolutely mad, but I see my work in the line of Bernini, Rodin, Brancusi, and then I would put my name at the end of that line. Perhaps I am utterly deluded, but the urge in my work does come from the work of the past, and I do not consciously wish to destroy or rupture my continuity with it. There is a principle in science that when any theory succeeds another theory, it must preserve the previous theory: Einstein does not overthrow Newton, Newton’s becomes a smaller, specialized theory in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Not that I believe the work of Bernini, Rodin, and Brancusi is diminished because of the work of Carl Andre, rather I think that it is continued. I hope that in my work I preserve the interest people ought to have in Bernini, Rodin and Brancusi. I’m not in favour of destroying museums, at all, although I think a lot of the treasures in museums should be returned to the places from which they were stolen.

In 1970 you said, ‘to say that art has meaning is mistaken, because then you believe that there is some message which art is carrying like the telegraph, as Noel Coward said. Yes, art is expressive, but it is expressive of that which can be expressed in no other way. ’ But what is expressed through say, Equivalent VIII?

It’s like a poem. If you can succeed in successfully paraphrasing a poem, that is a sign that the poem fails. This is even more true in a painting or a sculpture: if there was another way of doing it, it should have been done in another way. Art does not function merely in the domain of language.

But you should be able to indicate directions in which I, or anyone else, could derive something, whether perceptually, affectively, or intellectually, from your work.

I absolutely agree. I am not saying that nothing at all of value can be said about a work of art, but I’m too subjectively bound up with the work. I could only answer by sitting down and telling you the story of my life. But that’s beside the point, too. I can relate to you things in my conscious memory which I think were combined. Perhaps under analysis I could present unconscious things which were there, too. But sculpture is a mediation between one’s own consciousness and the inanimate world, which is after all what life and death are about. The making of art requires that this mediation between the self and the inanimate world must be of some significance to another consciousness. But, to me, it’s not communication. It is as if a beautiful woman invites you to dinner at her flat, and the food is very good: you eat the food, and take pleasure from it, but this woman is not also necessarily telling you something that can be told in any other way.

The fact is that in Britain most of those who saw the bricks, of both left and right, working class and middle class, either failed to respond, or responded negatively — without pleasure. How should they look at Equivalent VIII differently to experience a positive response?

The bricks were presented to the British public, by the media, as one point. Nothing else was provided: just one point. Given one point you don’t know whether you’ve got a circle, a straight line, or what. If you have only one member of a category, then the category does not make any sense.

Whatever your intentions, many cultural meanings now attach to the bricks. But you tend to deny them and say they have nothing to do with your art.

Years ago, I was quoted as saying art is what we do and culture is what is done to us and our art. Works of art, any human concern that’s shared by many people, becomes enriched by the sum of those concerns which can never be identical with each other. But everyone says the bricks cannot stand by themselves, they need an argument, or line of work, to surround them. I absolutely agree; but the Venus de Milo would just be a stone woman if nobody knew about sculpture. It would seem a very odd thing to do. It may be true that the line of works that I’ve done, and even what is called ‘abstract art’, may prove historically to be worthless, or a great cultural desert. I’m not denying that possibility: the judgement of history will finally emerge.

Since ‘culture-free’ art is manifestly impossible, shouldn’t the anticipation of the cultural response to your work be taken into account in your project?

The only way I could think of trying to do that would be trying to flatter the taste of people whom I thought might otherwise dislike the work. That’s verified in portrait painting. Wasn’t it wonderful what happened to the portrait of Churchill? I think that was an intimation of what’s going to happen to my work. I wish I could say, however, that out of pure motives you make great art, and out of corrupt motives you make poor art. But that’s simply not true.

So perhaps you could produce more popular and accessible art without compromise?

If I wanted to do that I would go into one of the mass- orientated arts. I’m not saying that mass-orientated art must flatter its audience, but it may flatter it and still be very strong. The strongest 20th-century art is film, without question. I love film, but I feel no calling in it, no vocation. I have probably enjoyed film more than sculpture, but I have the calling, or urge, to work in sculpture. The age of film was probably over by 1950: think of those Hollywood Studios which did turn out some extraordinarily great films for the most crass and commercial reasons.

What sort of response are you expecting to your Whitechapel retrospective?

I hope the English public will realize that they have placed much too great importance on my work. After all, it is only art. The Fine Arts have been called elitist, but ‘elitism’ seems to me to refer to some degree of power. Few people of any kind are interested in the Fine Arts today because they are not present in people’s homes. There is not an original art­work in the house where I grew up. Perhaps we are seeing the withering away of the so-called Fine Arts, painting and sculpture. I don’t know. If that is so, I hope I’m not accelerating the process.

Who do you expect to come to your Whitechapel exhibition and enjoy it?

It’s impossible for me to tell. Perhaps people who are waiting for a bus who come in out of the rain. That’s fine if they get some shelter. I hope that the Whitechapel show will provide enough to determine the ‘polygon’ of my work. There is no reason why the reaction to my work now cannot be informed. It will be easier to sort out just what is blind prejudice, what is informed dissent, and what is informed appreciation.

You once said, ‘my works are in a constant state of change. I’m not interested in reaching an ideal state with my work. As people walk on them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, the materials weather and the work becomes its own record of everything that’s happened to it. ’ Do you therefore disapprove the Tate’s decision to remove the ink-stain from the bricks?

I approve their removal of it. That statement was not meant to refer to vandalism, but to the fact that I do not polish metal plates. As a boy, I had to shine my father’s shoes. The idea that somebody would have to shine my sculpture is offensive to me. It certainly would not be the rich collector who did it, but some poor chamber-maid, or butler, on their hands and knees. You can’t walk on the bricks or timber pieces, but the metal pieces are kept much in the best condition by being out where people walk on them.

Isn ’t vandalism part of history, too?

Vandalism is part of history, but then so is Auschwitz. That does not mean we should approve and continue the practice.

Although you reject the term ‘conceptual’ artist, you have always agreed that you are a minimalist. What do you mean by ‘minimalism’?

I think it applies less to the work than the person. I found that at that time in order to make work of strength and conviction you could not do a scatter shot. You had to narrow your operations. That’s not true of every artist, but it was true for me and some others. I’m a minimalist because I had to shut down a lot of pointless art production to concentrate on a line which was worthwhile. You could say that minimalism means tightening up ship, for me.

Hockney has said that he believes that modernism is dead. Do you see yourself as a defender of late-modernist values?

Certainly not. Abstract art can produce as much trash or kitsch as representational art. Kitaj and Hockney, however, have said that their objection to modernism is that all art springs from drawing the figure. Their art does. But you could not describe Stonehenge, or much other art, as drawing the figure. In debates like that, I can only be correct: they believe that art other than their own isn’t valid. Well, if they are right, I’m wrong. But if I am right, then their art has its validity, and my art has its validity. If I am right, they’re right too.

Are you a pluralist then?

I’m a kind of anarchist, I suppose. I don’t think anybody should tell an artist what he should do, or what he shouldn’t do.

Do you have any empathy with the view that British art should become less hegemonized by American styles, that it should move in the direction of a national art?

In England that would be like demanding a truly national cuisine. I think it would be a disaster.

In 1970, you spoke of your attempt ‘to make sculpture without a strong economic factor’. You said, ‘I find that it’s necessary for me to return to this state and make sculpture as if I had no resources at all, except what I could scavenge, or beg, or borrow, or steal. ’ Do you still feel the same way?

Yes. I think there’s a tendency, with our prosperity, to go forever grander projects, ever more stupendous earthworks, if you can raise the money. Scavenging the streets, industrial sites, and vacant lots is perhaps similar, for me, to what drawing from the figure is for Hockney. When I started making sculpture I had no resources except what I could scavenge, borrow or beg. That was how my practice evolved. If I become too remote from that I think my work will lose whatever vitality it might have.

In the catalogue to your Guggenheim exhibition, Diane Waldman wrote, ‘the conventional role of sculpture as a precious object, and its ownership, has been vigorously attacked by (Andre’s) oeuvre which refuses, by definition, to make such accommodations. ’ Do you agree?

No, of course not. It is the genius of the bourgeoisie that they can buy anything: collectors buy ideas and goldfish in bowls, all kinds of things. That is the genius of the capitalist system. If they set out to make a commodity out of you, there’s absolutely no way you can prevent it. There’s nothing wrong with precious objects. There are a lot of objects which I find precious. Other people do not find them precious. The question is whether their only legitimacy is that they are articles in trade.

Would you call yourself a Marxist?

Yes, Marx is the only philosopher I have read who made sense to me of the common life everyone lived. There is no better definition of freedom than Marx’s — ‘the recognition of necessity’. I wish that in the United States there was a Marxist political party, but there is not. There’s all kinds of infantile Marxist insanity, which is fractionating and divisive. I am absolutely inert and inactive politically now, because by vocation I’m not a politician, but there is no group which I can attach myself to.

As a Marxist you are presumably aware of the labour theory of value?

Yes, indeed.

Where do you think the exchange-value of your works comes from?

Both Marx and Engels separately explained why art was the one commodity that seemed not to reflect the labour theory of value. They wrote that they had seen works on which many hours had been spent which were in their opinion without value, and others that seemed to have been dashed off in seconds that were of great value.

But how are the exchange-values of your works created?

These values are official, but, as we know, they are not scientific. The values the market place creates are objective in the sense that they are exchangeable, but they are not objective in the terms of science.

You have spoken a lot about the ‘immanence’ of your sculpture. Do you mean by this that its value resides inherently in its material existence in the world?

Absolutely. I think that is the essence of materialist philosophy.

Don’t you think that exchange-value is something that’s projected on to the work by dealers, critics, and museum men, and that it contradicts what you call ‘immanent’ value?

In Das Kapital, Marx describes the exchange-value, or commodity value, as something like a ghost which travels alongside the real productive value. But my Marxism has never been a formal, organized study. You may say I admire the sentiments of Marx, and his organization of a philoso­phical point of view. But in no way am I a politically effective person.

Much of the popular resentment against your work seems to me to arise from the fact that it comes to signify the high price attaching even to relatively unworked and worthless material if it is legitimized by art institutions as art.

I can give you a perfect example of that. When I was working in Hartford, a man came up to me and delivered a tirade. He was so furious I thought he would have apoplexy. He ended saying, ‘There’s no art; there’s no craft. There’s nothing. Art is craft.’ I asked him what his work was. He told me that he was a propeller maker. Now that is a doomed trade if ever there was one: in ten or twenty years I don’t think there will be many propellers in the world. He was a man who possessed great skill, yet who was rapidly becoming obsolete. I think it was his own lack of significance in the world of production that he was getting at. Productive activity arose in the neolithic age when there was also a great outburst of abstraction, with the megalithic monuments and so on. I’m not saying that abstraction is more advanced, but perhaps abstract art has occurred in human history every time there has been a total technological change in the organization of society. Perhaps abstract art is just catching up with the industrial revolution. My work reflects the conditions of industrial production; it is without any hand-manufacture whatsoever. My things are made by machine. They were never handworked, because they come from furnaces, rolling mills, cranes and cutting machines. I’m the only one who handles these things by hand when I take them off the stack and put them on the floor. I’m not claiming that as any kind of craft. But is it possible to make art, which is a branch of productive activity, in which the hand does not enter into the production of the materials of which it is made? Perhaps my work poses the question as to whether it is possible to make art that parallels the present organization of production, technologi­cally and economically.

How much did the Tate pay for Equivalent VIII?

I think it was £4,000. Something like that. They couldn’t have got that Andre for less. That’s what is ridiculous about this.

For the Hartford piece you were paid $ 87,000, of which you spent $7,000 on materials, and expenses.

I would say that I spent roughly $10,000 or $12,000: it was largely expenses.

Don’t you think this sort of pricing increases the anger against your work? If you took a reasonable fee you might get more acceptance for what you claim to be your real concerns.

The economic system tries to drive the artist out of his position as the primitive capitalist to make him another employee. I don’t want to be forced to be someone’s employee. I have my primitive capital interest in my work, and that is what you are buying — not my labour time. The advanced capitalist wants to drive the primitive capitalist out of business; he doesn’t want to drive the worker out of business.

I was in the gallery when Angela Westwater telephoned and ordered the steel plates which you later laid out on the floor to form your current New York exhibition. When they were in the factory stock-room these plates were worth so much; when you arranged them on the gallery floor without working them in any way, a few days later, they became worth a hundred times as much. A six-by-six plate-piece in your gallery now costs $ 22,000. Aren’t these magical values bound to be the most striking thing about the work?

The difference in value between, say, a Morris Louis painting and the value of its canvas and pigment is even greater. Sculptors have to bear the burden, and painters do not, because the material value of the basic supply is so much greater in sculpture. The material cost is a relatively large proportion of the sculptor’s cost. I very much resist this thing of turning my relationship to my work into that of an architect who accepts a fee for a large capital project. I am making capital goods and selling them as capital goods, in a primitive capitalist way. I don’t deny that.

But why should people value this specific pile of bricks, or arrangement of steel plates, more than any other?

Because that pile of bricks is my work, and if you want to get the authentic example or specimen of the work of Carl Andre then you must go to Carl Andre and buy it. I have a monopoly supply. Now this supply can be forged or plagiarized, but then one would be dealing with the work of a forger or plagiarist. This is very simple. There is less startling matter there than meets the eye. But we generally tend to overvalue money and undervalue art.

Equivalent VIII was a reconstruction, not an original, wasn’t it?

Yes. The original has been destroyed. At the time I made these pieces I did not have the money or the space to store the bricks, so I had to return them to the brick supplier. When I wanted to reconstruct the works the plant that had produced the bricks was no longer in existence. In the case of works which have been destroyed, and this is also true of the Pyramids, because I was subject to economic deprivation, I reserved the right to reconstruct them. But I’m not interested in reproducing or adding to the number of works of a given kind that exist. But if others attempt to produce reconstructions, then these would not be art because art is not plagiarism.

What is this factor ‘art’ which seems to be the component which confers value?

It is a connection we supply between objects. Certainly, it is not scientific or objective. If the human race should be annihilated suddenly art would go with it. The objects might remain, but the relationship between them would be gone. Art is definitely an unofficial system of value created by people.

So art, for you, is a special kind of exchange-value that attaches to arrangements of certain common-or-garden units, or objects, in certain circumstances?

I would hope it was production value, not exchange-value.

Much peasant art is expressed through piles of materials which are used and used up, like log piles, in the South of France.

Or hay bales in Belgium! They are magnificent sculptural arrangements. The only difference is my self-conscious intent to have made it art. In the work of Brancusi, the remaining endless column is the gate-post of a peasant farm. I don’t think that’s a sign of the debility of a work, but rather of its strength.

You came from a middle-class background, didn’t you?

Not really. Not a bourgeois background. My father’s father was an immigrant Swedish bricklayer; in the United States he met with some success and became a small building contractor and bricklayer. He was a very small entrepreneur, basically a skilled worker. My father worked as a draughtsman in a shipyard, again essentially a skilled worker, but he was no capitalist of any kind. The class structures of England and America are quite different; in Britain, the constitutional monarch is the Queen, in the United States the constitutional monarch is the dollar. Not really; obviously economic forces rule. But in England the Queen can knight her horse trainer or the Beatles, and that’s one way of conveying value. In the United States there is no way of conveying value except with money. I think this is why British artists get less for their work than American artists. Americans are used to conveying value with money. In a way it makes American society more vulgar, simple and clear. How much money you have determines your social position. It’s much less ambiguous. I find it extraordinarily difficult to follow the intra-class wars that go on in English drawing rooms.

You went to an expensive private school though?

I was a scholarship student. My mother was naively socially ambitious. She’s despaired ever since because I discovered my vocation in art there. Late at night my mother cries and says that I was ruined at Andover. I found an art studio there, and from the first time I worked in one it was my greatest material pleasure. That’s what set me out consciously to make art. Without that experience, I don’t think that it would ever have happened.

Barbara Rose wrote that in the early 1960s you walked into her house and announced that you had 'resigned from the middle classes’. Is this true?

Yes, what that really meant was that I had already ‘dropped out’. I had abandoned the fantasy of upward social mobility, of having a suit and tie, which I have not worn. My family expected me to do better than my father, to go into a profession, perhaps. I realized that I was not following any course that might lead in that direction.

Do you identify with the working class then?

I identify with the productive class and the production class, too. That must include managers and even imaginative capitalists. The trouble is that there are so few imaginative capitalists any more. That’s what is really humiliating. It’s annoying to be ruled, but doubly humiliating to be ruled by incompetent people.

Would you accept the criticism that you are an ouvrierist? You carry out work like working-class work, but you wear clean overalls. Your identification is formal: it does not go beyond the level of appurtenances.

It is formal rather than practical because I don’t hang out at the factory, and I don’t live in the working-class district of the city. I cannot deny that, but I don’t think this formal connection is false.

Between 1960 and 1964 you worked on the Pennsylvania Railway as a freight brakeman and freight conductor. What did that mean to you?

Quincy, where I was born, is an industrial suburb of Boston, so I was with working people all my life. It wasn’t a matter of descending into the working class, or any such thing. It was a way of surviving and earning my living. I never expected to earn my living as an artist. My compulsion to make art was not economically ambitious: it was not making me a penny. I had to support myself and my wife. It was outdoor work, and fairly healthy. There are no minor injuries on the railroad. You get cut in half, but you don’t cut your thumb. I learned a hell of a lot about sculpture on the railroads.

Is that echoed in things like the timber blocks arranged in a long line?

Yes. My work was taking long trains of cars that had come in from another city and drilling them; that is, hauling them up in bands and drilling them into different tracks. I’d have to draw up new bands and take them all over the place. It was essentially filing cars, a matter of moving largely identical particles from one place to another; then there was the whole terrain-following business which I like very much in my work. A band of cars segments and follows a terrain: it’s not rigid.

You once said, ‘I’d like to reduce the image-making function of my art to the least degree. ’ Is that still true?

Yes, it is. But in a way I’ve realized that it’s a futile job. You cannot absolutely remove the image.

The work itself becomes an image of Late Modernism, doesn’t it?

Yes, it did. But I once said that the earthwork people were taking the concerns of modernism and putting them in wild and distant places away from the museum and gallery scene. But if my work had any significance, I was introducing into modernism concerns which had escaped it, like industrial materials. There had been the Bauhaus, and so forth. But I thought the Bauhaus was backward. The stuff students produced in the first year always seemed much sounder than what they produced in their last year.

Hollis Frampton once wrote of your ‘utter concern for the root, and the fundamental nature of art’. Would you accept that?

The appearance of art is not usually of interest to an artist; it shouldn’t be of interest. Aristotle said that all art was representational but that it must not represent the appearance but the process of nature. I think works of art should refer the process rather than the appearance of art.

Wouldn’t you agree that part of the root, the fundamental nature of art, is image-making?

Which came first, sculpture or painting? Probably painting. The first savage who smeared him- or herself with red mud and was delighted. I think the urge to sculpture is closely related to a sense of mortality. People began to sense that they physically and temporally passed through this world, and started setting up markers to indicate where they had been, almost like tracks, evidence of existence. Fundamentally, primitive art had more to do with this than communication. The evidence of existence could start to be used to communicate. Art can be used to communicate and to facilitate communication. But that is not its fundamental essence.

Although the work of sculpture must exist as a thing in the world, its raison d’etre as sculpture is surely its ability to refer to areas of experience beyond itself?

It must have a demonstrable relationship with other works that we call sculpture. That’s one relationship.

You once said, 7 want wood as wood, steel as steel, aluminium as aluminium, and a bale of hay as a bale of hay. ’ Then you say you want a bale of hay as art. But there is a contradiction here. In order to become art, you must present the bale of hay as something other than itself.

I almost never have used a single bale of hay: that, to me, is not a work of art. The urinal is not a work of art, to me. Perhaps to Duchamp. But the relationship among 12, 30 or 50 bales of hay or plates, the will, the desire to make combinations like that is, to me, the desire of art. A metallurgist might be interested in one plate or even a chip of steel. My early pronouncements on these matters were very much overdrawn. I was a young man trying to clarify for myself what my work had to be. Now I hope I am as stern with myself, but I also hope that I have a better understanding. But one has to narrow one’s understanding to a certain degree to get something done.

Would you agree now that the thing-in-the-world is only realized as a sculpture when it is seen, through perception, as a meaningful sign?

No, no. It could be an empty sign, and that may be valuable.

But certainly a sign.

No, no: as evidence. You may say you wish to stop the traffic on a road. You can put up a ‘STOP’ sign, or a red light, or you can put a landmine there. I think the first form is a sign, but the second is not. It is a phenomenon. Works of art are fundamentally in the class of landmines rather than signs. That’s my own deep feeling. The linguistic aspect of art is tremendously overstressed, especially in the conceptual thing. It is part of the vulgarism of our culture, ‘What does it mean?’ and all that. Ten years ago I would have argued this point with you about the cultural matrix that makes a work of art sensible. But now I realize that without the matrix of art, of sculpture, or of the general culture, there would be no reason to value the work.

You reduce sculptures to the role of signifiers which you say signify nothing. These are then released into the cultural world where they signify things external to yourself like Late Modernism. And this is what is constituting them as works of art, whatever your intentions may have been.

This may be what is happening, but it is not part of my conscious design. I think in our society we constantly confuse the information and the experience. Certainly conceptual art is really about information. It is not about thought processes and the body operating in its own luxury and pleasure and so forth.

Would you agree that Pop art was essentially a superficial art which attempted to put in brackets the substantial signifier, whereas you set out to produce the obverse of Pop, signifiers completely devoid of signs?

To a certain degree my work is the antithesis of Pop art. Many of the Pop artists had attempted second-generation Abstract Expressionism and, disappointed with their results, wanted to find some other thing to do. But Pop art has always seemed to me to be about a world that was already formed, its images were already present, whereas my materials have not yet reached their cultural destiny. The bricks are not joined together; the plates are not stamped, or deformed. They represent the unrealized material possibilities of the culture. This may be fanciful, but it is the exact opposite of Pop art, which generally represents something finished, whose destiny is totally determined. Perhaps one thing my work is about is the fundamental innocence of matter. I don’t think matter is guilty of all the transgressions of which we are always accusing it. Advocates of gun control think that by keeping these tools of death out of people’s hands there will be less murder. That may be true, but it is not the problem. The problem is the values of a society where guns are lusted after in the first place. Matter is not guilty of the material conditions with which we surround ourselves. You cannot blame the bricks for my art: you must blame it on me.

Is it true that in 1965 you were canoeing on a lake in New Hampshire when you suddenly realized your work had to be flat as water?

I had found a brick in the street, a beautiful white brick made of synthetic limestone. Sand and lime are mixed and run through a superheated steam oven. Chemically, it is almost identical to limestone. It’s a very nice material, and I wanted to use it in my next show, although I was not sure how. I think I already had the ‘equivalent’ idea, that all the pieces should have the same number of blocks. But I was wondering whether they should be of different heights or not. In a canoe, the centre of gravity is below the surface of the water. I looked out at absolute water seeking its own level. The surface had a perfection you never got on land; there is no grade on water. From that, I decided I wanted them all two tiers high.

Wasn’t this close to the kind of flatness Greenberg was talking about at the same time?

My practice is so remote from painting that I would not even have thought of the connection. At High School, I never could do anything but a flat painting. Whenever I tried to achieve some idea of space, I failed. Finally, I did a monochrome painting, not as a revolutionary art form, but because that was all I was painting even when I used colour.

When you were seeking flatness, there was also Greenberg’s flatness, and the literal superficiality of Pop. Do you deny any relationship between these three apparently similar phenomena?

The objective conditions under which these works were produced were the same. But there was much less interchange among all these people than is usually assumed. They didn’t really know each other: I didn’t know Donald Judd, or Robert Morris, and they did not know the timber pieces using units which I made before 1960. Although I agree that the objective conditions for minimalism were essentially the same for the Pop artists and colour-stain painters, ‘flat’ in sculpture is not fundamentally about illusion at all, but about entry. I wanted to make sculpture the space of which you could somehow enter into. You can enter the horizontal plane in a way that you cannot enter the vertical unless you are Simon Stylites. But also as Lucy Lippard and I have agreed in conversation, works like my metal pieces could not have arisen without air travel. There is an analogy between looking out of an airplane at the ground, and looking down at the work.

I think that the emergence of‘flatness’ as a credo in the Fine Arts reflected a certain urban experience which emphasized the superficial rather than the physical, which denied interiority. Despite many of your claims, I feel that the floor pieces express this experience without transcending it.

I would hope that they do. But, if the works do not convince you otherwise, I cannot. But I would say this. The one single characteristic of matter that draws me to sculpture is its mass. It is flat because that is the most efficient use of mass one can arrive at. I’ve never made the proto-typical minimalist work, the box. I have never been interested in volume at all. The way to achieve mass effects economically, of course, is through flatness because the 3/8-inch, foot-square plate is a much more efficient unit of sculptural mass than the cube made from the same amount of steel.

But why does ‘flatness’, or efficiency, matter in a sculpture?

I was once quoted as saying that sculpture was a matter of seizing and holding space. Given the resources available, using plates rather than cubes or boxes was the most efficient way of working. I think aesthetic efficiency is one of the signs of a strong work of art. I don’t mean simplicity, because a complex work of art can pack aesthetic efficiency too. The struggle is not between simplicity and complexity but between efficiency and inefficiency.

You once wrote, ‘there is no symbolic content in my work. ’ But a pile of bricks, say, is a very personal symbol, surely?

Almost a personal emblem, or a psychological emblem, that relates to earliest experiences.

A symbol in the psycho-analytical sense?

Yes.

You are modifying your view about symbolic content then?

When I made that statement I was both naive and being polemical. In polemic one caricatures; one must. I now realize that one cannot purge the human environment from the significance we give it. But I have a theory that abstraction arose in neolithic times, after paleolithic representation, for the same reason that we are doing it now. The culture requires significant blankness because the emblems, symbols, and signs which were adequate for the former method of organizing production are no longer efficient in carrying out the cultural roles that we assign to them. You just need some tabula rasa, or a sense that there is a space to add significance. There must be some space that suggests there is a significant exhaustion. When signs occupy every surface, then there is no place for the new signs.

But what would you say to the view that your obsession with materials which have been ‘digested’ into similar units, but not fully refined by industrial production, can be correlated with a fascination with shit?

Yes, of course. Absolutely.

Would you also accept that the obsessional ordering and arranging of materials which plays an important part in your work correlates with the ego-defence mechanisms holding back the dangerous instinctual desire to play with your own shit?

Yes, but some infants would rather smear on the wall, and others were drawn to play on the floor with it. And that’s only to divide painters from sculptors. I don’t think that I could be accused of being a painter, even as an infant.

Perhaps one reason why your work interests some people is because it closely reflects anal-erotism, which has been thinly sublimated through classical, middle-class, obsessional modes of ordering, close to those of the miser, or the accountant?

Exactly, although the same thing is true, but cannot have the same class connotations, at Zen gardens in Japan. That’s a different class, but also human beings. William Carlos Williams once answered that question beautifully when he was asked if all artists and poets were neurotics who had never left a primitive state of sexual development and therefore were obsessed. He said, ‘Yes, that’s true of anybody who does anything remarkable.’

You wear industrial overalls, but they are always immaculately clean. Here again is this association with dirt, manual labour, physical smearing, and so on, and its immediate denial in their cleanliness.

If you are really interested in dealing with dirt, you have to be very fastidious. You can’t afford to be sloppy. Here’s another of these parallels. When he was a draughtsman out on the ships, my father pragmatically and empirically built up his knowledge of a very strange speciality which was not taught: the sanitary and freshwater plumbing of ships. His great ambition for me when I was a little boy was that I should grow up to be a sanitary engineer, planning the great plumbing and civic engineering works of the city.

A new Haussmann!

Not so much the streets as the sewers.

Haussmann made a sewer which was his joy and pride. He took people on tours round it.

Ah! The municipal sewer of Boston was indeed right by my house in which I lived as a child. The house was on a kind of peninsula in a marsh, and on either side of it were two gigantic dykes. When the enormous sewer, it was so big you could drive teams of horses through it, could be underground, it was. But they had to keep a certain grade, so that when it went over lowlands they had to build these enormous dykes. My boyhood experience with these great earthworks, and the idea that the excrement of the whole metropolis of Boston was pulsing by my house, was undoubtedly important.

Sometimes the instinctual impulses break through in your work, as in your dog-shit cement pieces of 1962.

Absolutely.

Do you agree that the particular infantile experience that you are recreating as an artist is the productive one of shitting?

It is more complex than that. It starts with that; it is a vision in which excrement is necessary, and can be satisfying in certain ways, but it also has to be accounted for in another way. In the West there is an over-developed system: we do not know how to get rid of our industrial excrement. And we have a crisis, indeed almost an anal crisis, in the culture.

The infant values his own shit very highly, and the family, particularly the middle-class family, tends to value it not at all. Your work is involved with this same paradox: Is this thing to be valued highly, or not at all?

In a certain way. It is a kind of primal scene of its own, isn’t it? I think this cannot be denied.

In the Freudian conception, the obsessional is also usually preoccupied with the contradiction between the idea and the thing, and so on. Your denial that you are a conceptualist and your preoccupation with ‘immanence’ and stuff can be seen in these terms too?

Absolutely, yes.

Is your work a symptom of an obsessional neurosis which it does not transcend?

I hope that it does not transcend it, but provides catharsis for it and goes beyond it. Moore said, and I’m paraphrasing now, that all art is an attempt to regain the vividness of first expressions or experiences. I think he meant conscious experiences: at least it goes beyond the instinctual, beyond the infantile omnipotent state, when we begin to be aware of ourselves in the world. The omnipotent infant does not require any art because he is god.

When you create value as if by magic, by laying out those steel plates, that seems to me an immediate gratification of early feelings of infantile omnipotence.

But I started placing them there when they weren’t worth anything.

But the situation changed. A t last the world recognized the value of your shit! Don’t you acknowledge that there is an element of magic-making, of infantile omnipotence in your work?

Well, not omnipotence. But I used to dream when I was a little boy that I was a great general leading a great army into battle. And then somebody would come up to me and say, ‘You can’t do this. You’re just a little boy.’ And then I would be sent home.

Are you still waiting to be sent home?

(Laughs.) I hope I’m not sent home when I go to the Whitechapel.