Carl Andre’s "pile of bricks"—
Tate Gallery acquisition controversy - 1976
Excerpt from John A. Walker’s Art and outrage (1999).
On 16 February 1976 the front page of the Daily Mirror attacked a 1966 sculpture made from bricks by the American artist Carl Andre. The main heading was: “What a Load of Rubbish”. Subsequently, media coverage was intense and the sculpture was vandalised while on display in the Tate Gallery.
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"What a load of rubbish", front page of Daily Mirror, 16 February 1976.
Carl Andre (b. 1935), an American sculptor or “artworker”, became known to the art worlds of the United States and Europe during the 1960s as a leading exponent of the tendency known as Minimal art. During the following decade, he became famous in Britain as a consequence of press outrage at the purchase, in 1972, by Sir Norman Reid, director of the Tate Gallery— a somewhat belated purchase— of one of Andre’s 1960s’ works from the John Weber Gallery, New York, for an undeclared sum (rumoured to be between £4000 and £6000). The sculpture in question was called Equivalent VIII (1966) (the opaque title Untitled was also used in a Tate report) and consisted of 120 cream-coloured, American firebricks arranged on the floor in two layers of 60 to form an oblong. (Therefore, like a fractal, parts and whole were self-similar.) The bricks were not joined or cemented together in any way. Incidentally, the bricks did not date from the 1966 version of the sculpture— they had been of a different type and had been returned to a brickworks which subsequently closed. The Tate Gallery bricks were more recent purchases.
In his youth Carl Andre had been influenced by the art of Constantin Brancusi, a Modern sculptor who constructed certain works from blocks of stone and wood. Andre also drew upon his experience of working with standardised units as a brakeman in a railway yard. He came to the conclusion that carving and modelling were unnecessary because ready-made objects such as bricks were already “cuts in space”. Therefore, all he needed to do was to order them into geometric forms or lines. After use, if a work remained unsold, it could be dismantled and the objects returned to their place of origin.
Carl Andre, a Marxist of sorts, claimed that his sculpture had proletarian roots because it was related to working-class crafts such as bricklaying and tilesetting. (His grandfather had been a bricklayer.) His use of plain, common materials supposedly signified a connection with the common people. Unfortunately, such connotations were not discerned or appreciated by the common people of Britain.
While Constantin Brancusi stressed the vertical, Carl Andre stressed the horizontal. In so doing he rid sculpture of its pedestal. Canoeing experiences of the flatness of still water surfaces persuaded him that sculptures should be “level” and “low”. In 1966 Andre held an exhibition called Equivalents at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. The wooden floor of the gallery became a plain ground against which a configuration of eight “islands” of rectangular sculptures made from various combinations of sand-lime bricks were set. From above the installation resembled an abstract painting or relief. Since the Tate’s sculpture is a single, self-contained form, an “outtake” from Equivalents, it lacks even the relational complexity of Andre’s 1966 floorpiece.
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