Carl Andre’s "pile of bricks"—
Tate Gallery acquisition controversy (1976)
Minimalist artists wanted to deny that art is part of culture by reducing it to nature. Carl Andre once remarked: “My work has no more idea than a tree, rock, or a mountain.” In which case, the layperson’s view— “It’s not art”— seems perfectly justified. Since Minimal art rejected art’s traditional characteristics, it was only the artist’s tautological assertions—“I am an artist, therefore, what I make is art. If I say it’s art, it’s art”— and the art display context— galleries, museums—which endowed it with the aura of art. Outside the gallery stacks of bricks ceased to be art or were not recognised as such by the vast majority of people. Bernard Levin, writing in The Times, refused to accept that art was simply what artists or art bureaucrats declared it to be: “I know better than the people at the Tate who bought a pile of bricks and called it art. I call it a pile of bricks; and that is what it is.” Such disagreements reveal that art is a contested concept and that the definition of art in our society involves a power struggle between contending factions.
Paradoxically, despite its heavy reliance on art institutions, Minimal art had a tremendous democratic potential. Like food recipes or musical scores, many pieces were generated from sets of instructions: if someone paid the artist a small fee for a copy of the instructions and then followed them exactly they would obtain a piece of work. In other words, because Minimal art involved no skilled handwork, there was no need to pay large sums of money to obtain an “original” or to insist on the artist’s signature and evidence of provenance. What the Tate Gallery curators failed to perceive was that they could have established a large collection of Minimal (and Conceptual) art for virtually nothing. If they had done so, the charge of wasting public money would have been much easier to refute.
All the publicity aroused by Carl Andre’s “bricks” piece resulted in it becoming famous and virtually every new visitor to the Tate now wishes to see it. This has enabled the Tate to claim that it has become a “popular” work of art, but surely, it is a notorious tourist attraction rather than a truly popular work of art. What can be said in its favour is that it raised the issue of the identity of art in an acute form and thus prompted many people to ponder the questions: “What is art? What materials can art be made from? Who in our society has the power to define art?”
The furore over “the bricks” was also of value in exposing the immense gap which existed during the 1970s between the taste of the art world minority and the taste of the majority of the British public.
ads by artdesigncafe
Facebook comments
