Quotes by Carl Andre

A place is an area within an environment that has been altered in such a way to make the general environment more conspicuous.

By nature, I am a materialist... It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I'm interested in.

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.

I find that my greatest difficulty and the really most painful and difficult part of my work is draining and ridding my mind of that burden of meanings which I've absorbed through the culture-things that seem to have something to do with art but don't have anything to do with art at all.

I have been subject to politics as long as I've been alive, thirty-five years, starting with the New Deal, going into the Second World War, the Cold War, Korea, the whole thing. So, I've been affected by it and hence since I've made my art, my art must reflect my political experience.

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

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.

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

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

That's another way, perhaps, of an art poverty; one has to impoverish one's mind.