"My Five Year Old Could Do That!"
Looking at art that enrages - Part 2
This is a tricky subject and everyone has their opinion. I’ve often been drawn into discussions about whether this art has any real merit. This three-part article will hopefully encourage some interesting debate. In the first part, I discussed how we, the art viewing public, are enraged – are we being taken for fools? Now in Part Two we explore how the art world itself may have been duped, and in Part Three it will all step up a gear, and we meet “the devil”. Surely he has the wiles to convince us to take his side.
How do you know if you have an elephant in the fridge? Answer: There will be footprints in the butter. This joke unbelievably may hold some insight into our rage at the artists being discussed this time.
Last time we looked at the confronting art produced by Rothko and Malevich and the audience’s angry response to their work. Compared to the works by our next artists their paintings on canvas look quite traditional. The public have thrown up their arms in horror at the examples we now turn to. We explore how the art world is being duped – isn’t it? It’s not just the public being taken in; something is happening at a high level in the art establishments. For surely this can’t be art and someone is having a laugh (all the way to the bank).
A kind of war has been underway for many decades; the war on (re)defining the term “art”; its main engagement was fought during the 1960s but at times pockets of unrest still break out. Carl Andre (b. 1935) is a worthy combatant in this conflict, and his Equivalent VIII (1966) got mixed up in one of the most memorable British skirmishes to date.
Although purchased some years earlier, unrest reached flashpoint in 1976 when the Tate Gallery in London announced they’d added Equivalent VIII to their collection. The media led a frenzied assault. Andre’s arrangement of 120 ordinary firebricks, and how much they cost the taxpayer threw the gauntlet down to the public about what might be called art. Stack bricks two deep in a rectangular form and it is sculpture. It was smeared with paint later in the year.
Andre’s Minimal sculpture developed during the period 1958-1966: from hand-tooled wooden sculptures towards his floor-related works where the exhibiting location and placement play a vital role. Equivalent VIII is the last of his series of Equivalent sculptures; each is an arrangement of 120 bricks in rectangular form (Andre chose 120 because of the many mathematical factors this number comprises). They are laid out differently but have the same height, mass and volume. “Equivalent” of the titles relates to Alfred Stieglitz’s cloud photos but the works owe more to the Equivalence Relation and the Principle of Equivalence theories. Mathematics, arithmetic and forces in physics are intrinsic to his art. Andre has likened the sensation of walking around his Equivalent sculptures to wading (in bricks instead of water). The sculptures have also been linked to his experience of a Kyoto raked sand garden, and a canoeing trip on a lake which encouraged his interest in low and flat surfaces.
Minimal art was a product of its time - a time of increased consumerism and factory-made goods. In its use of prefab materials and by often involving other people in the production of work, Minimal Art brought the world of mass production and the division of labour into abstract art. It moved away from self-expression, symbolism, allegory and description. Traditional sculptural conventions were removed, and this non-representational art pared sculpture back to materials in their own right; showcasing their form. In a work such as Andre’s “Aluminum-Zinc Dipole E/W” consisting of two plates (one zinc, one aluminium) laid flat, side-by-side, even the volume is reduced to give prominence to the material and its inherent structure.
This move away from what traditionally defined sculpture also looked to include the viewer more fully as he/she could chose the viewpoint and bring their own senses and presence to the work.
Andre sums up his approach in this quote: “my work is atheistic, materialistic and communistic. It is atheistic because it is without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual quality. Materialistic because it is made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials. And communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men.”
Minimal Art has taken an important role in redefining our perception of what art is. A number of interesting challenges were being ventured: the myth of the lone creative genius was being pushed to the side by collective art practices; the work itself might not be a one-off to be appraised and valued accordingly. It seemed that the gap between high art and popular art was diminishing. Minimalism and Equivalent VIII contributed to the sense of confusion felt by many about how to define art. A really interesting point put forward by an author discussing Equivalent VIII is that a Rodin in a car park is still a Rodin. Andre’s sculpture however is just a pile of bricks. Artworks had become dependent on their setting to define them as art. A pile of bricks in the context of the art institutional could now be called sculpture. The real paradox here, is that although many artists hoped to break down barriers and promote a new accessible art, it actually often depended more than ever on the institution.
With regard to the elephant joke at the beginning – the context is all-important. If we take the elephant out of its usual context it becomes funny (although not very!!) – the idea of an elephant living in a fridge is ludicrous. And like the joke, the context plays an important role in a work like Equivalent VIII. Leave it in the street and people would walk past without much of a glance, but put it in a gallery space and the visitor starts to think about it in a different way.
Another publicly fought ruckus highlighting how confused we are about what art has become is the 1998 Fine Art students' trip to Spain. It was reported that a group of Fine Art students from Leeds Uni had spent the funding for their end of term art project on a week in the Costa del Sol. The media sent out a call to arms as tempers flared that this fun in the sun was being justified as art. Then came an announcement that it had been faked; the whole Spanish holiday had been staged – they had lain low in their flats, worked on sun-bed tans, and the holiday photos had in fact been taken in Cayton Sands near Scarborough. This non-holiday was also labelled art. Nicholas Barber wrote in the Independent newspaper “You tell your tutor that you’ve been on holiday, and he tells you that it’s art. You tell him you haven’t been on holiday, and he tells you that that’s art too.”
The issue of “is this art?” has also been raised in relation to the next artist’s work, but more often the big question that comes up is “is she really an artist?” - quite a subtle shift from the work to the person. From “are bricks art” to “is Tracey a con-artist” is a big leap!
Art is the means by which life reflects on, transforms and indeed creates its values; human life without it would not properly be human at all.
Antony Gormley
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EXTRAS
Carl Andre
Andre got his bricks for Equivalent VIII from a brickworks in Long Island City, New York. The sculpture didn't sell when first shown and he returned the sand-lime bricks and got his money back. When he remade the piece he had to hunt out similar bricks - the brickworks had since closed.
Minimal Art’s breakthrough came in 1966 with the “Primary Structures” exhibition in New York’s Jewish Museum
Andre “what my sculpture has in common with science and technology is an enormous interest in the features of materials.”
Most visitors to Andre's first one-man exhibition “Eight Cuts” in LA (1967) wouldn't enter the gallery and left after a quick look at the installation. The gallery floor was covered in concrete capstones with 8 open areas revealing the wood floor. Visitors had to walk on stones to enter gallery, which didn't come easily to the 1960s gallery goer.
IMAGE: Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre © Carl Andre/VAGA, New York and DACS, London 2002