I find that people who do not care very much for art at all
spend all their art time and energy with art that they don't like.
I just don't understand why people who were outraged by my art
bother with it at all.
This programme contains some strong language.
It consists of 120 bricks stacked in two layers.
Industrially-manufactured bricks, all of which, of course,
are made of the same substance and are therefore of the same hue.
Yeah, no, I totally remember it, yeah.
I remember my mum telling me that the Tate Gallery had bought bricks.
Oh, I do remember the bricks controversy.
I was...had just finished my foundation, so I'm really old!
And I remember being quite perplexed by it, really.
Do you remember the bricks controversy? I do, yeah, 1976.
Pile of bricks basically on the floor, and they called it art.
It's funny how it's lodged in public memory.
It was talked about all over the nation and it went on for months.
One can see it as the moment that modern art became something
that everybody had an opinion about.
The Tate art gallery in London hit the headlines today when it
was revealed that they'd paid a lot of money for a pile of old bricks.
It was 1976 that the whole thing broke.
The bricks fuss was one of those things that actually caught
like wildfire.
Suddenly, the whole press went mad about this work.
They're probably the most expensive bricks in the world.
The Tate's brickies laid out the 120 firebricks in the
rectangular pattern decreed by the sculptor.
It was a major media storm.
Most critics and mere mortals find this low-slung rectangle
laughable or loathsome.
It's bloody pretentious and stupid, and they need sending up!
It just seemed, in my opinion as a taxpayer, a complete waste of money.
I think they're making fun of us. People would say I'm wrong.
I admit, it's my opinion.
But I really believe that the person who believes himself that this
sculpture is making fun of us. What's your reaction?
You've studied it closely, have you? Yes, I've studied it.
And what do you make of it? It's a pile of bricks!
One of the main reasons why the public was upset about the bricks
was that it wasn't refined, you know, and that works of art,
you know, could not just be made out of ordinary stuff.
This is bricks being stacked, not even being kind of formed,
joined, carved or anything happening to them,
just being put in this simple rectilinear arrangement.
And I think it felt, for many people,
like the artist was just taking the piss.
Waste of taxpayers' money and a waste of space in the Tate Gallery.
Of course, all the popular press picked up the thing about what
a waste of money, what a load of rubbish.
Here is this gallery, funded by the state, they get 500,000 quid
a year for acquisitions, what do they spend their money on?
They spend it on a pile of bricks, claiming that it's a work of art.
The bricks controversy, like all great controversies,
it's a period piece, it's something of its time.
# He loves to dance He's got to dance
# Oh, I love to love... #
If you'd opened a newspaper in the sort of early weeks of 1976,
it was just sort of one bit of bad news after another...
Today's decision means that over 100 men will turn up tomorrow
knowing they'll either be asked to go home or told they'll get no pay.
..a strike, a set of terrible economic figures.
The pound has never fallen so far so fast.
# The minute the band begins to swing it
# He's on his feet to dig it
# And dance the night away... #
There was double-digit inflation, there was a world recession,
oil prices were rising.
It was a period not of expansion but of restraint.
# If I had my way
# Oh, I love to love
# But my baby... #
And I think that, when people find out that when there's
so little money to play with and when
so many ordinary households are kind of under financial pressure,
when they find out that public money is going on some bricks,
they see that, I think, a lot of people saw that,
as the perfect symbol of a kind of society and of
a kind of high culture, if you like, that had lost its way.
I've never seen anything so stupid in my life!
I'm afraid I don't see any art in it or any beauty.
Very nice in my back garden but not in an art gallery.
In Arena this week,
the controversial American artist Carl Andre talks about those bricks.
Well, maybe I've learned from my experience in Britain that
my work poses questions.
I'm not sure I have any answers.
MUSIC: Autobahn by Kraftwerk
Carl Andre was an American artist born in 1935 and he was brought up
in Massachusetts in a town called Quincy, which was very industrial.
CARL ANDRE: From 1960 to 1964,
I worked as a freight brakeman on the Pennsylvania Railroad.
I think that was my final art academy - the railroad.
The idea of construction, building, bringing material order to
the world, you might say, was again one of my earliest memories.
Part of his job was to couple and uncouple the wagons, the trucks.
He was looking at steel lines travelling across the land,
working with very elemental materials.
And it all makes sense that his aesthetic comes out of that
experience.
He was one of the key artists of the movement known as minimalism,
which was a major, major art movement, along with just one
or two other artists, and then there were millions of followers.
Minimalism is a historic art movement that began in
the '60s in New York and,
although it has precedence in the earlier part of
the 20th century in very sort of cool, streamlined,
abstract art, it's really a '60s art movement.
It means objects, mostly sculpture but sometimes paintings,
reduced down to their most minimal aspects.
So all the attributes of painting or sculpture you can think of
are reduced down until you've got the barest minimum of what
it takes to be an artwork.
The main minimalists are all American -
Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Carl Andre.
There was a painter called Frank Stella,
who was Andre's friend.
There was Sol LeWitt among the sculptors.
Robert Morris and Robert Ryman.
Now, in that handful of names,
there's all sorts of materials being used.
Somebody's making minimalism out of neon light tubes and
someone's making minimalism out of forms that are just boxes.
Someone's making minimalism out of paintings that are all white.
Somebody else is doing paintings that are all stripes.
And in Andre's case, what distinguished him is that
he was doing sculptures which you could barely see.
When you did focus on them,
you could see that they were like the floor.
They were on the floor but there didn't seem to be anything
but the floor.
It was as if they were a floor upon a floor.
CARL ANDRE: People are always saying,
"What will the man on the street say about your work?"
Well, the child of the man on the street under the age of five
almost always loves my work so I'd rather go for the child.
They're built very close to the ground and they're used to
noticing what's on the ground and the patterns that are on the ground.
Minimalism came in when there was a kind of reaction against
American abstract expressionism.
Jackson Pollock, as we know,
danced over his canvas with his drips and so on.
Pollock became a cult hero to his art public and was dubbed
Jack the Dripper in the press.
Fierce individuality was personified in the controlled
explosions of Pollock's volcanic talent.
Abstract expressionism,
which was all gesture and throwing paint around, Jackson Pollock,
you know, quite emotive, quite vibrant, colourful work.
Then there was this reaction to that, which was minimalism,
which is all quiet and sombre and stripped back to the raw materials
and, you know, no grandstanding of gesture, you know.
It was all about the absence of that.
And there was sort of a paring back, almost denying of emotion,
really, you know.
Minimalism seemed to be like emptying itself out of content.
Carl Andre's motive in making brick sculptures was to do with landscape.
He had been on a canoeing trip, canoeing across the lake
where you're inches from the water, this flat water.
He suddenly kind of got the idea.
And he found himself absentmindedly noticing the sheer glassy surface
upon which he was canoeing, and it came to him in a flash
that flatness - literal low flatness - was the way to go.
You can imagine that glassy surface.
And you can imagine it was some pleasure.
And so it sort of gives you a hint about
a better way to appreciate his art than to be angry with it.
It's to sort of enter into it and enter into its delicious
possibilities.
Well, he had decided to make eight sculptures out of 120 sand
lime bricks, and these sculptures had formed different geometrical
shapes and different formations.
# There were plants and birds and rocks and things
# There was sand and hills... #
So he's thinking about arrangements,
he's thinking about the object as a sort of cut into space.
# And the sky with no clouds... #
The first version of Equivalent was exhibited in 1966.
And they were shown a gallery. None of them sold.
Someone from the then Tate Gallery, a few years later,
thought that it'd be a good idea if the Tate had one of them,
having seen it in a photo. But they didn't exist any more.
They'd gone back to the brickyard
and he had to remake it out of
slightly different bricks than he originally used.
# La, la
# La, la, la, la, la
# La, la, la
# La, la
# After two days in the desert sun... #
This is where we press a small quantity of firebricks. We weigh
out the right amount of material, we fill the dye and then the press
presses it to the correct size.
This is the colour they are before they are fired.
They go from here to a kiln,
where they are taken to a high temperature and then
they look like bricks.
# You see, I've been through the desert on a horse with no name
# It felt good to be... #
They are different to normal bricks.
They don't have a frog or a gap in the bricks. That's because we
want to get a good seal when the bricks are used in service,
a hole would be a weakness.
# La, la, la, la, la
# La, la, la, la, la. #
Tate Gallery acquisitions file about Carl Andre from 1972 to '79.
How extraordinary.
This is a letter from me
to the John Weber Gallery in New York,
in 1972, asking if they could give us an update on
the position of available sculptures by Carl.
"Uniqueness, size or edition, and price -
"details of brick pieces would also be useful."
Well, little did I know what that was going to be the beginning of.
Very interesting to see that again after what must be 43 years.
Amazing!
# After two days in the desert sun
# My skin began to turn red
# After three days in the desert fun
# I was looking at... #
This is a note.
It says, the bricks arrived on the 22nd of May 1972
at the container depot in Dagenham.
"Unable to get work released because of pickets."
Isn't it fantastic?
"All transport..." - that must be the name of a firm -
"..instructed to take no further action for the time being
"until more was know about the outcome of the dockers' dispute."
We will not back down in any way, shape or form.
We are dealing with the right to work and we want that right to work.
# Oh, you don't get me I'm part of the union
# You don't get me I'm part of the union
# You don't get me... #
So this is the first time I've ever known that
Dagenham comes into the story of the bricks affair.
# Till the day I die
# You don't get me I'm part of the union
# Till the day I die
# Till the day I die. #
Equivalent VIII had been shown twice before the controversy broke.
The press office tried to drum up interest in the press
in this display, and didn't really have much success.
I mean, they were actually told by some newspapers, you know,
"Who would be interested in this sort of thing?"
It's absolutely amazing considering what happened.
There has been nothing about the bricks.
The bricks have been there, they've be bought for years.
Nobody has basically even noticed.
But then the Sunday Times wanted to put the boot in to the Tate
about its finances. And the guy who wrote the story saw the bricks as
the perfect symbol of this.
# There's a kind of hush
# All over the world... #
I hope I get it right. Cos it was 40-odd years ago.
# You can hear
# The sound of lovers in love
# You know what I mean
# Just the two of us... #
I was a reporter on the Sunday Times.
I was sent to write a few hundred words on the Constable exhibition
at the Tate Gallery.
I was shepherded around,
handed a copy of the biannual report.
# So listen carefully
# Get closer now and you will see what I mean... #
What happened was that an investigative journalist
called Colin Simpson got hold of the report and read though it,
and picked up that they had bought a pile of bricks
and had spent public money on it.
So I sat down in the Tate and wrote this.
# The only sound that you will hear
# Is when I whisper in your ear... #
I had to phone the story through.
"In the summer of 1965, whilst on a canoeing holiday,
"Andre suddenly decided it was time to create low sculpture.
"He bought..."
120 bricks from a brickyard.
Arranged them in a low pile on the floor of an art gallery, comma,
put a price tag of $12,000 on them and waited for customers.
None came.
"Being short of money, he took the bricks back to the brickyard
"and got his money back."
Full stop. New para.
In 1972, the Tate saw a photograph of Andre's bricks
and offered to buy them.
"Andre went back to the brickyard only to find that it had closed."
Andre found some other bricks...
"..which, in due course, were crated and sent to London."
The Tate is understandably coy about how much it paid for this
insouciant masterpiece.
I was purely taking the piss, nothing else.
It was as simple as that.
# You will see what I mean... #
What I loved about it was what I worked into the piece,
which was that he took the bricks back to the brickyard to get
his money back.
# The only sound that you will hear
# Is when I whisper... #
The sheer brazen nerve of it, you know.
I admired him.
The shit hit the fan, as they say.
HE CHUCKLES
It's the section called business news.
There's this headline - The Tate Drops A Costly Brick
by Colin Simpson.
HE LAUGHS
I read it not having the faintest idea that it was going to
cause this amazing hullabaloo that followed.
The following Monday, the Daily Mirror had it
on its front page
and suddenly all the newspapers wanted to be in on the story.
You know. There's the advertising
industry not wanting to miss a trick.
It's pretty good, isn't it?
I mean, here we are two days after the Sunday Times.
And everybody expected
the minister to condemn it. He behaved extremely well
and absolutely didn't take up
the media provocation that the minister should somehow
be intervening on these crazy Tate trustees.
They hadn't actually been on show when the Sunday Times fuss started
and I think, quite rightly, the Tate brought them out
and allowed people to come and see them and have their own discussion.
Those in the know - and even those who aren't -
classify it as low sculpture.
Usually they are locked away in a store room,
but today the Tate put them on show.
Mr Burgess, I believe you have special instructions
for assembling the bricks.
Yes, we do.
Parallel to the wall and then lay down ten bricks in one line.
And just six wide.
We just build up off of that.
Now, do you think this is a work of art?
Well, everything in here is a work of art.
This is the central space in Tate Britain
and at the time of the bricks affair,
in the north end of it, there was an enormous Constable exhibition
which aroused tremendous public interest and huge crowds.
But we had to put the sculpture
by Carl Andre on display very quickly
and the best place was in a gallery just through here.
And so, you had the two groups of people
surging up the sculpture hall simultaneously.
One lot going that way and one this way.
This room was just filled with chattering people.
Some of them chattering,
some of them just starring in awe and fascination and,
in some cases, I suppose, horror.
And it was placed around here.
The long axis that way and with an attendant's chair close by
to keep an eye on the public's behaviour towards the sculpture.
It's all very well for the private individual to buy
a weird painting or a weird piece of sculpture,
but when the Tate does it...
they are really trendsetters in this area.
And also, of course, the funds they're using
are those which come to them largely from the Arts Council.
I think the other factor was that it got onto television very quickly.
There was the moment of course where one thinks of it now as a clip of...
I think it was Fyfe Robertson sitting on the bricks
and actually holding one up. That was somehow extraordinary.
You might think in your innocence
that you could lay them down anywhere, but no so.
The American sculptor genius who fathered this,
carefully numbered each brick.
Even the BBC, you know, disgracefully really,
allowed that ridiculous scene with that awful man Fyfe Robertson.
Complete philistine.
It was a disaster, really.
They are doing great harm to art and to you and me
in our attitude to art.
And they are doing this by treating with all seriousness
way-out crap as art.
How do you think it would look in a gallery?
Splendid, rather than what we have seen on television at the moment.
Yes, there is more to it than just being flat on the floor.
Oh, yes. Quite. Yeah. Lot of work in this, really.
What do you reckon, ?12,000? LAUGHTER
Well, for me, 15.
LAUGHTER
I remember a building site. A guy with a hod with bricks in.
Stood next to a pile of bricks.
I remember thinking it was a pile of bricks,
just like a pile at a building site,
not even ordered or arranged or anything.
And I remember seeing a cartoon of a pile of bricks.
People 40 years ago were very suspicious of conceptual
and modern art. They were distrustful of it.
When they think about art in the '60s and '70s,
they think about the kind of art they've grown up with
and they've seen and taken for granted.
You know, blockbuster exhibitions like the Constable exhibition
which was running at the same time as the bricks controversy.
Constable never had the least doubt that nature meant
the visible world of tree, flower, river, field and sky
exactly as they presented themselves to the senses.
ALL: Hemisphere.
Sunny interval over Cromarty.
Northern...
I think people are shocked and bewildered by what they see as
the sort of artistic challenges of conceptual art, and minimalism,
and brutalism, and performance art, and all these kinds of things.
Norman Reid is the director of the Tate.
I asked him what he though the gallery's purpose would be
in the future.
Well, to give pleasure, I think,
which is basic to the whole idea.
Norman Reid was the Tate director who, when he took over in the
mid-1960s, dragged the Tate into the 20th century.
I think we are constantly in this situation where we have to try
to judge how much should we spend, how much do we need this,
how much is it going to be significant in the future.
He was the man who bought in the Rothko gift.
You know, those great, huge abstract paintings by Mark Rothko -
the American.
And that was Norman's generation. He totally got all that.
But I don't think he quite believed in the bricks, you know.
You could tell,
and I think I knew enough about him to know,
that it wasn't really his sort of thing -
the pile of bricks.
As soon as the scale of the controversy became apparent,
which was almost immediately, he issued an instruction that
he should be the only person
who should deal with the press about this.
My colleagues and I were muzzled.
Half of the Tate's job is to form a national collection of modern art.
This is part of a more adventurous policy.
He perhaps was not prepared for the public communications onslaught
that came with the row about the bricks.
It's certain that some of the exhibits will appear
incomprehensible and even offensive to some visitors,
in the same way as Constable's work was widely attacked in his own day.
How much did you pay for the bricks?
I can't say how much we paid for it
because it is not our policy to disclose prices.
# What about Daddy Cool?
# I'm crazy like a fool
# What about Daddy Cool... #
It's very unfortunate that, at the time,
the Tate refused point blank to reveal what it had paid.
And I think they should have fessed up.
# Daddy, Daddy Cool... #
I was one of three of us whose job it was to go onto
the floor of the gallery, stand in front of the works of art themselves
and explain them to the public.
School parties used to book in.
Here we have 120 firebricks by the American artist Carl Andre.
Six rows long, two rows high.
# What about Daddy Cool?
# I'm crazy like a fool... #
So...what does it mean?
# Daddy, Daddy Cool
# Daddy, Daddy Cool... #
There were a lot of comments, "But I don't get it.
"It's just a pile of bricks."
# Daddy, Daddy Cool... #
It's the old thing, they want to know what it means.
Everybody wants to know what works of art mean.
The objections to the bricks were very, very simple.
It was that people simply didn't understand them.
I think there was still very much
the attitude that, you know,
somehow the public had to get it, you know.
And if they didn't, it was tough.
I think the Tate at the time failed to explain itself.
It was a failure of communication, it was a failure to
set that work in context,
to explain where it came from art historically,
why it was art historically significant.
What the Tate should immediately have done was to explain what
the eight Equivalents are.
And it didn't, as far as I know, do anything of the kind.
It certainly didn't do it in my presence.
I was totally unaware of any explanation.
Where the whole thing
went wrong, I think, is going right back to
the beginning when the Tate bought that piece.
They bought only one of the eight Equivalents,
they should have bought all eight.
If they had bought all eight then the presentation of Equivalent VIII,
which is the one they've got, would be
perfectly logical even to people
who hated it and wanted to write things in
newspapers about "what a load of bricks".
And if you've got eight variations
on a theme in a room,
even the stupidest people would begin to see something is going on.
Don't understand it, but something is clearly going on
between these eight various different-looking objects.
You know, why should anybody be able to get art, you know, immediately?
Why should art be accessible to everybody immediately?
Even Renaissance art isn't really accessible to everybody immediately.
It's a pretty difficult thing
to know what all those symbols are.
Somehow people think that art
is different from other complex areas of our culture.
I mean, art is like football.
If you go to a football match and don't know the rules,
and you are stuck up on the stands,
and there are just a lot of men running around the pitch,
I mean, it's meaningless.
Art is like that, you need to know the rules.
You need to understand the context, you need to know a bit about art.
And you can't get away from that.
The bricks themselves refer very, very much to the history of art.
And by presenting a sculpture that is only bricks
and where the material is the most
overwhelmingly noticeable thing about it,
he's highlighting and forcing you to think about
the role of materials in art.
If you are into art and sensitive to things that it has done,
and interested in having your mind expanded by it, then
it is possible to follow up some of the provocations of that work.
But if you are not - and why should many people be - after all,
it's rather a narrow interest.
If you are not, then it feels much better
to want to punch it.
One piece of string, 100 paperclips.
One photograph of a filing cabinet with row of paper cups on top.
Meanwhile, the public was sending in their ideas of
what they thought was a contemporary work in sort of joke form.
Each had to be dealt with separately.
A feather, a pebble, a piece of coal.
One vacuum cleaner.
VACUUM CLEANER HUMS
We were inundated with parcels sent by members of the public.
It became a pile in its own right.
One of my roles at the Tate as research assistant
was to write letters that would say, "Dear madam,
"thank you so much for sending to the Tate your work of art entitled
"A Varnished Kipper.
"This has been thought of very carefully by the curators
"and on this occasion the trustees do not feel they will be wishing
"to acquire this work.
"I will be sending it back to you by separate package."
But that's what's so great, the running joke.
You know, any old thing can be art.
And I'm sure it happened in Duchamp's day too,
you know, people rolling out any old thing and saying,
"Hey, look at my artwork."
And I think it became a wonderful performance piece.
So it's hilarious that minimalism
somehow gets the maximalist response.
Many people in other countries,
I think thought this was a very strange phenomenon -
the bricks affair.
They couldn't understand why all this fuss was being made about
a very fine work which, in their own countries,
would not have aroused all this fury.
Well, I think what we have in Britain, and what we've always had
is this self image of being pragmatic, no bullshit.
And the bricks story absolutely brings that out.
You see something that's a bit nonsensical
and rather than bowing down in fealty to the artist
who has created something incredibly highbrow, you say,
"Nah, looks like a load of rubbish to me."
And I think British people love to do that.
We are naturally a very cynical, suspicious,
intolerant of pretention, pragmatic, empirical kind of people.
And actually, of course, we're right.
I was head chef at TIME and LIFE Magazine,
which I am quite proud of.
# Can you hear the drums, Fernando? #
And I went along with a friend of mine who lived in
the top flat of the house I lived in,
to see the Constable exhibition that was on at the Tate.
And as we made the journey there,
we decided we would go and see these controversial bricks.
# Softly strumming your guitar
# I could hear the distant drums
# And sounds of bugle calls were coming from afar... #
And so, we came away, sat on the Tube going back to Clapham North,
where we both lived, and I said, "Jillkins..."
I think I might do some sort of protest.
And she said...
Well, there's a suggestion box.
You could write something harsh and put it in.
And I said, "Well, no.
"I feel something more radical is called for."
# We were young and full of life and none of us prepared to die
# And I'm not ashamed to say... #
Yep, I decided I would go into the Tate Gallery
and colour the bricks blue.
# There was something in the air that night
# The stars were bright, Fernando... #
So I went and saw Jillkins about it and she said...
You wouldn't.
And I said, "No, I think I would."
I put on a brand-new three-piece pinstripe blue suit.
And I got to the Tate Gallery with my bottle.
They were frisking everyone on the way in because of IRA bombs.
So there was only one obvious place to put the bottle.
So I went in.
Went to the place where the bricks were.
A lot of people milling around. Two security ladies.
And I put my head chef's voice on and I said,
"Could you all stand well back, please?"
And they all stood well back.
And I undid my bottle,
and I made pretty designs and swirl patterns all over the bricks.
And when the bottle was empty,
I sort of, rather sarcastically, tapped the end of it
like you would with a ketchup bottle.
And everyone started clapping.
And the security lady looked at me,
you know, particularly with all this clapping going on, and she said...
Are you the artist?
And I said...
No, love, I'm a protestor.
And she said to her fellow colleague...
Fuck me, Lil, we're in trouble, girl.
And Lil looked at me and said...
Are you dangerous?
And I said no, I wasn't dangerous. And she said...
Will you wait here while I go and get a security man?
And I said, "Yeah, I'll wait here." And off they went.
And it was at least seven minutes before they came back.
Then along came the security man.
He was a little snow-haired white commissionaire
who probably fought in the last war.
You're coming with me, son.
I said, "Oh, come on. Don't do any strong-arm tactics.
"I've been waiting here for ages for you to arrive."
I said, "Just lead on."
I was taken down to the basement,
where the security was, to be grilled.
Do you regret doing it?
No, I most definitely do not regret doing it.
No, not at all.
# Though we never thought that we could lose
# There's no regret
# If I had to do the same again
# I would, my friend, Fernando
# If I had to do the same again
# I would, my friend, Fernando... #
Page three of the Sun.
With me on page three, underneath the tits.
And I'll tell you what it says.
"Toff tips blue dye on Tate's bricks."
And I suppose I did look like a city gent in a blue pin-stripe suit.
We've got the Daily Telegraph here.
And I'm slap bang in the middle.
"Blue dye blacks out the Tate bricks."
And as you can see, the paper does look like the Dead Sea Scrolls.
After they photographed me full-on and sideways
and done my fingerprints, they said,
"You are banned for life now from the Tate."
Have you ever been back to the Tate?
Once or twice, I've nearly been back,
but then I chickened out.
But, I mean, they are hardly going to recognise some fat old man
from this dashing 27-year-old, are they?
"Here, we recognise you." HE LAUGHS
As the saying goes -
a lot of people may not know anything about art
but they know what they like.
Also what they dislike. Among the latter are many Englishmen.
One Englishman disliked a current piece of art so much
that he poured blue dye all over it. It has been taken away for cleaning
but we are told that it will be back.
I was in my office that afternoon and suddenly I got this
message saying that somebody has thrown some paint over the bricks.
This crazed guy threw what proved to be food dye over it
and that gave the story new legs.
I rushed down.
Conservation department colleagues were there already.
So, of course, the work had to be taken off view
and the bricks had to be cleaned and restored, you know,
which took some time.
The trustees I think had become extremely defensive
and very concerned about these attacks on the institution.
There were a lot of different opinions inside the Tate
about what might happen next.
It was a time of extreme paranoia
among the upper echelons of the Tate.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there was a view from curators and
conservators that if the bricks go back out,
they couldn't go under a Perspex box.
That would ruin the whole look of them.
So the question arose about whether it was possible to get a full
set of replacements - if needed - in the future.
I was, as a junior, set the task of researching and finding
the brickyard in New Jersey
to see whether it was possible to replace the bricks, which,
of course, were already a replacement by Carl Andre himself
of the very first bricks he'd used.
"Dear Sir,
"I am writing to make enquires about acquiring some firebricks
"manufactured by your company and shipping them to London.
"We have in collection a sculpture by the American artist Carl Andre -
"Equivalent VIII.
"In order to be able to replace bricks which might get broken
"or damaged in the future, we would like to purchase
"a complete spare set of the bricks.
"Could you give me an estimate for the cost of 120 firebricks
"and, if possible, an estimate for packing and shipping the bricks
"to London. Thank you for your help.
"Yours faithfully, Sandy Nairne - research assistant."
What emerged was that the same brickyard
wasn't basically making the same bricks.
And, of course, those bricks are wonderfully particular,
they are firebricks, they don't have any indent.
So you simply couldn't get a match
in terms of the colour and specification,
and having some other bricks that might have looked vaguely similar
was not the point.
They really did have to be the same and that wasn't going to exist.
But I do feel - which I said at the time -
it's like the emperor's new clothes.
There are a lot of people in the art world who are scared
to be seen as not being "with it".
So instead of saying, "Well, that's a pile of old..."
They say, "Oh, isn't it wonderful? How marvellous.
"What a wonderful pile of bricks."
But let's be honest, we know that when they go home
they are not thinking that.
It's crap.
What is it then?
Well, it's a pile of bricks.
That's a pile of bricks, this is a pile of bricks.
Until you do something with it, it will always be a pile of bricks.
The building behind me - that's art.
That's proper art, that.
Cos they've made something of it.
But a pile of bricks, it's just a pile of bricks.
As it happens, the thing that people didn't like
or said they didn't like about the Carl Andre work
was that it didn't seem to have any skill.
And in a way, that was the profoundest and most real thing
that they were getting.
That's true, it didn't have any skill.
It had lots of other things which
the people who didn't like it and thought he hadn't done anything
were wrong about. But the one thing they were right about
was that there was no actual technical or craft skill involved.
There wasn't even any making, really.
Right. Yes, well, you've now raised another major, major issue
about the incomprehension
of modern and contemporary art
by the wider public.
And that is the confusion between art and craft.
Art is about ideas...in the end.
The great artists develop the craft they need to carry out their ideas.
CARL ANDRE: There was a confusion whether art is a craft and skill.
And I cannot claim really craft and skill
in the sense that I did not forge my metals,
I did not mine the ore, I did not burn the brick.
I did not do any of those things which are associated
with the craft aspect of art.
Now, I'm not saying you should not have craft and skill in art at all.
I've never rejected craft.
I've never undertaken it, which is a different question.
I think there was a confusion in the general public's mind
about skill in art. And there still is, I think.
You still can't get away from the idea that the artist
has to make things themselves
and it has to have the hand of the artist and
the mark of the artist.
Marcel Duchamp submitted to a New York art show
a public convenience entitled Fountain.
In 1917, Duchamp had kind of created the idea of the ready-made -
he bought a urinal from a plumber's merchant and signed it R Mutt.
And it became an artwork. And that revolutionised 20th-century art.
Duchamp wrote in the press,
"Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not
"has no importance. He chose it.
"He took an ordinary article of life,
"placed it so that its useful significance disappeared
"under the new point of view.
"Created a new thought for that object."
In 1972, the Tate Gallery purchased a work by Carl Andre
dating from 1966.
It is an example of minimal sculpture.
The case of Carl Andre's sculpture will surely be of interest
to future historians of taste.
One of the journals that responded to the Carl Andre bricks controversy
was the Burlington Magazine, which still today is regarded as
one of the leading art magazines in the world.
Right now, it raises a number of important issues.
Just how far should a public gallery,
which must impose its own kind of order on what it acquires,
go on to accommodate changing attitudes towards art?
At what point, if any, does it have to draw the line?
We had initially criticised the Tate's acquisition of the bricks
and raised questions about its validity as an object.
Clearly the line of the editorial is that, by no means,
is Andre's sculpture necessarily
going to be vindicated by history.
There are plenty of places where the latest thing can be seen.
There is no longer any need to risk freezing
in a permanent public record
a mass of effective and showy work that may well,
in a few decades, be regarded as trash.
Well, I just thought it was outrageous that the subject wasn't
being taken seriously enough.
And we were very shocked that a magazine of that nature should have
come out so hostile to the acquisition of this work.
The director of the Tate, Norman Reid,
insisted that the Tate should have the right of reply.
For the Burlington to come out and criticise an acquisition like this
was something that he needed to rebut.
# This town ain't big enough for the both of us
# And it ain't me who's gonna leave... #
So Norman then asked me if I would write an article explaining
why the Tate bought this work.
# Flying
# Domestic flying... #
"The editorial in the April issue of the Burlington Magazine,
"which criticised the Tate Gallery for purchasing one of
"Carl Andre's firebrick sculptures was an astonishing item to find
"in this particular magazine."
# This town ain't big enough for the both of us
# And it ain't me who's gonna leave... #
He wrote this furious protest.
"No attempt is made to answer the question whether minimal art
"constitutes an important phase in the development of art.
"And, if so, whether Carl Andre's work
"is among the most important produced within that phase."
# This town ain't big enough for the both of us... #
It's a very interesting flash point, I think.
He was talking to the artistic community
and arguing for a new form of art.
"In the Tate's view, the Andre will in time be accepted
"as among the important art of its period."
# I ain't gonna leave. #
Yeah, we were on the wrong side of history with this editorial.
It's not a line that we would hold to any more.
Do you think the Tate were right to acquire it?
Yes. History has vindicated the Tate for acquiring it.
It stands now as a cornerstone
of what minimalism has meant for art history.
As Richard Morphet says in his article,
time needs to pass before art takes its place in history
and reveals its hand.
The whole movement that Carl Andre was part of -
minimalism and then conceptual art -
that whole moment has, of course, being massively influential
because you can't have Damien Hirst,
Sarah Lucas,
Tracey Emin...
You can't have them without minimal and conceptual art
having stirred things up to the extent that it did.
I love minimal logic.
I love all that logic of all those minimal artists.
And they are actually beautiful objects,
the arrangements are beautiful.
And it's like, you know,
they are easy to enjoy.
Do you think there is a minimal influence in your work?
Yeah, absolutely. My tanks are totally Sol LeWitt.
You know, the reason why they look like they do is
cos I thought, "I want a Sol LeWitt with a dead animal inside it."
I wanted to put the emotion
back into minimalism, in some way.
And I think that's why they look like minimal sculpture.
You know, I love minimalism now.
I use the way it looks a lot in my own work.
And I, as an artist, and a lot of other artists
borrow from all these periods.
We cherry-pick certain aspects and
we are kind of liberated, really.
It can be as wild and woolly
or as minimal as you want it to be.
MUSIC: Yes, Sir, I Can Boogie by Baccara
After the white heat of the bricks affair cooled down,
the bricks just took their place in the Tate's collection
and were displayed from time to time in different arrangements of works.
# Your eyes are full of hesitation
# Which makes me wonder... #
They are doing a wonderful job and they are a very important part of
the Tate's collection of the art of that, by this time, distant period.
# I wanna keep my reputation
# I'm a sensation
# You try me once you'll beg for more
# Oh! Yes, sir, I can boogie
# But I need a certain song
# I can boogie
# Boogie woogie all night long... #
We are installing Carl Andre's sculpture Equivalent VIII
in a new display of Tate's permanent collection at Tate Modern.
It's a lynchpin of this display because it leads to lots of
other developments in contemporary art that we're looking at.
# No, sir
# I don't feel very much... #
The bricks have been integrated into this display,
which actually reveals the influence of Andre.
You can see the Carl Andre here now...
in a context.
The fascinating thing, of course,
is to know what the public make of it now.
There are those, of course,
who don't really understand what it's all about at all.
But I think there always will be.
You know, it's interesting, isn't it?
I'm not sure that we understand. Don't understand, no.
But we appreciate it. Yeah.
I thought they were very interesting.
I like the colour, that sandstone yellowy colour.
Almost like you're by the sea, walking on the beach.
Do you think we're all a bit more open-minded about modern art now?
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
We see modern art and we're used to it.
We see, "Oh, that's very cool."
# I can boogie
# Boogie woogie... #
You know, I've got no axe to grind against Carl Andre,
the so-called sculptor. Good luck to him.
I mean, if people are so bloody gullible, then so be it, you know.
I have no shame in admitting to a certain philistinism
when I see these kinds of things.
I can't honestly say that the bricks are a work that
have made me think about anything.
When I look at something like Carl Andre's bricks...
for me, it's a beautiful, quiet moment.
You know, it's like a quietening of the mind.
There's something very meditative about it.
But art is something you have to stand in front of.
And I think, very often, people standing in front of art - anyone -
like Carl Andre's -
people will go, "You know what? It's odd but I really like it."
# Yes, sir
# I can boogie... #
Thinking back, it was described as a pile of bricks.
But it clearly isn't a pile of bricks.
It's some bricks that have carefully been arranged.
# All night long... #
I think I was never quite as negative as many people were.
But as I've grown older and I've grown more familiar with bricks,
I've grown to love it in
quite a serious way now.
I think it is a nice-looking piece of artwork.
I think the shape of it, the layout of it,
actually seems to work very well for me.
SHE SIGHS DEEPLY