The legend surrounding Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII is so infamous that it has come to overshadow the actual work itself. I, and the rest of my class were taken aback by just how small it looked. It is slightly taller – and about the same width – as a man lying down. Photographs always make it look bigger, and I think that makes it seem additionally unimpressive in reality. Some of my classmates said it looked unfinished, or maybe like something a builder had just out down and would use later.
I wonder if you were to tell him, if it would please Andre to know that fifty years on his most famous work is still causing bemusement and anger. I’ve always preferred to experience Art by myself, whether it is watching movies, going to Art galleries or listening to music. I don’t like to feel my opinion being swayed by those around me. I will sometimes go to see a film without reading any reviews, just so I can have an experience that is authentically my own. I didn’t know until this week that “Wherever you will go” by The Calling is considered a bad song, I’d certainly never thought of it that way. So once our class broke up I sat down with the piece to try and get a truly authentic experience of it. I am not sure if I succeeded, because I certainly wanted to like it, and it is very easy to convince yourself that something you want to like is better than it actually is. The first thing I noticed abut “Equivalent VIII” other than the size is the colour. All the photographs I’d seen of it make it look grey, but it’s more of a sandstone colour. It makes it feel far less aggressive than you thought it would be, which maybe adds to the disappointment. For a piece that caused, and continues to cause, so much outrage, (I even overheard two primary school boys saying quite firmly that it was “not Art”) it doesn’t feel that it’s trying to provoke any anger at all. But now I have tried to break away from the preconceptions I had about the work, what do I think of it as it is?
The thing that is most striking about Equivalent VIII when you look at it up close, is that it is irregular. It’s not a perfectly smooth slab. Different bricks jut out, rise up or fade in. This isn’t a machine tooled piece of geometry, it’s a real thing with real imperfections. One does get the sense that it is less about the shape, and more about the putting of the bricks together, like a child playing with wooden blocks. I felt a strong urge to reach out and touch the thing, would it be satisfying to run my fingers across it? Again, I can’t say what is true, and what is preconception but the unevenness of the surface made me think of water (which was the inspiration for the Equivalence series). The surface of water is rarely perfectly still, but it always holds an equivalent shape and general flatness. But it ripples and tremors. I saw a display of several stuffed ducks in the Natural History Museum in Oxford, they were on a clear glass bottom, standing in for water. Somehow, that felt less like water than Andre’s bricks did. Water displays are often a part of Zen gardens, as are assortments of stones. Things like the calm water, or the carefully arranged stones, are meant to provide a sense of stillness and calmness. Intentionally or not, I feel that Andre’s work also does this. I did find, really stopping to take it in, that there is a sense of quiet and calmness to it all. It’s not trying to be perfectly still, it simply is. If Andre really had sanded the surfaces down to make them perfectly flat, it might have felt artificial. As it is, it’s a display of things in order, simply being themselves, without stress or panic. And yes, it made me feel sort of calm looking at it. Far from being a radical work of Art, Equivalent VIII simply seems to be a new version or some very old ideas. Even in the West, a traditional wooden cross with nor ornaments or decoration, could have similar qualities, and the same effect on a viewer. It’s more that the sentiment behind the work was completely unknown to
the commercial and materialist world to which it was shown. Again, I’m not even sure that Andre knew about the legacy he was tapping into, (traditional Zen Art) but I do believe he at least knew the emotional place that sort of thing comes from.
I decided to try to draw Equivalent VIII in my sketchbook, using perspective and foreshortening just like I would on a model in Life drawing. It proved surprisingly hard. I’d get bogged down in the details, ad curves where there shouldn’t be curves, or make it look too straight and flat – or make it look too big and bulky. It’s insane to think that something this simple could be harder to draw than a human body. Maybe because it is so simple, there’s nothing to really latch on to. But in the end, I was able to draw something that could the essence of the work, a little bit of its spirit and presence and I felt pretty pleased with myself after that.
In conclusion, it might not be the work I thought it would be, and I might not like it as much as I thought I would, but I do think it has value, at least for me. I have to question whether an Art Gallery is really the right place for it, far from giving anything positive, it just seems to bounce off most people and I can’t say a work of Art succeeds if the people who need its message the most can’t hear it. But at least I got a positive experience out of it myself. If nothing else, it will help me and maybe others think about how the ideas it has, which I believe are good ones, could be expressed in a more accessible way.
John's Learning Journal 