Equivalent VIII
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- "The essential difference between a sculpture like Andre's Equivalent VIII[1], 1978, and any that had existed before in the past is that Andre's array of bricks depends not just partly, but entirely, on the museum for its context. A Rodin in a parking lot is still a misplaced Rodin; Andre's bricks in the same place can only be a pile of bricks."--The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes.
Equivalent VIII, usually referred to as "The Bricks", is the last and most famous of a series of minimalist sculpture by Carl Andre. Constructed in 1966, it was bought by The Tate Gallery in 1972. The exhibit comprises one-hundred-and-twenty fire bricks, arranged in two layers, in a six-by-ten rectangle. All eight structures in the series have the same height, mass and volume, but different shapes. Thus they are all "equivalent".
When first exhibited at the Tate Gallery at Millbank in 1976, the piece drew much criticism in the press because of the perception that taxpayers' money had been spent on paying an inflated price for a collection of bricks.
The exhibit is now housed in the Tate Modern gallery on Bankside.
External links
- The Bricks at the Tate Modern
