P.T. Is there a content expressed in your sculptures?
C.A. I think art is expressive but it is expressive of that which can be expressed in no other way. Hence, to say that art has meaning is mistaken because then you believe that there is some message that the art is carrying like the telegraph, as Noel Coward said. Yes, art is expressive, but it is expressive of that which can be expressed in no other way. So, it cannot be said to have a meaning which is separable from its existence in the world. No explicit meanings, no, not in mind when I address myself to the work, not at all. What is quite the opposite is that 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. That’s the aspect of the term “minimal” art that I have always prized and I always considered myself, to that extent, a minimal artist. When people talked about minimal art, I didn’t realize that they were talking about sculptures and the work. I thought they were talking about the artists. Because what the idea “minimal art” really means to me is that the person has drained and rid himself of the burden, the cultural over-burden that stands shadowing and eclipsing art. The duty of the artists is to rid himself of that burden. I think it’s an extremely difficult thing to do. I would not say that I have achieved it, because 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. But I think art is quite apart from that and you have to really rid yourself of those securities and certainties and assumptions and get down to something which is closer and resembles some kind of blankness. Then one must construct again out of this reduced circumstance. That’s another way, perhaps, of an art poverty; one has to impoverish one’s mind. This is not a repudiation of the past or such things, but it is really getting rid of what I describe as dross.
P.T. You don’t consider yourself a conceptual artist, do you?
C.A. I am certainly no kind of conceptual artist because the physical existence of my work cannot be separated from the idea of it. That’s why I said I had no art ideas, I only have art desires. To speak of ideas as conceptions in a philosophical sense and then to speak of ideas for art, well that is to speak about two utterly different things. I thin what we really mean to do is apply ourselves to the language we use in the most rigorous sense. As Confucius said, when he was asked what he would do if her were made the prime minister of the duchy where he lived, “The first thing I would do is call things by their right names.” This is why I wish to separate myself entirely from any conceptual art or even with ideas in art. My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise not be there. By nature, I am a materialist, an admirer of Lucretius. It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I’m interested in. The sense of one’s own being in the world confirmed by the existence of things and others in the world. This, to me, is far beyond being as an idea. This is a recognition, a state of being, a state of consciousness—and I don’t which at all to be portrayed as mystic in that. I don’t thing that it’s mystical at all. I think it’s a true awareness that doesn’t have anything to do with mysticism or religion. It has to do with life as oppose to death and a feeling of the true existence of the world in oneself. This is not an idea. An idea is a much lower category on my scale in that awareness, that consciousness.
