Carl Andre Quotes

No matter what you experience in life, it incorporates political tendencies, and in so many ways.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

Every body and thing has politics involved. Every. Single. Thing.

I've always been most interested in the politics of everyday life: your relation to whatever you're doing, or what your ambitions are, where you live, where you find yourself in the social hierarchy.

Political, social and economic realities are shaped by a historical process.

My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.

Art has to be reflective of our society.

Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state.

Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.

Politics are always involved, even in my love songs.

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

The esthete stands in the same relation to beauty as the pornographer stands to love, and the politician stands to life.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

It's very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don't make portraiture ideological in some way.

Painting is situational. And my particular situation exists within gender, race, class, sexuality, nation.

I've talked about that with friends, about what genre makes sense to choose for each record and the strategy around that... Sometimes it's more about the moment of time, and other times it's more about the sound of the song. Sometimes it's about what's going on in larger life, in politics.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

When alone I am not aware of my race or my sex, both in need of social contexts for definition.

I am a poet who composes what life proses, and who proses what life composes.

When you grow up in that environment of drugs and guns and people gettin' hurt, it start to reflect your background. And I think, at that time when I was doin' it, that's all I knew. But as I got older in the business, I stopped bein' involved with that, and I started to look at the world. And I said, 'Yo, I wanna start talkin' about everything that goes on in the world. I don't wanna just limit myself to one style'.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

I'm not trying to push my political agenda on anybody. I'll do that like any other citizen by giving money to a party or candidate I believe in. I don't mind going out and endorsing somebody I believe in. But when we're talking about my films, I don't think my politics should have anything to do with it.

I'm very aware of how much movies, literature and art affect culture. They are a reflection of the world around us and they are also a means by which we engage with the world around us.