In 1977 the Tate gallery bought the work 'Equivalent VIII' from US
minimalist Carl Andre.
It was a rectangular arrangement of 120 fire bricks all of which shared
the same height, mass and volume and were therefore ‘equivalent’ to each
other. Andre used common industrial materials that could be bought
anywhere and assembled by anyone. And in this case it was bought by the
Tate for £2,297. Even in those days, this wasn’t huge money for a museum
to pay for an art work but the scandal and general hoo haa was huge at
the time and to this day holds a special place in UK tabloid culture as
the ultimate signifier of art world bullshit. “Two grand for a pile of
bricks!”
Like the NFT discussions Equivalent VIII also revolved around and raised
questions of provenance. Might, someone not have secretly substituted
another set of fire bricks for Andre’s
original ? How could we ever know whether we were experiencing the
original Andre? Etc etc. Signed certificates by the artist were the
metadata of the day. Although he denied it the fuss might well have
delighted Andre who as a Marxist had at some point had advocated selling
art by weight. And in truth the politics of the best art of that era was
the very opposite of the pro market obsession of the NFT venture. It was
best captured by a book, Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialisation
of the Artwork from 1966 to 1972. From the book’s title to the way its
contents were arranged it shares the bare faced literalness of Andre’s
work. And as her introduction makes clear the works represented were
valued by Lippard in part because they embodied the impulse to explode
any possibility of entering the market place on terms that allowed the
works to function as market tokens or as “exchange value”. It was a
different time.
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