In 1976, the Tate published in a biannual report that it had purchased Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, a 1966 sculpture consisting of an arrangement of 120 plain fire-bricks. Stacked two deep in a neat rectangle, six bricks across by 10 long, the pale bricks sit directly on the gallery floor. Tate still occasionally shows them as a classic example of minimalist art. If viewers look down as they skirt their terse, unyielding, low-slung presence, there isn’t much there to give them pause. It is a statement, if not a particularly deep one.
Neither particularly confrontational, nor enveloping, the familiarity of the materials and their arrangement are unlikely to provoke a shrug, much less argument. If there was once a mystery as to why they were there at all, it has long gone. This is what certain kinds of artists did then, and they still do such things now. We are accustomed to provocations of all sorts in the gallery. But for a long time Andre’s bricks – which became known as the Tate bricks – caused great controversy, generated newspaper headlines, febrile arguments and any number of cartoons and jokey photo-opportunities. Bricklayers offered to produce cut-price versions, and the Daily Mirror ran photos of smiling brickies with their own versions of Andre’s sculpture under the headline “ARTYCRAFTY: a brickbat from the boys on the building site”. Oh, how we laughed.
