Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

Carl Andre, Equivalent VIII, 1966

I went to the Tate Modern today to visit Carl Andre's brick sculpture Equivalent VIII, made in 1966 and purchased by Tate in 1972, after which it sparked a lot of controversy from the public.

"Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII has 120 bricks stacked 2 deep x 6 wide x 10 long. The other equivalents in the series also have 120 bricks, identically aligned, may be combined into 90 different cuboids, (induding the most compact) a stack 8 x 5 x 3 and (the least) the three single file rows along each of the dimensional axes. Each of these 90 cuboids can in turn be set up on the floor in three different ways. Thus there are 270 possible combinations. And looking down on Equivalent VIII we may perhaps imagine looking up at Equivalent CCLXVII – a single file vertical column of 120 bricks laid end-on-end, which would, if it stood almost 30 metres above the ground"

– Tom Lubbock

Here is a clip from the documentary, Upholding the Bricks, produced in 1991 by Channel 4 and narrated by the British television presenter - Raymond Baxter - who incidentally is also Carl Andre’s Uncle.