Page 16 - Studio International - January 1966

Anthony Caro interviewed by Andrew Forge
Wide 1964
58-a x 60 x 160 in. Steel and Aluminium painted Burgundy Kasmin Gallery
The Horse 1961
Steel sculpture painted Brown 80 x 163 x 38 in.
Forge I was looking at your exhibition at the Kasmin
Gallery and looking at the big yellow piece, and they are
long forms which come spreading out across the floor
towards you. I discovered that as I moved about in the
room I didn't have the feeling, as I might with another
kind of sculpture, of looking at the same thing and
getting different aspects of what was essentially the vt
same image, but that my own movement about the
room really created completely new images, the thing
seemed to break up and re-form in completely new
ways. And it occurred to me that perhaps there was an
element in your sculpture which was in a sense
specifically pictorial, which had to do with space in a
way that one wouldn't normally associate with
sculpture.
Caro I'm not so sure about the idea of it breaking up
into different images as you go round it. This sort of
sculpture is entirely to do with the sort of space that
the onlooker, or the artist who's making it, inhabits.
Scale is our scale, scale is the onlooker's scale, always,
and size becomes a different thing. It's not like a
small sculpture enlarged up. I mean a small sculpture
could be sitting on a stand, and inhabiting its own
world. One can then enlarge it up until it becomes a
large sculpture. My sculpture isn't involved in that sort
of operation at all. It's more like things in the room
really. This table, these chairs, the waste-paper basket,
all these things are to do with the fact that I have to sit
at the table, or have to sit on the chair. In the first place
I think that I made sculptures of this sort in about 1960,
because I wanted to make something that was as
important in a room as a person. I found it wasn't
possible to do this by making a person-type sculpture.
And I would have been left very much with the
problem of the vertical axis always making any sort of
abstract sculpture into a bit of a figure. So then you cut
that out and you start to get the sort of horizontal axis
maybe, and then you cut that out and you're left with
the floor as an axis. If I could only make it really free
the floor itself would take its part in the sculpture and
the only axis that would be left would be your axis or
mine, looking at it.
Forge What do you mean by 'really free' ?
Caro Well, I don't know what I mean by 'really free'
yet, because I haven't made a really free sculpture. The
objective is always to make sculpture more free.
Forge Do you mean freeing it from the evident effects
of gravity or the evident necessity to stand up ?
Caro I think that comes into it, yes.
Forge Does this kind of freedom have anything to do
with the fact that some of your sculpture, although
it's made of tremendouslydense materials like sheet steel
and angle-iron and so on, also looks very flimsy some-
times ?
Caro Well, the question of gravity that you raised
earlier is relevant: a thing that was floating would
be free, in a sense, but obviously it can't be done,
because of the weight of every object. So some of these
sculptures have gone down to the ground and used it,
because to use this terrible handicap in a positive way
could give the same sort of freedom, maybe, as sticking
a lump of stuff up here in the air, unsupported, another
one over here, another one over here, you see ? That's
what I mean.
Forge This is really what you would like to happen ?
To be able to make sculpture in the air, so to speak?