I’ve been thinking a lot lately of governments’ relationships to modernism and, by extension, contemporary art, and the controversies that erupt around it.
So I was kind of stoked to see the headline in The Art Newspaper, “Revealed: secrets of the Tate bricks
Newly released documents uncover a heated argument and the search for spares.” The paper apparently filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the documents pertaining to the 1976 outcry over Tate Britain’s acquisition of Carl Andre’s 1966 sculpture, Equivalent VIII, which consists of 120 bricks stacked two high.
Sweet.
But here’s the big get: Tate couldn’t find any extra bricks left to stockpile. Also, “Among the papers is a memo on ‘The Burlington & the Bricks’.”
Seriously, that’s it. Do they publish this long-lost memo or add anything to the Tate curators’ argument in print with Burlington Magazine? No. I guess TAN figures if people really want to know, they can FOIA it for themselves.
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the making of, by greg allen