There might be a very important difference between the work of Anthony Caro and your work that I would like to question here. Fried underlines the importance of what he calls the «syntax» in Caro’s work, but when someone experiences the spatial giving of Shalechet at the Jewish Museum in Berlin (fig. 9), it becomes secondary, or at least questionable to think only about the formal grammar of that very installation.

M.K.: When Fried talks about composition, gravity, form, shape and size he talks academically. Composition-wise, if you make a sculpture like my Uprise from 1967 (fig. 10) with three circles, its shape of course makes it a self-contained piece. A circle doesn’t care what people think about it, so you can talk about syntax, but if you make a sculpture that includes for example a human hand, that element can be disturbed, scared off; it can relate to a different meaning than the pure meaning of a compositional syntax. I have to say that I had a very different relation to Anthony Caro. First of all we are good friends. Second, we used to fight with each other.

T.H.: Ok, but these are personal issues, what about his work?