M.K. Well, in the beginning it was very much related to the work of David Smith, who was a very powerful personality. With Anthony Caro I had two basic arguments on sculpture: regarding tradition and abstraction. Caro was working as an assistant to Henry Moore in the 1950s; he was introduced to David Smith in the early 1960s and then he started to fight with Henry Moore. I remember he wrote an article in the London Times about Henry Moore and about how much he was passé… I didn’t like that. I also didn’t want to continue working with Caro, because I saw how systematically he destroyed the artists who worked with him. Not because he destroyed them, but you work amidst his work, and in a way you change your attitude, because you are involved with the work. Moore’s ideas were classical, Greek, natural and fantastic unknown things.

Anthony Caro also used to work a little like Germaine Richier in the beginning. He made the Cigarette smoker, an organic work, but later when he met Smith he started to get involved with the shapes and forms, and maybe in a way even drawings. David Smith used to make a lot of shapes. What remained was the negative, and the negative was a solid shape; the sculptures were then more like drawings.

T.H. You are referring to the initial formal contours?

M.K.: Yes the intial contour, but the contour actually was not there because of the technique of the spray. The contour was not clear, and what was clear was only the line of the form; the surrounding.

I think for Caro it all developed out of drawing his work. For David Smith it was different from Anthony Caro. Smith was concerned with the relation of the sculpture to the subject, but Caro was more aesthetically concerned with form and shape. When Edward F. Frey wrote about Smith, Caro and me he related me more to Smith than to Caro and maybe it’s true. [2] Maybe Caro is more «abstract» but my point is that sculpture cannot be completely abstract.

T.H.: Maybe we should here go back to the Kantian position on modernism by Clement Greenberg, who spoke about two constitutive conventions or norms in modernist painting: flatness and the delimitation of flatness. While Caro’s sculpture, as Fried argued, did not draw attention to the objecthood of the material – while he respected the internal structure of sculpture – Smith would have at the same time allowed a more pictorial dimension in his sculptural works. I have the impression that what you call «attitude» exceeds the demand of any logical relation of the medium and its questionable pretension of a visual density; as if there is a critical sculptural imagination that goes beyond the self-criticism of structural abstractness in modernist art. After all, both Caro and Fried were maybe not concerned with how the attitude affects the shape, and I think this is very important in your case.