Time & Perspective Quote by Anthony Caro

“Early One Morning” doesn’t “take time” as a platitude about craft; it’s Caro letting you in on the work’s real medium: duration. The phrase has the casual, almost dismissive syntax of someone resisting mythology. No grand artist-as-genius speech, just a practical insistence that the sculpture’s meaning is inseparable from the hours of looking, adjusting, and testing how steel behaves in space. In Caro’s hands, time isn’t only studio labor; it’s how the viewer learns the piece. You don’t read it instantly. You circle it, catch the way planes open and block sightlines, feel your own pacing become part of the composition.

The subtext is an argument against the quick hit. Caro came of age when modernism was trying to purge narrative and pedestal-bound monumentality, pushing sculpture onto the floor and into the viewer’s body-space. “Early One Morning” (with its sunrise title that hints at atmosphere without illustrating it) sits in that post-war British moment when abstraction had to justify itself as more than tasteful geometry. Caro’s answer is experiential: the importance of “all things like that” is precisely the messy bundle modernism pretended to leave behind - mood, memory, the tempo of perception.

That offhand “I mean” matters. It performs humility while staking a hard claim: if you want what the sculpture is doing, you have to grant it time. In an attention economy, it reads almost defiant.