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Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications Sheldon Museum of Art

1986

Of Steel and Brick And Ordinary Things: The Sculpture of Carl Andre

Donald Bartlett Doe Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska- Lincoln

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Doe, Donald Bartlett, "Of Steel and Brick And Ordinary Things: The Sculpture of Carl Andre" (1986). Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications. 55. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/sheldonpubs/55

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Sheldon Museum of Art at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Sheldon Museum of Art Catalogues and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. RESOURCE SERIES RESOURCE AND RESPONSE lVlEl\1()RV\L ART G LERY

THE SCULPTURE OF CARL ANDRE

Resource/Response is part of Sheldon's ongoing Resource Exhibition Series. Resource/Response explores current issues and ideas addressed by contemporary artists. The Resource Series is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. A portion of the museum's general operating funds for this fiscal year has been provided through a grant from the Institute of Museum Services, a federal agency that offers general operating support to the nation's museums.

:>, ~ro (!) Developing during the (p a. years when 0 0 0 prevailed, we knew ro ::; more what sculpture ro Cl... :>, couldn't have- (f) Q) t:: figuration, personal ::J 0 () touch, history-than en c what it could ... For the Q) E Q) most part, our sculpture (3 :>, gained its own identity ::!? :g and took flight only at Q) (!) the moment that we 0 (5 .c scrapped, one by one, a. the reductivist tenents of Minimalism. I Volume 2 Wade Saunders Number 2 64 Steel Square represents Carl means out of options and that, indeed, Andre's first use of modular units of steel. it was eligible for collecting. 64 Steel Dating from 1967, it reflects nearly all Square now must be seen as an es­ of the tenents of Minimalism which Wade pecially succinct paradigm of the art­ Saunders and his generation of sculp­ ist's total output and the style of tors (who are now gaining prominence) Minimalism; it also seems an icon of its have labored to abandon. era. Precisely as the title* indicates, the If all of the reductive qualities of the work is a square of steel plates, each work combined to displace nearly every measuring, with minor variations, eight traditional aesthetic quality from the art by eight inches. Those dimensions, object itself, they did not serve or suf­ squared, produce both the size and the fice to remove such objects from the form of the completely installed work. Modernist tradition. Minimalist sculp­ The blunt, arithmetrical logic of the ture generally was acknowledged to work is underscored by the conspicu­ bear a formal relationship to the austere ous absence of the artist's hand: it is geometries of Constructivism and De not carved or welded or, in some overtly Stijl. The widespread use of found ob­ skillful way, shaped. Instead, 64 Steel jects-or materials off the hardware Square is simply uncrated and ar­ store shelf-tied Minimalism to Dada, ranged in a format which reiterates the and especially to the example of Marcel shape of its component parts. Those Duchamp, who had already shown, with parts themselves were obtained from his snow shovel titled In Advance of a an industrial scrap yard. Although each Broken Arm and his urinal titled Foun­ has accumulated its own rusty/en­ tain, that anything could be art. What crusted patina, there is no assigned or­ Minimalism demonstrated, after Du­ der of juxtaposition; any arrangement is champ, was that the continued use of A Memorial to After Ages, 1983, Quincy granite, 18 x 180 x : regarded as successful as any other. found objects to create radical art re­ That the 64 plates may be installed quired a specific context in order to be in any of thousands of different arrange­ seen as art. ments within the boundaries of the The required context was gallery or You're getting rid of square emphasizes the sculptor's in­ museum space. There, the viewer was difference to traditional levels of artistic not (likely to be) a casual onlooker or things that people used control. Further, it points to the non-re­ passerby, but a thoughtful observer. to think were essential lational character of the work. That is, Unlike Duchamp, however, the Mini­ the work not only relates to nothing but malists did not evince an ironic attitude to art. But that reduction itself, but also has no composed inter­ toward the viewer. They wished to con­ 64 Steel Square, hot rolled steel, % x 64 x 64" Collection Jan & Ingeborg van der Marck is only incidental. I nal relationships. The steel plates are front the gallery or museum visitor with simply those steel plates. There is no a perceptual challenge. For many, in­ object to the whole intention to exploit the quality of the en­ cluding , the effort was to reduction idea, because crusted surface patina, or to arrange generate a very clear gestalt-a thor­ the elements of the work in a balanced oughly unified object or situation in it's only reduction of and harmonious composition. Instead, which the configuational whole, and not those things someone the plates are merely put on the floor, color or texture, or some other specific one next to another, in repetitious se­ characteristic or element, dominated. doesn't want. 2 quence. For Andre, the issue of sculpture came Donald Judd Today, nearly two decades after its to rest upon creating what the artist first installation, 64 Steel Square carries called a "cut in space." with it a certain elegance that seems He came to this radical notion of classical in its restraint. When it and sculpture with the same speed that we works related to it first were shown, associate with the rate of change in however, the impact of its reductive contemporary art. Andre was born in character was extraordinary. A number 1935 in Quincy, , a blue of critics worried that, given such a lim­ collar town of shipyards and granite ited vocabulary, the artist had virtually quarries, but also the birthplace of two nowhere to go without emptily repeat­ presidents, John Adams and his son, ing himself or, worse, undermining the John Quincy Adams. Andre was edu­ spare premise of the work. Others, un­ cated there until the end of his sopho­ doubtedly find ing Andre's work (espe­ more year in high school. He then cially those made of ordinary firebrick) attended one of the most elite and ac- as a kind of ultimate multiple which any­ one could duplicate, complained that it was unsellable-and uncollectable. Time has shown that Andre was by no

'This work has been shown under three titles. At its installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art it was presented simply as Untitled. At tt;e Guggenheim retrospective exhibition of 1970, the work was titled Steel Piece. In the traveling ex­ hibition curated by David Bourdon, the title was more completely descriptive: 64 Steel Square. ademically rigorous of New England 1966, in the landmark "Primary Struc­ preparatory schools, tures" show at the Jewish Museum in at Andover. From Andover he went 1966, and at the Dwan Gallery in Los briefly to Kenyon College and then to Angeles in 1967. Andre's Lever, a row the U.S. Army. of 137 firebricks assembled face to face In 1957, he went to New York. He did to draw a long line of fired clay blocks not enter art school, but became closely across the installation space at the Jew­ associated with younger members of the ish museum, exemplifies the flat, in­ New York art world. He was a friend of stantly clear yet perplexing character of , then a graduate student all of the works shown in this period. in art history. He shared the studio space Works such as Lever, the boxes of of -and was profoundly in­ polished metal and plexiglass by Judd, fluenced by him. The most powerful in­ and the simple configurations of flou­ fluence on Andre, beyond Stella, was rescent fixtures by Dan Flavin were the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi. quickly understood to be a reaction Andre's earliest work, completed in against the expressive, gestural quality the late Fifties, was vertical in structure of abstract expressionism as it was and perhaps most directly suggests the widely taught and practiced by the end repeated, identical shapes of Brancu­ of the Fifties. In such articles as that in si's Endless Column. By 1960, Andre Art in America by Irving Sandler in 1965, concluded, under the acknowledged such minimal works were also linked with stimulus of Stella's ideas, that by cutting the cool use of found imagery that into or carving into his wooden material stamps the Pop canvases of Roy Lich­ he did not improve upon its original tenstein and Andy Warhol. quality. He came to see the block of Like Pop, Minimal art was indeed cool. wood itself as a cut into the space which It was even labeled Cool Art, as well as it occupied. Working, typically, with ABC Art, reductive art, literal art, the western Red Cedar, he constructed in­ New Art of The Real, and Specific Ob­ creasingly simple shapes which were jects. The (w)holisic character of the inserted into-and thereby cut into-the work of such artists as Tony Smith, Sol space of the gallery in which they were LeWitt, and Robert Morris, as well as installed. that of Judd, Flavin, and Andre was For a period of four years in the early understood to be profoundly influenced Sixties, Andre worked on the railroad in by painters such as Kenneth Noland, New Jersey. He collected a wide as­ Robert Ryman and Stella. Stella, in fact, sortment of objects and assembled made an observation which was so them in now lost objects-perhaps in­ widely quoted it contines to seem nearly fluenced directly by the Art of Assem­ the motto of Minimalism: blage exhibition which opened in the My painting is based on the fact fall of 1961 at the Museum of Modern that only what can be seen there Art. This exhibition, developed by Wil­ is there. It really is an object ... liam Seitz (Stella's instructor at Prince­ All I want anyone to get out of my ton), traced the ample and diverse paintings, and all I ever get out of tradition of assembling images and ob­ them, is the fact that you can see jects from often disparate sources into the whole idea without any con­ a single work of art. fusion ... What you see is what That tradition, which extends form the you see. 3 Cafe Zurich to Louise Nevelson's stuido, from the Merzbilder of Kurt Schwitters This highly reductive attitude had not to the Combine Paintings of Robert emerged overnight. The Bauhaus had Rauschenberg, shares with Andre's insisted that Form must follow Function version of Minimalism, f)owever, only the and that all purely decorative elements process of assembling. in architecture and furniture, for most Andre's definitive and extended use conspicuous examples, must be de­ of the assembly process emerged in a leted as superfluous. The Constructiv­ series of exhibitions held at the Tibor de ists, most notably Malevich, and the De Nagy Gallery in New York in 1965 and Stijl artists, most notably Mondrian, had reduced their abstract art to austere geometric arrangements of flat shapes on canvas or clean rectilinear construc­ tions in three dimensions. The Bauhaus and the European avant garde move­ ments insisted that their art contained fundamental moral, spiritual, and social values, however, while the new gener­ ation of reductive artists of the 1960's insisted that all of their art was con­ tained, quite precisely, in what one took the trouble to see. In this, their art had been predicted by the most influential critic of the pe- riod, . In this critic's insisted that the work of the Minimalists view, the course of art since Jacques was inexhaustible simply because there Louis David had been reductive in out­ was nothing there to exhaust. 6 Some­ line. The illusion of pictorial depth-the thing, that is, cannot be taken from suggestion of three dimensionality on a nothing. two dimensional surface-had been It remains, however, that an entire gradually erased. Steadily, art was generation of sculptors have had to work moving toward its defining character­ diligently to scrap, "one by one, the re­ istics-which were, for painting, flat­ ductivist tenents of Minimalism." If the ness and the shape of the support, or blank, chessboard configuration of 64 the edge of the canvas. Steel Square now seems the surface on It was in this general context that which the endgame of was Andre's work took early shape. As the played, it also seems the focus of re­ illustrations of his recent work show, he action which has propelled contempo­ has continued with remarkable consis­ rary art into Postmodernism and the tancy. Aisle provides a cut in space; proliferation of styles and attitudes which rather than a negative or open space will, with luck, propel art into a fruitful between pews or pillars, it is a volume future. that cuts into the open gallery space around it. The configuration of the work Donald Bartlett Doe itself reiterates this cut by containing an open volume within itself. Sulculus is a work which illustrates its arcane title in an arrangement of polished blocks of quarried granite; the title and term means, simply, a small groove or fur­ row, which is precisely what the stone outlines and thereby creates. A Monu­ Sulculus, 1981, ~ranite blocks, 30 x 18 x 18" ment to After Ages, quarried from his hometown of Quincy, recalls Lever, yet, at the same time, is much more clearly a towering shaft tipped ninety degrees to rest flat on the floor. About such works as these, Andre once obser\dd, My work is atheistic, materialistic and communistic. It's atheistic be­ cause it's without transcendant form, without spiritual or intellec­ tual quality. Materialistic because it's made without pretension to other materials. And communistic because the form is equally ac­ cessible to all men. At other moments, however, Andre has offered remarkably poetic meta­ phors for his own work. In an extended interview in Artforum, he insisted that sculpture should be Jike 'a road, insofar as it should not have several specific vantage points from which should be viewed to best advantage. Rather, like a road which may disappear and reap­ pear, but is endlessly the same ribbon of pavement, sculpture should have no special vantage points; it should always be precisely what it is4 Elsewhere, he noted that the art which was of chief inspiration to him was that of such art­ ists as Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, and . It was such art as theirs, filled with revolutionary and undiluted intentions, that aspired to ends which, in Andre's view, made art worth doing. In the late Sixties, Greenberg found Minimalist work too clearly the direct expression of an idea: "Its idea remains an idea, something deduced instead of felt and discovered."5 Michael Fried Selected Bibliography 23. Reise, Barbara. " 'Untitled 1969'-A Foot­ Footnotes 1. "Andre's Square One." Art News, Nov. note on Art and Minimalstylehood." Studio 1. Wade Saunders, 1977, p. 29. International, April 1969, pp. 169-72. "Talking Objects: 24. "The Role of the Artist in Today's Soci­ Interviews with 2. Ashton, Dore. "Principles of Transitori­ Ten Younger ness." Studio International, Sept. 1973, pp. ety." Art Journal, Summer 1975, p. 327. Sculptors," Art in 91-92. 25. Rolfe, Jeremy Gilbert. Exhibition Re­ America, November, 1985, 3. Baker, Kenneth. "Andre in Retrospect view-John Weber Gallery, New York. Art­ forum, June 1974, p. 68. p. 111. (Traveling Exhibit)." Art in America, April 2. Bruce Glaser, 1980, pp. 88-94. 26. Rose, Barbara. "ABC Art." Art in Amer­ "Questions to ica, Oct. 1965, p. 67. Stella and Judd," 4. Battcock, Gregory, ed. Minimal Art: A Crit­ Minimal Art: A ical Anthology, New York; E.P. Dutton & Co., 27. Schjeldahl, Peter. "Anti-illusion: Proce­ Critical 1968. dures/Materials at the Whitney Museum." Art Anthology, ed., 5. Bochner, Mel. "Primary Structures: Exhi­ International, Sept. 1969, p. 72. Gregory bition at the Jewish Museum." Arts Maga­ 28. Smith, Roberta. Exhibition Review-Spe­ Battcock, New York: E.P. Dutton zine, June 1966, p. 32. rone Westwater Fischer Gallery, New York. & Co., p. 159. 6. Bochner, Mel. "Serial Art Systems: So­ Artforum, Jan. 1976, pp. 61-62. 3. Ibid, p. 158. lipsism." Arts Magazine, Summer 1967, pp. 29. "Statements by Sculptors." Art Journal, 4. Phyllis Tuchman, 39-43. Winter 1975-76, pp. 126-27. "An Interview with Carl Andre," 7. Bourdon, David. "Carl Andre: Sculpture 30. Tatransky, Valentin. Exhibition Review­ Artforum, June, 1959-1977." New York: Jaap Beitman, Inc., Sperone Westwater Fischer Gallery, New 1970, p. 56. 1978. York. Arts Magazine, June 1977, pp. 40-41. 5. Clement Greenberg, 8. Bourdon, David. "Sculpture as Place." 31. Tuchman, Phyllis. "An Interview with Carl "Recentness of Arts Magazine, Dec. 1977, p. 5. Andre." Artforum, June 1970, pp. 55-61. Sculpture, " 9. Develing, Enno. "Carl Andre: Art as a So­ 32. Tuchman, Phyllis. "Background of a Min­ Minimal Art, ed., cial Fact." Artscanada, Dec. 1970, pp. 47- imalist." Artforum, March 1978, pp. 29-33. Gregory Battcock, p. 183. 49. 33. Tuchman, Phyllis. "Minimal ism and Crit­ 6. Michael Fried, 10. Domingo, Willis. Exhibition Review-Dwan ical Response." Artforum, May 1977, pp. 26- "Art and Gallery, New York. Arts Magazine, May 1971, 31. Objecthood, " p.55. Minimal Art, ed., 34. Waldman Diane. "Carl Andre-Exhibition Gregory 11. Eisenman, Stephen F. Exhibition Re­ Catalogue: The Soloman R. Guggenheim Battcock, p. 144. view-, New York. Arts Museum," New York: The Solomon Gug­ Magazine, May 1983, p. 48. genheim Foundation, 1970. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 12. Exhibition Review-Dwan Gallery, New 35. Waldman, Diane. "Holding the Floor." Art A debt of gratitude York. Art News, Summer 1969, p. 12. News, OCt. 1970, pp. 60-62, 82-83. is owed the lenders, Jan and Ingeborg van 13. Exhibition Review-Whitechapel Art Gal­ der Marck; without lery, London. Art and Artists, May 1978, p. their generosity, this Resources & 50. Response exhibition 14. Fischer, Hal. "Space as Support: Uni­ would not have been Art­ possible. Beth Watts, versity Art Museum, Berkeley Exhibit." museum intern, offered forum, Oct. 1979, p. 65. considerable assistance with the 15. Fuller, Peter. Exhibition Review-Lisson development of the Gallery, London. Connoisseur, July 1972, p. bibliography and 23. contributed much to this project. We are 16. Graham, Dan. "Carl Andre." Arts Mag­ also grateful to azine, Dec. 1967, pp. ~4-35. Douglas Baxter of the Paula Cooper Gallery, 17. Kingsley, April. Exhibition Review-John New York, for his able Weber Gallery, New York. Art International, and quick assistance Summer 1974, p. 45. and to Phyllis Tuchman for her valuable 18. Krauss, Rosalind. "Sense and Sensibil­ observations regarding ity, Reflection on Post-60's Sculpture." Art­ criticism in the 1960s. forum, Nov. 1973, pp. 43-53. 19. Kuspit, D.B. Exhibition Review-Weber Gallery, New York. Art in America, July 1974, p.83. 20. Masheck, Joseph. Exhibition Review­ Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Artforum, Dec. 1970, p. 78. 21. Monte, James. "Looking at the Gug­ genheim International." Artforum, March 1971, p. 30. l/:UIII~~Q~ Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery 22. Perrone, Jeff. "Art vs. Talk." Artforum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln May 1976, pp. 32-33. Lincoln. Nebraska 68588-0300 (402) 472-2461