Winter 2014-15
Carl Andre’s self-effacing, ground-hugging assemblages of thick, squared-off timbers, firebricks, aluminum ingots, and metal square plates look completely at home in the sprawling galleries at Dia: Beacon. As a former factory with industrial-size spaces, the museum is a perfect complement to an art predicated on the system of industrial production. “Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010,” which opened in May and will close on March 2, is a retrospective of Andre’s entire career, including his typewritten poems, whose dense, graphic blocks of words and letters break up the page much as his sculptures delineate breaks in space, a visual “dairy,” called Passport, from 1960 and his Dada Forgeries, including his serialized, inscribed postcard correspondence and Duchamp-inspired objects.
Most of the sculpture fills Dia’s three enormous front galleries. The sprawling placement of his geometric structures and assemblages, which include barely-there flat squares laid down on the floor and in-filled corners of timber blocks or copper plates, emphasizes their horizontality. Indeed, the scattering of wooden structures, concrete blocks, plates of hot-rolled steel and the like echoes the sprawl of the built landscape, with its boxy malls, warehouses, and housing developments, humongous parking lots, and roadway paraphernalia. It expresses the same randomness and utter lack of hierarchies, as if Andre had decoded and distilled the essential components of the engineered physical landscape. On the other hand, the exceptionally generous space of Dia, with its acres of wooden floor and white walls, gives Andre’s work a meditative aspect. The large floor pieces comprised of square plates of various metals, including copper, aluminum, magnesium, and zinc, in some cases arranged in a checkerboard pattern of two contrasting colors, seem to float, as does his spiraling zinc, magnesium and tin ribbons.
The airiness of the rooms highlights the shifts in scale of the various pieces, so that the space of the gallery seems to contract and expand, as if it were a living, breathing creature. Usually, the scale is somewhat keyed to the human body. The sculptures are chunky but lack monumentality; they hug the ground rather than lord over it. However, in the case of Scatter Piece, a scattering of small metal ball bearings, pulley discs, Plexiglass solids, and aluminum ingots, and 44 Carbon Copper Triads, consisting of dozens of graphite blocks and bricks and copper plates laid out spaciously at right angles to each other in grid-like formation, the scale is tiny, as if each were a model. Triskaidek, a staircase-like structure made of 91 red cedar blocks, emphases the verticality of the wall and slices through the rectangular space of the room, as if it were a volumetric container. Washed by natural light, which was dimming on the rainy November afternoon I visited, the various surfaces of metal, wood, and brick form a lyrical cadence in contrast to the sheer, unmovable mass of the timbers, bricks, and metal ingots—a rhythm that contrasted lustrous texture versus dullness, tonal nuance versus subtle color, reflectiveness and shimmering light versus dense, deadening blackness.
Andre, who was working for the Pennsylvania Railroad when he began assembling timber blocks into simple geometric structures he called Pyramids in the late 1950s, initially scavenged his materials from the streets of lower Manhattan before ordering it directly from industrial suppliers. Born in Quincy, Massachusetts, he attended Phillips Academy before joining the army and traveling to Europe. As a lineman for the railroad, he assumed the persona of the workingman, adopting the costume of overalls and work shirt, even after his first solo exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1965 won him acclaim.
Partly from economic necessity but later also as a principle, Andre eschewed the studio, with its associations of preciosity and the artist as a lone genius creating expressive works of beauty. For Andre, the artist was more like a fabricator, who massed units by hand, mimicking what the machine could do. The building blocks of his assemblages could be extended or recombined, suggesting there was nothing unique or special about them. Indeed, many of the works in the exhibition were either built years after they were proposed or recently rebuilt due to the destruction of the original; this in no way affects their value. It’s a practice that underlines what co-curator Yasmil Raymond in a YouTube video attributes to Andre’s originality, even genius: his ability to make art in any location around the world from the materials at hand. Predicated on the fact that “material production happens everywhere,” Andre’s work acknowledges the “globalism” that dominates the means of production today, she noted. “It’s political by the way it’s made,” she said, adding that the work is both pragmatic, in that it represents the artist’s reaction to existing conditions, and utopian, in its recognition of the inherent potential of these materials to generate beauty, anywhere and anytime.
Influenced both by Brancusi’s “endless column” sculptures, in which the base of the work is freed and serves as the essential unit of the work, and Duchamp’s Readymades, in which found objects were transformed into sculpture simply by taking them out of context (the display of an upside-down urinal, entitled Fountain, is legendary), Andre referred to his pieces as “cuts in space” and “places,” eschewing the convention of sculpture as form or structure. Besides the floor, his sculptures take their cue from the wall or the corner. One of the most famous examples is the piece in Gallery One, entitled Lever. It’s a line of 136 firebricks extending from the wall as matter-of-factly as a railway segment. Pyramus and Thisbe, in Galleries Two and Three, uses the wall itself as a divider: on either side of it, in two separate rooms, extend two identical structures made of upright and horizontal red cedar blocks.
Originally, his flat square floor pieces were meant to be walked on, as “platforms for the interrogation of their surroundings,” as the DIA booklet accompanying the exhibition explains. Because this was not allowed at Dia, one is forced to walk around them and hence misses out on an essential element of their meaning as a precinct or place one could look out from—the art-viewing experience turned inside out and the art object itself as exceptionally reticent, a literal doormat, if you will.
The wide, deep spaces of the three main galleries in part make up for this censure in that they allow one to stroll past and even through certain pieces in a continuum, so that the works speak to each other, episodes of a single grand creative moment. The fisted density of some pieces, such as the tightly packed 74 pine blocks in Pyramid: Square Plan, contrasts refreshingly with such airy, spacious pieces as Lament of the Children, a grid arrangement of 100 concrete blocks that filled the entire mid section of Gallery Three. Breda, 97 cross-shaped blue limestone pieces stretched end to end, leads the eye to the arcade-like freestanding Neubruckwerk, made of western red cedar. The simplicity of each structure highlights the subtle variations: the different shaped openings in the case of Newbruckwerk, which emphasizes the rhythm of negative shapes, and the way certain plates in the 9 x 27 Napoli Rectangle, one of the flat floor pieces, are upended, not quite fitting perfectly together. Some imperfections have the odd effect of giving an artisan feel to the industrial vocabulary, of pointing to the challenges of handling such unyielding, inexpressive machine-produced units by hand, of the individual acting on the machine made—of struggle, if you will.