CARL ANDRE.

“My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.”

SYNOPSIS

During the 1960s and 1970s, Carl Andre produced a number of sculptures which are now counted among the most innovative of his generation. Along with figures such as Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, Andre played a central role in defining the nature of Minimalist Art. His most significant contribution was to distance sculpture from processes of carving, modeling, or constructing, and to make works that simply involved sorting and placing. Before him, few had imagined that sculpture could consist of ordinary, factory-finished raw materials, arranged into straightforward configurations and set directly on the ground. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s many of his low-lying, segmented works came to redefine for a new generation of artists the very nature of sculpture itself.

KEY IDEAS

Andre is a sculptor who neither carves into substances, nor models forms. His work involves the positioning of raw materials – such as bricks, blocks, ingots, or plates. He uses no fixatives to hold them in place. Andre has suggested that his procedure for building up a sculpture from small, regularly-shaped units is based on “the principle of masonry construction” – like stacking up bricks to build a wall.

Andre claims that his sculpture is an exploration of the properties of matter, and for this reason he has called himself a “matterist.” Some people have seen his art as “concept based,” as though each piece is merely the realization of an idea. But for Andre, this is mistaken: the characteristics of every unit of material he selects, and the arrangement and position of the sculpture in its environment, forms the substance of his art.

Andre insists on installing all new work in person, and his configurations are always carefully attuned to the scale and proportions of their immediate surroundings. However, once installed, his sculptures can be dismantled and reconstructed in other locations without his direct involvement.

In 1966, Andre began to describe his work as “sculpture as place,” a phrase which alludes both to the fact that his sculptures are produced simply by positioning units on the floor, and to their “place generating” properties. Andre defined “place” as “an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.”

comment to editor

 

CARL ANDRE BIOGRAPHY

Childhood

Andre has always credited his early upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts, as having a formative influence on his art. The son of a marine architect of Swedish descent, he grew up in close proximity to the Quincy naval shipyards, which during the Second World War expanded rapidly (at their peak of productivity they employed 32,000 workers). He would later claim that one of his strongest childhood memories had been the sight of the “rusting acres of steel plates” which lay beside the yards “under the rain and sun.”

In 1951, at the age of 16, Andre was awarded a scholarship to attend Phillips Academy, the prestigious boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. It was here, under the tutelage of the painters Maud and Patrick Morgan, that he received his only formal art training.

MORE

LEGACY

From the late 1960s onwards, Andre’s art became an important reference point for many subsequent artists both in North America and in Western Europe – largely because he was seen to have reduced sculpture to its essential state. While Andre himself saw this as the end-point of his art, many sculptors (including Richard Serra) took his insights as the starting-point for their own practice, and built up from the principles which Andre had laid down. 

 

CARL ANDRE QUOTES

“Art is the exclusion of the unnecessary.”

“Settle for nothing less than concrete analysis of concrete situations leading to concrete actions.”

“My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalyzed politics of my life.”

“…art for art’s sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one’s needs.”