The artist Carl Andre, who has died aged 88, made his work from industrial supplies equivalent to bricks or squares of magnesium, and laid them down in easy sequence. No phantasm was concerned, no transformation of the essential materials into one thing else. What you noticed was what you bought. And what the British public acquired in 1972 when the Tate purchased Andre’s Equal VIII – a horizontal rectangular association of 120 bricks on the ground – it didn’t like.
The shock waves of disapproval reached so far as New York, the centre of artwork world sophistication the place not a single drop of wine had spilled on the non-public view on the Tibor de Nagy gallery on 72nd Road, when not simply Equal VIII however Equivalents I to VII had been proven collectively. The American press gave nice play to the fuss in London and the affair turned a part of the Andre legend. Books on minimalism would carry a copy of Equal VIII – or Bricks, as it’s normally recognized – like a certificates of probity.
The Seventies had been a prolific and profitable time for Andre. However every thing modified after the evening in September 1985 when Andre and his third spouse, the artist Ana Mendieta, had been alone collectively of their Thirty fourth-floor house in Greenwich Village, New York, and he or she fell from a window to her loss of life.
Andre was tried for second-degree homicide however, following a high-profile trial in 1988 during which he determined to not give proof and to forgo his proper to a jury, the decide discovered room for affordable doubt and acquitted him. “Justice has been served,” Andre stated as he left the court docket. He quietly turned up for his subsequent opening and his status, and the marketplace for his work, started to revive, however he by no means managed to flee the shadow of Mendieta’s loss of life.
Minimalism – the time period normally utilized to Andre’s work – flattens out the distinctions between him and contemporaries equivalent to Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Dan Flavin, though he most well-liked it to conceptualism, which he rejected completely. “I used to be all the time combating the rise of conceptual artwork,” he stated. “An concept within the head will not be a murals. A murals is out on the planet, is a tangible actuality.”
From the 60s, all these artists labored in easy modules and stripped away inessentials some greater than others – Judd’s work had architectural qualities, Flavin assembled strip lighting very fantastically, Morris performed with kinds in house, however Andre merely assembled readymade components in sequences.
Thinkers within the American artwork world equivalent to Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried argued that Andre had decreased his work to the purpose of inexpressiveness and unimaginativeness, at which it may solely be materials and will now not be referred to as artwork.
Andre himself discovered the preoccupations of critics and public inappropriate. His sculpture, he stated, maybe recalling a teenage go to to Stonehenge, went outdated 3,000 years in the past.
He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, a few hours from Boston. Raymond BaxterHis father, George, a carpenter and marine draughtsman, would take Carl to the museum in Quincy and each he and Carl’s mom, Margaret (nee Johnson), an workplace supervisor, learn poetry to their son. Andre later wrote concrete poetry, and a sequence of correspondence on this kind, between him and an artist pal, Hollis Frampton, referred to as 12 Dialogues 1962-63, was printed in 1980.
After faculty in Quincy, Andre rounded off his training at Phillips Academy, Andover. He acquired a scholarship to Kenyon Faculty, Ohio, the place he studied poetry, however was kicked out after two months. After nationwide service, he moved to New York in 1957 meaning to turn out to be an artist. He labored first as an editorial assistant in a publishing home and, from 1960 to 1964, when he was working as an artist however not but making a lot cash, as a brakeman on the Pennsylvania railroad.
In New York he met the summary painter Frank Stella, who had additionally been at Phillips Academy. Stella provided him house in his studio. Andre was working there at some point, carving into a big baulk of wooden, when Stella stroked the uncarved facet and remarked: “That’s sculpture too.” Andre stated his preliminary response was resentment, however that Stella’s commentary modified his life.
His first group present was on the Hudson River museum in Yonkers, in 1964, adopted by a one-man exhibition on the Tibor de Nagy gallery. In 1969 he turned a founding member, together with artists equivalent to Takis and Hans Haacke, of the Artwork Staff’ Coalition, which resolved for artists to take extra social and political duty. It campaigned for New York’s museums – specifically the Museum of Fashionable Artwork – to have a extra inclusive exhibition coverage in direction of feminine artists and artists of color, and efficiently pressured MoMA and different museums into implementing a free admission day.
In 1970 Andre was given a serious retrospective exhibition on the Guggenheim Museum. There, on the bottom flooring, he laid his 37 Items of Work: an enormous sq. of steel plates in six supplies (aluminium, metal, copper, zinc, lead, magnesium) which stuffed the atrium with its presence and challenged guests’ preconceptions of minimalist artwork as being dry or boring.
Andre offered numerous work presently, together with three items to the Tate. Their preliminary exhibiting handed with out response, however after a Sunday Occasions piece in 1976, drawing consideration to the taxpayers’ cash spent on the bricks, the furore was huge. In response to the Tate director Nicholas Serota: “For a very long time afterwards the Tate was relatively much less bold in its acquisitions.”
All through this decade and the following, Andre continued to experiment in supplies. “The periodic desk of components is for me what the color spectrum is for a painter,” he stated. “My ambition as an artist is to be the Turner of matter.”
In 1979 Andre met Mendieta by means of their mutual pals and fellow artists Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, and the couple married in Rome in 1985. In response to pals their relationship was unstable, fuelled by heavy ingesting on either side. Andre claimed to recollect nothing of the occasions main as much as Mendieta’s loss of life. Whereas he advised that she may need fallen whereas attempting to shut a window, or that she may need thrown herself in an act of suicide, lots of Mendieta’s pals and followers believed he both deliberately pushed her, or that she fell whereas the pair had been combating.
Andre’s pals, sellers and buyers stood by him all through and after the trial, however Mendieta’s remained satisfied he was responsible even after his acquittal, suggesting that not all of the proof had been put earlier than the court docket. Whereas he continued to work, present and promote, specifically in Europe, the place the case had had much less publicity, anger grew amongst feminist artwork teams in New York.
In 1992, 500 protestors organised by the Ladies’s Motion Coalition gathered exterior the SoHo Guggenheim after an Andre sculpture was included in its inaugural present, holding a banner that stated: “Carl Andre is within the Guggenheim. The place is Ana Mendieta?” Three years later the feminist activists the Guerrilla Women issued a poster describing Andre because the OJ Simpson of the artwork world. Andre didn’t reply. “I’m a relatively phlegmatic particular person,” he stated. “Fairly stoic. I discovered properly as a toddler, after I would typically be bullied. I used to be a fats baby.”
Nevertheless, the eye on Mendieta’s loss of life solely grew over time, alongside along with her inventory as an artist, and the marketing campaign group Whereisanamendieta, named after that preliminary slogan, continued to boost consciousness. On the opening of the Tate Fashionable extension in 2016, the group over the omission of Mendieta’s work – and the inclusion of Andre’s – within the new constructing.
In 2013 Andre had a serious retrospective on the Dia Artwork Basis in New York, which travelled internationally, together with to the Turner Up to date, Margate.
He was married first to Barbara Brown, a instructor, and secondly to Rosemarie Castoro, a painter. In 1999 he married Melissa Kretschmer, an artist. She and his sister, Carol, survive him.
