Thursday, August 9, 2007
Brice Marden
Brice Marden was born October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland, from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1958 to 1961, when he received his B.F.A. degree. In the summer of 1961, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, and went on to enroll at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, receiving an M.F.A. degree in 1963.
It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that characterized his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality.
In the summer of 1963, Marden moved to New York with his wife, Pauline Baez, whom he had married in 1960, and with whom he had a son, Nicholas. They later divorced and he married Helen Harrington in 1969. He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth and whose work furthered his interest in gridded compositions.
Marden made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in the winter of 1964. It was during this time that his first solo exhibition was presented at the Wilcox Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Marden spent the spring and summer of 1964 in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. His first solo show in New York was held at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, and in the fall of that year, he became the general assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. In 1968, he began constructing his paintings with multiple panels. From 1969 to 1974, he was a painting instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta in Kassel, and he was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975. A show of drawings made between 1964 and 1974 traveled in 1974 to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened an interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction. Around this time, Marden traveled to Thailand, where he became interested in Far Eastern calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. During the 1990s, Marden has continued to exhibit regularly in New York. He was the subject of two major traveling shows, Brice Marden—Cold Mountain, at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Menil Collection, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Kunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1991 and 1992; and Work books 1965–1995, which traveled in 1997–98 to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Brice Marden was born October 15, 1938, in Bronxville, New York. He attended Florida Southern College, Lakeland, from 1957 to 1958 and the Boston University School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1958 to 1961, when he received his B.F.A. degree. In the summer of 1961, he attended Yale Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut, and went on to enroll at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, receiving an M.F.A. degree in 1963.
It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that characterized his paintings of the following decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. He has described his early works as highly emotional and subjective, despite their apparent lack of referentiality.
In the summer of 1963, Marden moved to New York with his wife, Pauline Baez, whom he had married in 1960, and with whom he had a son, Nicholas. They later divorced and he married Helen Harrington in 1969. He worked as a guard in 1963 and 1964 at the Jewish Museum, where he came into contact with the work of Jasper Johns, an artist whom he studied in depth and whose work furthered his interest in gridded compositions.
Marden made his first monochromatic single-panel painting in the winter of 1964. It was during this time that his first solo exhibition was presented at the Wilcox Gallery, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. Marden spent the spring and summer of 1964 in Paris, where he was inspired by the work of Alberto Giacometti. His first solo show in New York was held at the Bykert Gallery in 1966, and in the fall of that year, he became the general assistant to Robert Rauschenberg. In 1968, he began constructing his paintings with multiple panels. From 1969 to 1974, he was a painting instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
In 1972, his work was showcased at Documenta in Kassel, and he was honored with a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1975. A show of drawings made between 1964 and 1974 traveled in 1974 to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Fort Worth Art Museum; and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. In 1977, Marden traveled to Rome and Pompeii, where he strengthened an interest in Roman and Greek art and architecture, which would influence his work of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the mid-1980s, Marden turned away from Minimalism toward gestural abstraction. Around this time, Marden traveled to Thailand, where he became interested in Far Eastern calligraphy and the art of the brush stroke. During the 1990s, Marden has continued to exhibit regularly in New York. He was the subject of two major traveling shows, Brice Marden—Cold Mountain, at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Menil Collection, Houston; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Kunstmuseum, Bonn, in 1991 and 1992; and Work books 1965–1995, which traveled in 1997–98 to the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Angela Bulloch
A storm in a pixel
The brooding opening sequence of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm (1997) assumes some importance in the recent work of Angela Bulloch. It begins with a train making its way from New York to the suburbs. The train grinds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Paul Hood, the nerdy adolescent the film converges upon, reads to himself from the November 1973 issue of his favourite comic book, The Fantastic Four. ‘It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four…because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other…without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal antimatter.’ This fragment of narrative from the comic is an allegory of the entire film, which tells of the insidious ramifications husband and wife swapping had on the nuclear family during the Watergate era. All of this action is played out against superlative examples of ’70s interior design such as Verner Panton shag-pile carpets and lamps, making it all the more enticing a subject for Bulloch.
Bulloch has been progressively working through films from the late ’60s and the turn into the ’70s that take their respective epochs as their subject matter. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) was the subject of Blow-Up TV in 2000 and his Zabriskie Point (1970) provided the point of departure for Z-Point in 2001. So given this progression through time, it is no surprise that she has now moved on to the early ’70s with the recent Antimatter series, albeit by way of a ’90s film about the period.
In the present series of pixel boxes, minimalism is used to establish a language through which a narrative scenario can be played. The seemingly unified formal vocabulary that Bulloch fashions often leads to a certain level of opacity in her work – a consequence of how she abstracts from the films the pixel boxes are premised on. Thus although Bulloch relies on the formal rigour of minimalism to render the surface design of the art work instantly legible, beneath this veneer all kinds of action takes place which percolates through to the viewer slowly. The precise way Bulloch uses the films is key to this process. In each work a short sequence from the selected film is slowed down and a sophisticated system of digital motion image processing is used to filter it. Digital imagery is hereby recast as a new pixel-based architecture in which the rudimentary components of narration and cinematic image are dismantled.
The sequences from the given film are chosen because they are particularly striking. For example, the modernist house the heroine watches being blown-up in the desert in Zabriskie Point is taken as the point of departure for the series Z-Point. The sequence begins by showing her as she leaves a luxury villa in her car and shifts to some financiers discussing plans for building luxury houses in the desert. The camera then returns to the heroine gazing almost paralysed at the villa as it suddenly explodes. There follows a series of slow motion explosions from the interior wherein food, clothing, books and furniture are propelled through the air. In the finished animation sequence of Z-Point, these slow motion shots have an entrancing effect as they are submerged in bright, light blue tones into which one or two single, dark brown, slightly moving pixel squares are deposited.
A series of glass-fronted wooden boxes contain the fluorescent tubes bringing the pixels to life. Using custom-made software the diagonally arranged tubes inside the cubes can be modulated to an almost infinite variety. The individual cubes form the elements of a modular system that are stacked up in different combinations, in cubes, towers, or columns. The colours move constantly and result in lyrical waves of change, differing according to the particular sequence that has been manipulated.
In the new series based on The Ice Storm each member of Paul Hood’s family constitutes a different particle of antimatter. The series appends the formal vocabulary of the earlier ones by painting a phrase associated with the respective character from the comic on the wall behind the pixel box unit. Antimatter3: The Thing (2004) is a portrait of Paul’s father Benjamin Hood and comprises 13 pixel boxes in which reds and greens pulsate against the word WHROOM! which hugs the wall behind it. Meanwhile, Antimatter3: Invisible Girl (2004), a portrait of Paul’s mother, consists of only five pixel boxes wherein pinks and blues dissolve into whites and the word SCREEEEEEEEEE! graces the wall. In a further work from the series Paul Hood himself is represented by the Human Torch and the phrase FLAME ON zips across the wall.
A fascinating point of correspondence can be found between the periods from which the films Bulloch uses derive and the internal development of minimalism. Consider how Bulloch’s series starts with Blow Up, a film contemporaneous with the austerity of high minimalism, and then moves onto Zabriskie Point released four years later in 1970 in a moment that marks the full onslaught of the critique of minimalism. Artists who really came into their own during this period such as Robert Smithson injected the raw forms of minimalism with narrative, later enhancing this by actually using film itself. The upshot is that while the basic language of Flavin et al is significant for Bulloch it is only by way of its critique through post-minimalism and its reintroduction of narrative.
For narrative to be fed through such a rigorous language is unusual and that a certain level of ambience results is even more so. As Bulloch filters the late ’60s and early ’70s through her work it enables us to see these decades afresh, in relation to the film and design culture of their time, pixel by pixel.
A storm in a pixel
The brooding opening sequence of Ang Lee’s film The Ice Storm (1997) assumes some importance in the recent work of Angela Bulloch. It begins with a train making its way from New York to the suburbs. The train grinds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and Paul Hood, the nerdy adolescent the film converges upon, reads to himself from the November 1973 issue of his favourite comic book, The Fantastic Four. ‘It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four…because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other…without even knowing it. That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four: that a family is like your own personal antimatter.’ This fragment of narrative from the comic is an allegory of the entire film, which tells of the insidious ramifications husband and wife swapping had on the nuclear family during the Watergate era. All of this action is played out against superlative examples of ’70s interior design such as Verner Panton shag-pile carpets and lamps, making it all the more enticing a subject for Bulloch.
Bulloch has been progressively working through films from the late ’60s and the turn into the ’70s that take their respective epochs as their subject matter. Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) was the subject of Blow-Up TV in 2000 and his Zabriskie Point (1970) provided the point of departure for Z-Point in 2001. So given this progression through time, it is no surprise that she has now moved on to the early ’70s with the recent Antimatter series, albeit by way of a ’90s film about the period.
In the present series of pixel boxes, minimalism is used to establish a language through which a narrative scenario can be played. The seemingly unified formal vocabulary that Bulloch fashions often leads to a certain level of opacity in her work – a consequence of how she abstracts from the films the pixel boxes are premised on. Thus although Bulloch relies on the formal rigour of minimalism to render the surface design of the art work instantly legible, beneath this veneer all kinds of action takes place which percolates through to the viewer slowly. The precise way Bulloch uses the films is key to this process. In each work a short sequence from the selected film is slowed down and a sophisticated system of digital motion image processing is used to filter it. Digital imagery is hereby recast as a new pixel-based architecture in which the rudimentary components of narration and cinematic image are dismantled.
The sequences from the given film are chosen because they are particularly striking. For example, the modernist house the heroine watches being blown-up in the desert in Zabriskie Point is taken as the point of departure for the series Z-Point. The sequence begins by showing her as she leaves a luxury villa in her car and shifts to some financiers discussing plans for building luxury houses in the desert. The camera then returns to the heroine gazing almost paralysed at the villa as it suddenly explodes. There follows a series of slow motion explosions from the interior wherein food, clothing, books and furniture are propelled through the air. In the finished animation sequence of Z-Point, these slow motion shots have an entrancing effect as they are submerged in bright, light blue tones into which one or two single, dark brown, slightly moving pixel squares are deposited.
A series of glass-fronted wooden boxes contain the fluorescent tubes bringing the pixels to life. Using custom-made software the diagonally arranged tubes inside the cubes can be modulated to an almost infinite variety. The individual cubes form the elements of a modular system that are stacked up in different combinations, in cubes, towers, or columns. The colours move constantly and result in lyrical waves of change, differing according to the particular sequence that has been manipulated.
In the new series based on The Ice Storm each member of Paul Hood’s family constitutes a different particle of antimatter. The series appends the formal vocabulary of the earlier ones by painting a phrase associated with the respective character from the comic on the wall behind the pixel box unit. Antimatter3: The Thing (2004) is a portrait of Paul’s father Benjamin Hood and comprises 13 pixel boxes in which reds and greens pulsate against the word WHROOM! which hugs the wall behind it. Meanwhile, Antimatter3: Invisible Girl (2004), a portrait of Paul’s mother, consists of only five pixel boxes wherein pinks and blues dissolve into whites and the word SCREEEEEEEEEE! graces the wall. In a further work from the series Paul Hood himself is represented by the Human Torch and the phrase FLAME ON zips across the wall.
A fascinating point of correspondence can be found between the periods from which the films Bulloch uses derive and the internal development of minimalism. Consider how Bulloch’s series starts with Blow Up, a film contemporaneous with the austerity of high minimalism, and then moves onto Zabriskie Point released four years later in 1970 in a moment that marks the full onslaught of the critique of minimalism. Artists who really came into their own during this period such as Robert Smithson injected the raw forms of minimalism with narrative, later enhancing this by actually using film itself. The upshot is that while the basic language of Flavin et al is significant for Bulloch it is only by way of its critique through post-minimalism and its reintroduction of narrative.
For narrative to be fed through such a rigorous language is unusual and that a certain level of ambience results is even more so. As Bulloch filters the late ’60s and early ’70s through her work it enables us to see these decades afresh, in relation to the film and design culture of their time, pixel by pixel.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Candida Höfer
Among the prominent disciples of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer may still be the most underrated, as these two gorgeous shows remind us. ''Traces,'' at the Goethe-Institut, is a small group of photographs, from the past five years, of the interiors of libraries and museums: Beinecke at Yale, the Pierpont Morgan in New York, the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and others. Sonnabend Gallery offers a larger number of new pictures: other buildings (museums, palaces, libraries) in Venice, Germany and the Netherlands.
For more than 30 years, Ms. Höfer has been compiling her deadpan inventory of public spaces, a social catalog of architectural history. Empty and vast, these places can sometimes seem like just occasions for photographic spectacle, the pictures are often so chillingly awesome. But Ms. Höfer is a straight photographer whose humanity and improvisatory spirit come across if we are patient enough to appreciate the serendipity of her light, the subtlety of her color and the quiet, melancholy pleasure she seems to take in finding, as if almost by chance, poetry in institutional form.Her real topic is ambience, a fleeting sensation. Her challenge is to avoid both the dry architectural document and clinical abstraction. When Ms. Höfer's work succeeds, it implies a secret world. You might say she captures the ghosts moving through these spaces, leaving their traces.
They appear in the willowy shapes of three pools of light, like the Three Graces, cast by the trio of tall windows onto the marble floor of the Ca' Rezzonico. Blinding light through the doorway of the archaeological museum in Venice is another trace, which dissolves the sculptures in the room, leaving only an arrow visible on the interior wall, pointing visitors as if into the ether. And in a library in Utrecht, Ms. Höfer catches the ghostly interplay of distilled white light through arched windows with the white of a sculptured bust, different from the white on the railings that frame shelves of books, some yet another white -- a kind of formal call and response.
Her self-portrait in a mirror at the Palazzo Zenobia, nodding toward Velázquez, is a reflection of a reflection of a room full of trompe l'oeil paintings of sculptures, themselves illusions, ghosts of ghosts. Ms. Höfer stands at the center, nearly hiding behind her camera in the empty space, capturing the essence of absence.
Among the prominent disciples of the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer may still be the most underrated, as these two gorgeous shows remind us. ''Traces,'' at the Goethe-Institut, is a small group of photographs, from the past five years, of the interiors of libraries and museums: Beinecke at Yale, the Pierpont Morgan in New York, the Deutsche Bücherei in Leipzig and others. Sonnabend Gallery offers a larger number of new pictures: other buildings (museums, palaces, libraries) in Venice, Germany and the Netherlands.
For more than 30 years, Ms. Höfer has been compiling her deadpan inventory of public spaces, a social catalog of architectural history. Empty and vast, these places can sometimes seem like just occasions for photographic spectacle, the pictures are often so chillingly awesome. But Ms. Höfer is a straight photographer whose humanity and improvisatory spirit come across if we are patient enough to appreciate the serendipity of her light, the subtlety of her color and the quiet, melancholy pleasure she seems to take in finding, as if almost by chance, poetry in institutional form.Her real topic is ambience, a fleeting sensation. Her challenge is to avoid both the dry architectural document and clinical abstraction. When Ms. Höfer's work succeeds, it implies a secret world. You might say she captures the ghosts moving through these spaces, leaving their traces.
They appear in the willowy shapes of three pools of light, like the Three Graces, cast by the trio of tall windows onto the marble floor of the Ca' Rezzonico. Blinding light through the doorway of the archaeological museum in Venice is another trace, which dissolves the sculptures in the room, leaving only an arrow visible on the interior wall, pointing visitors as if into the ether. And in a library in Utrecht, Ms. Höfer catches the ghostly interplay of distilled white light through arched windows with the white of a sculptured bust, different from the white on the railings that frame shelves of books, some yet another white -- a kind of formal call and response.
Her self-portrait in a mirror at the Palazzo Zenobia, nodding toward Velázquez, is a reflection of a reflection of a room full of trompe l'oeil paintings of sculptures, themselves illusions, ghosts of ghosts. Ms. Höfer stands at the center, nearly hiding behind her camera in the empty space, capturing the essence of absence.
Friday, August 3, 2007
Carl Andre (1935- )
Carl Andre was one of the founders of the art movement known as Minimal, Systemic, or ABC Art. It is an art that seeks to eliminate everything decorative, extraneous and additive, reducing all components to art's purest elements; it is precise, cerebral and austere rather than accessible. Andre once said that what was beautiful in art was "not that someone is original but that he can find a way of creating in the world the instance of his temperament." His own temperament is close to the tranquil philosophy of Taoism, and many critics refer to his work as "pacific." He reveals little about himself. The men in the family tended to be in building or metal working trades; his father, a marine draftsman, was also an accomplished woodworker, and his grandfather was a bricklayer. In an interview video-taped for the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the artist said of Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born: "The industry was granite-cutting and monument sculpture ... My uncle and father mostly worked in the shipyards ... In 1951 I went as ascholarship student to Phillips Academy, Andover [Massachusetts]. It was there that I first got to know the joys of making art." He was the youngest of three, the only male; his mother wrote poetry and his father took the children to museums and read aloud to them. He later worked at a steel company and on a railroad, traveled to Europe, joined the army. In 1964 he was invited to exhibit at the Hudson River Museum (where this writer was Assistant Director) in a suburb outside of New York City. As Minimalism attracted critical attention, he began exhibiting in the city.For his one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the artist set out eight rectangular sculptures deployed on the gallery floor, each made of 120 bricks. "One hundred twenty is the number richest infactors," Andre explained, "arithmetic is only the scaffolding or armature of my work." Equivalent VIII, one of the eight works, was made two bricks high, six across, and ten lengthwise (technically and sometimes referred to as "2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher"). The titles supposedly were derived from Alfred Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds made in the 1920s and 1930s, called Equivalents. The sculptor's works have nothing to do with clouds, but in mathematical theory the Equivalence Relation has to do with the relation of sameness between elements, while in physics, the Principle of Equivalence demonstrates the distinction between inertial and gravitational forces-- the sort of disciplines that concern Andre.Emplacement, environment, and relativeness are important in all of this artist's works. "A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous," he said. "Everything is an environment, but a place is related particularly to both the general qualities of the environment and the particular qualities of the work which has been done." The bricks in Equivalent VIII are humble materials, basic to building, construction, and manufacture; by treating these cubic, tesserae-units as sculpture, we begin to view the work's physical reality as anesthetic phenomenon. And since placement generates and energizes the piece, Equivalent VIII and its surrounding environment become one work of art.Carl Andre invariably works within a strict self-imposed modular system, using commercially available materials or objects, almost always in identical units or bar forms, such as timber, styrofoam, cementblocks, bales of hay, etc., with only one type of material per work. He considers the setting or placement an essential part of the work, and the form of each piece is largely determined by the space for which it is constructed. "I don't think spaces are that singular, I think there are generic classes of spaces. So it's not really a problem where a work is going to be in particular. It's only a problem, in general, of the generic spaces: is it going to be the size of Grand Central Station or is it going to be the size of a small room?"
Equivalent VIII created considerable controversy in London and New York when newspapers ridiculed the Tate Gallery's purchase (the 1966 work had been dismantled; Andre made a new version for the Tate). Although the London Sunday Times referred to it as an "insouciant masterpiece," the Evening Standard called it a "pile of bricks," and even the venerable Burlington Magazine denounced the museum for squandering public monies on something that "might have occurred to any bricklayer." In New York City this writer defended it in a letter to the New York Times: "A lot of people find profound meaning in this abstract balance between the spiritual and the material, which manifests harmony, proportion and pure order." As a result of the notoriety, Equivalent VIII, of course, became one of the Tate's biggest attractions. Interestingly, Andre's cubical work is in a museum named after Henry Tate, who made his fortune manufacturing cubes of sugar. Andre's emphasis on horizontality with the floor strikes at the traditional concept of sculpture as a vertical and anthropomorphic form. The artist's arrangement of his designated units were made on anorthogonal grid by mathematical means; and like scientific and mathematical models, the physical manifestations of concepts and theories are often beautiful objects in themselves. The rectilinear systems of Equivalent VIII are vertical and horizontal coordinates that manifest themselves in a commensurable pattern of structural regularity and symmetry.The correspondence of parts with reference to a median plane has its counterpart on the opposite side of that plane so that the two halves are geometrically related as a body and its mirror image. The Cartesian grid, a system in which we control our immediate environment, is the principle rule of this arranged composition ("arranged" implies a fixed notion to the parts and a pre-conceived idea of the whole). Andre's usual method of cohesion for his forms is inertia and gravity: no mortar or other binding material is used.For the ancient Greeks, symmetry was first applied to the commensurability of numbers and agreement in dimensions, then to that of parts of sculpture or statues, and soon to the elegance of form in general. Symmetry was considered a "binding together" in a world of mutually related parts of the whole; it presupposed a way in which differences might be preserved yet integrated. Today we tend to regard symmetry as a bilateral arrangement of parts where the whole is divided into a number of identical elements or units that are uniformly distributed around a point, plane or line. The order which Carl Andre imposes on his materials is not designed to create an art object to be gazed at, so much as to create a set of conditions which generates a perceptual response which we experience as art.
Carl Andre was one of the founders of the art movement known as Minimal, Systemic, or ABC Art. It is an art that seeks to eliminate everything decorative, extraneous and additive, reducing all components to art's purest elements; it is precise, cerebral and austere rather than accessible. Andre once said that what was beautiful in art was "not that someone is original but that he can find a way of creating in the world the instance of his temperament." His own temperament is close to the tranquil philosophy of Taoism, and many critics refer to his work as "pacific." He reveals little about himself. The men in the family tended to be in building or metal working trades; his father, a marine draftsman, was also an accomplished woodworker, and his grandfather was a bricklayer. In an interview video-taped for the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the artist said of Quincy, Massachusetts, where he was born: "The industry was granite-cutting and monument sculpture ... My uncle and father mostly worked in the shipyards ... In 1951 I went as ascholarship student to Phillips Academy, Andover [Massachusetts]. It was there that I first got to know the joys of making art." He was the youngest of three, the only male; his mother wrote poetry and his father took the children to museums and read aloud to them. He later worked at a steel company and on a railroad, traveled to Europe, joined the army. In 1964 he was invited to exhibit at the Hudson River Museum (where this writer was Assistant Director) in a suburb outside of New York City. As Minimalism attracted critical attention, he began exhibiting in the city.For his one-man exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the artist set out eight rectangular sculptures deployed on the gallery floor, each made of 120 bricks. "One hundred twenty is the number richest infactors," Andre explained, "arithmetic is only the scaffolding or armature of my work." Equivalent VIII, one of the eight works, was made two bricks high, six across, and ten lengthwise (technically and sometimes referred to as "2 high x 6 header x 10 stretcher"). The titles supposedly were derived from Alfred Stieglitz's series of photographs of clouds made in the 1920s and 1930s, called Equivalents. The sculptor's works have nothing to do with clouds, but in mathematical theory the Equivalence Relation has to do with the relation of sameness between elements, while in physics, the Principle of Equivalence demonstrates the distinction between inertial and gravitational forces-- the sort of disciplines that concern Andre.Emplacement, environment, and relativeness are important in all of this artist's works. "A place is an area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous," he said. "Everything is an environment, but a place is related particularly to both the general qualities of the environment and the particular qualities of the work which has been done." The bricks in Equivalent VIII are humble materials, basic to building, construction, and manufacture; by treating these cubic, tesserae-units as sculpture, we begin to view the work's physical reality as anesthetic phenomenon. And since placement generates and energizes the piece, Equivalent VIII and its surrounding environment become one work of art.Carl Andre invariably works within a strict self-imposed modular system, using commercially available materials or objects, almost always in identical units or bar forms, such as timber, styrofoam, cementblocks, bales of hay, etc., with only one type of material per work. He considers the setting or placement an essential part of the work, and the form of each piece is largely determined by the space for which it is constructed. "I don't think spaces are that singular, I think there are generic classes of spaces. So it's not really a problem where a work is going to be in particular. It's only a problem, in general, of the generic spaces: is it going to be the size of Grand Central Station or is it going to be the size of a small room?"
Equivalent VIII created considerable controversy in London and New York when newspapers ridiculed the Tate Gallery's purchase (the 1966 work had been dismantled; Andre made a new version for the Tate). Although the London Sunday Times referred to it as an "insouciant masterpiece," the Evening Standard called it a "pile of bricks," and even the venerable Burlington Magazine denounced the museum for squandering public monies on something that "might have occurred to any bricklayer." In New York City this writer defended it in a letter to the New York Times: "A lot of people find profound meaning in this abstract balance between the spiritual and the material, which manifests harmony, proportion and pure order." As a result of the notoriety, Equivalent VIII, of course, became one of the Tate's biggest attractions. Interestingly, Andre's cubical work is in a museum named after Henry Tate, who made his fortune manufacturing cubes of sugar. Andre's emphasis on horizontality with the floor strikes at the traditional concept of sculpture as a vertical and anthropomorphic form. The artist's arrangement of his designated units were made on anorthogonal grid by mathematical means; and like scientific and mathematical models, the physical manifestations of concepts and theories are often beautiful objects in themselves. The rectilinear systems of Equivalent VIII are vertical and horizontal coordinates that manifest themselves in a commensurable pattern of structural regularity and symmetry.The correspondence of parts with reference to a median plane has its counterpart on the opposite side of that plane so that the two halves are geometrically related as a body and its mirror image. The Cartesian grid, a system in which we control our immediate environment, is the principle rule of this arranged composition ("arranged" implies a fixed notion to the parts and a pre-conceived idea of the whole). Andre's usual method of cohesion for his forms is inertia and gravity: no mortar or other binding material is used.For the ancient Greeks, symmetry was first applied to the commensurability of numbers and agreement in dimensions, then to that of parts of sculpture or statues, and soon to the elegance of form in general. Symmetry was considered a "binding together" in a world of mutually related parts of the whole; it presupposed a way in which differences might be preserved yet integrated. Today we tend to regard symmetry as a bilateral arrangement of parts where the whole is divided into a number of identical elements or units that are uniformly distributed around a point, plane or line. The order which Carl Andre imposes on his materials is not designed to create an art object to be gazed at, so much as to create a set of conditions which generates a perceptual response which we experience as art.
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