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Andre’s Drill: Carl Andre at Dia:Beacon! January 5, 2015
Carl Andre, Passport, New York, 1960, color photo copy, 1970. Installation view, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–
2010, Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York.
May 5, 2014–March 2, 2015.
Art © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation, New York.
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% Lisa Zaher
Carl Andre, Triskaidek, New York, 1979.
Installation view, Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–
2010, Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, Beacon, New York.
May 5, 2014–March 2, 2015.
Art © Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio, New York.
The current retrospective of the work of the American sculptor and poet Carl Andre,on view at Dia:Beacon, engenders nothing short of a provocative re-inscription of theparameters for artistic production within the Minimalist cannon. A consideration ofAndre’s poems alongside both well known and lesser known sculptural forms, inaddition to previously unknown projects in diverse media, foreground the relationbetween Andre’s material processes and a systems aesthetic. Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place,1958-2010 enables us to begin to register the grounds, or limiting conditions, throughwhich an improvisatory and material systems aesthetic may emerge.
In the expansive, refitted factory space ofDia:Beacon, Andre’s sculptures—from hismetal floor tiles, to his permutations ofunits in wood—perform their materialityand placement. In this naturally litenvironment, the materials are best able todo their work. Zinc tiles announce theirflatness alongside the undulatingcylindricality of steel reinforcing rods; thelatter’s gnarled, raw resistance to the floorreasserting the industrial labor workedinto the smooth, cold surfaces of theformer laying nearby. In Triskaidek (1979),precise segments of Western red cedar,displayed in ninety-one units eachmeasuring 12 x 36 x 12, enact amathematical drill—an operation of theconsecutive sum of all numbers from one to thirteen. With the age rings of the redcedar exposed, the drill unavoidably moves inward, extending out from the artist’sexecution to the viewer’s own processing of the factors that matter—materials and theirorigins, placement, and temporal structures. We configure the sculptures’configurations, by walking and counting, by logically justifying arrangements andshapes.
Material and structural differences begin to matter here in ways that seeing a singlework of Andre’s alone, in a gallery setting, would fail to. While surely a factor of theretrospective exhibit, it is also an attribute that the space of Dia:Beacon brings to it—anattribute that appeared as well in their long-term installation of Andy Warhol’s Shadowsand On Kawara’s date paintings currently on view.
Throughout the exhibition, the co-curators, Yasmil Raymond and Philippe Vergne,bring attention to Andre’s collaboration with the American photographer, filmmakerand theorist, Hollis Frampton. Frampton not only photographed Andre’s earlysculptures, the prints of which are on view in the show, but also had an active andproductive dialogue with Andre. This exchange extended beyond their well known 12
Dialogues, the series of typed events between Andre and Frampton that took placebetween 1962-1963, published in 1980. There are poems for Frampton and those thatcorrespond directly to Frampton’s own work, including ESSAYONPHOTOGRAPHY-FORHOLLISFRAMPTON (1965) and THETHETHETHE-THETHETHETHETHETHE-SECRETSECRETSECRET-SECRETSECRET (ca.1959-1965), a poem that references Frampton’s photographic series, The Secret World of FrankStella (1959-1962).
However, the exhibition, geared as it is to highlight Andre’s work, inevitably falls shortin accounting for the extent of Andre’s collaborations with artists like Frampton. Forexample, it goes unmentioned that Andre’s poem A Short History of King Philip’s War (in 4suits), from 1960, which appears to have been previously named A King Philip’s WarPrimer, was for a time under consideration by both Andre and Frampton to become a20-minute, 16mm color film, according to correspondence between Frampton and theirmutual friend, Reno Odlin.[i] While there is not space here to fully explore themoments of intersection between Frampton and Andre’s practices, I would like tohighlight an interesting omission from the show that provides an important historicaltouchstone for both artists’ practices.
The basement of Dia:Beacon includes a vitrine featuring several mail art projects, onefrom Andre to the artist, Marjorie Strider, one to Jennifer Light and another to RenoOdlin. These projects each share a similar structure consisting of a set of images, eitherin postcard form (Strider and Light), or pages from a book (Odlin), that were sentindividually over a period of time, with each image numbered according to the order inwhich it was sent. Installed in the show, each set holds itself together through a systemof built-in correspondences and differences. Strider’s project consists of a series of 124postcards, each with different Tartan designs. Light’s project consists of a set of 30cards made of the Olympic male swimming team, in naked frontal and dorsal views(shielded frontally by a white triangle over the pelvis), stating the biometric facts of eachswimmer, including the date of his best performance. Sent between 1970 and 1975, thisgroup of mail art projects points to another, not in the show, between Carl Andre andHollis Frampton.
On October 31, 1974, Andre sent the first of forty-eight numbered envelopes fromManhattan to Frampton’s home in rural, upstate New York. Postmarked andnumbered, the numbers on the envelope corresponded to the post-marked date, exceptnumbers 1, and 31-48, which corresponded to the single digit of the date. Eachenvelope contained a single page pulled from a small, rope-bound, marble notebook.Each page contained photographic-based reproductions of works of art, cut fromvarious publications and pasted on each side. These objects included reproductions of“Francis the First Engraving the Famous Verses on the Window,” a scene from theBattle of Waterloo by Stanley Berkeley, etchings and line drawings of ancient ruins, andhalf-tone photo-engravings from photographs of significant places, groups and events.
On two occasions, however, the reverse side included the ghostly remains of a
[ii]
[iii]
[iv]
Hollis Frampton,
Portrait of Frank
Stella, 1959, from
Dorothy Miller, ed.
Sixteen Americans
(New York: The
Museum of Modern
Art, 1959), 76.
photographic portrait, depicting a male sitter in formal attire on printing-out paper—unfixed photographs left to fade to black over time.
Andre and Frampton’s mail art project does not hold together as aset as well as both Strider’s and Light’s. The images come from apre-existing scrapbook that bore the handwritten title, “Photographsof Historical Events,” most likely penned by its original owner, anAlfred L. Hallquist. The pages themselves are extremely brittleand mauve-colored dating roughly from the 1890s. This mail artproject does however resonate with another project on view atDia:Beacon: Andre’s Passport, New York from 1960 that consists ofreproductions of works of art in a range of different media, alongwith photographs, one notable inclusion being the photograph ofFrank Stella taken by Hollis Frampton that was published in the 16Americans catalogue from 1959 (Andre had contributed acomplementary text for Stella’s catalogue entry).
To define the set of Frampton and Andre’s mail art project entailsattending not only to the materiality of the brittle pages, and to theacts of reproduction glued upon them, but also to the system ofsending and receiving enacted by the postal process, and the correspondences betweenthe calendar date and the numbered envelopes. Such correspondences do not appear tobe a factor in the mail art projects on view at Dia:Beacon. As a repetitive and ritualisticact set to correspond to a calendrical cycle, Frampton and Andre’s mail art projectoffers speculation upon the relationship of images to habitual human experience and,ultimately, to history. While this notion is of definitive relevance to Framptonphotographic-based practice, it provides a new resonance for Andre’s exploration ofmaterials, of labor, and systems and structures on view at Dia:Beacon. Frampton andAndre’s mail art project enables us to contextualize Andre’s practice in accordance withmany of the performance and ritual based avant-garde practices of the post-Warperiod. Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 at Dia:Beacon is an excellent andproductive show that asks us to look beyond conventional art historical narratives andenact our own drill.
All, that has been, is as it should have been, but what will they trust in
now?
-Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXVI, from “Rock-Drill de los Canteres,” ll. 16404-16406.[viii]
[v]
[vi]
[vii]
Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 is on view at DIA Beacon through March 9,2015.
[i] Frampton to Odlin, 5 August 1960, in Hollis Frampton: Letters, 2 edition, ed. RenoOdlin (Paris: Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, 2002), 51.
[ii] For example, 1/48 was post-marked on October 31, 2/48 was post-marked onNovember 2, 4/48 on November 4, 10/48 on November 10, and so on. There aresome exceptions when two envelopes were marked with the same date (often one in themorning, the other in the afternoon), or when the date-stamp was missing orunreadable.
[iii] The notebook measures 9 x 5 ½”.
[iv] “Francis the First Engraving the Famous Verses on the Window” appears inHarper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 83 (June 1891), page 91.
[v] A hint of a small white arrow is discernible in the lower center of each image.Number 17/48 appears more like a bow tie; Number 16/48 possesses a longer triangle,suggesting a tie. It is possible that more were included in the book. Several envelopesremained un-opened, and have been determined by Frampton’s estate to remain so.
[vi] A sticker stating “Library of Alfred L. Hallquist” adhered on the inside cover, overthe top edge of a pasted reproduction of “The Surrender of Granada,” from thepainting by Pradilla. The sticker bearing this label was crossed out in pencil. Asignature of Alfred L. Hallquist is also present on the inside cover in a manner thatcorresponds to the handwriting of the title.
[vii] I thank David Soures Wooters, senior archivist at the George Eastman House fordating the paper to the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. Based on the origin of
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“Francis the First Engraving the Famous Verses on the Window” from Harper’s from1891, it is my belief that this object began as a scrapbook around that time.
[viii] Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1998), ll. 16404-16406.
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