Dancing with Carl Andre

Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art - The Language of Less (Then and Now) exhibit

As visitors curiously glide through each sectioned room of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new exhibition, “The Language of Less (Then and Now)” (showing now – 4/8/12), spotlights from above shine brightly on to each minimalist art piece, reminding the viewer to, “yes, look at me.”  While head tilting their thoughts and whispering a critique or two about the piece to a friend next to them, a very low-key six by six checkerboard of sheet and gun metal grey squares lays casually in the middle of the room.  Without a spotlight, the sweet floor-flower remains confident as each hopeful date passes her up for the sassy criss-cross neon lights or the voluptuous stack of green blocks in the corner.  When accidentally stepped on, visitors’ frantically look up in hope that the watchful eyes of the chaperone didn’t see and if they did, wave apologetically and move on.  If further flirting took place, the viewer would have discovered a name, “Zinc-Lead Plain” and brief background of the 1969 piece, where artist Carl Andre encourages visitors to participate and dance on his gal, in order to “feel the different densities of metal through our feet”.  Sadly not many suitors take notice and continually waltz around the camouflage squares, making their way to the next room of easy spotlight pieces.

"Zinc-Lead Plain"

Son of a marine craftsman, Andre attributed his love for natural materials through his upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts.  Growing up near navy shipyards, Andre fondly remembers the “rusting acres of steel plates” which laid out “under the rain and sun.”  It was Andre’s curious intrigue of his own surroundings that lead him to appreciate the simple lines and shapes of industrial materials such as hard steel and stoic lumbers of wood.  His interest in art grew when he attended the Phillip Academy in Andover, Massachusetts through a scholarship in 1951.  It was there that Andre discovered the “joys of making art” and received his only noted formal art training.  After traveling through Europe in 1954 and joining the United States Army Intelligence soon after, Andre nestled in New York where he began creating wooden “cut” sculptures influenced by artist Constantin Brancusi and former Academy classmate, Frank Stella.  Stella, another leading figure in the Minimal art movement, who shared studio space with Andre is noted to have said to Andre as he began removing hunks of wood from his art sculpture, “Carl, that’s sculpture too.”  And the rest, as they say, is history.  A self-proclaimed “matterist”, Carl Andre based his artwork on positioning his available materials of bricks, wood and steel within a particular “place”.  A “place” which helps “make the general environment more conspicuous”, arranging the artwork within the area so as to bring out the “quality of the environment” and the “work which has been done” within.  In 1964 Andre created the controversial Equivalent VIII which consisted of eight rectangular sculptures laid out on the floor, each made up of 120 bricks.  Some called it an “insouciant masterpiece” while others said a “pile of bricks”, yet all eagerly wanted to learn and understand more.

Equivalent VIII (http://art.yorkshire.com/media/33974/andrehuddersfield.jpg)

In an interview of May 1995, Andre remembers a discussion he had with abstract painter Ad Reinhardt as they were jokingly teasing each other about whose medium is better than the other.  “Sculpture is what you trip over when you back away from a painting to look at it.”  said Reinhardt playfully, and Andre quickly replied, “Well, when you turn the lights out, the paintings disappears, but you still trip over the sculpture.”  Andre wanted people to appreciate the beauty and make up of materials with as much admiration as how they see the colors in a painting.  His cool and collected “Zinc-Lead Plain” embodies the spirit, if not viewed on purpose she is there to at least step on and apologize soon after…whichever one comes first.