17 March – 22 April 2006
Sculpture
“I have no art ideas; I only have art desires.'
1970
I am certainly no kind of Conceptual artist because the physical existence of my work cannot be separated from the idea of it. That’s why I said I [have] no art ideas; I only have art desires. To speak of ideas as conceptions in a philosophical sense and then to think of ideas for art - well, that is to speak about two utterly different things. I think what we really mean to do is to apply ourselves to the language we use in the most rigorous sense. As Confucius said, when he was asked what he would do if he were made the prime minister of the duchy where he lived, 'The first thing I would do is call things by their right names. This is why I wish to separate myself entirely from any Conceptual art or even with ideas in art. My art springs from my desire to have things in the world that would otherwise never be there. By nature, I am a materialist, an admirer of Lucretius. It is exactly these impingements upon our sense of touch and so forth that I’m interested in. The sense of one’s own being in the world confirmed by the existence of things and others in the world. This, to me, is far beyond being as an idea. This is a recognition, a state of being, a state of consciousness – and I don’t wish at all to be portrayed a mystic in that. I don’t think that that’s mystical at all. I think it’s a true awareness that doesn’t have anything to do with mysticism or religion. It has to do with life as opposed to death and a feeling of the true existence of the world in oneself. This is not an idea. An idea is a much lower category on my scale in that awareness, that consciousness.'
Tuchman, ‘An Interview with Carl Andre’, 60, cited in CUTS Carl Andre Texts 1959 – 2004 (Cambridge (MA) USA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 85
07 February - 20 March 2004
Black White Carbon Tin
'What properties in materials do you identify with? Why do you continue to use the same materials? What is it that changes in your work from piece to piece?
'My formulation for sculpture (form-structure-place) left out my main concern: matter.'
Taken from a series of questions submitted in writing to Carl Andre by Jack Risley and John Zinsser in April-May 1990, published in the Journal of Contemporary Art.
Sadie Coles HQ is delighted to present the gallery’s second show with the American artist Carl Andre. The show will feature sonnets from 1963 and new sculptures made from graphite bricks.
Through his sculptures Andre has sought to renegotiate conventions of display, forcing a dialogue between the object and its surroundings. The sculptural form is no longer an end in itself, but rather the residue of an intervention into space. Brancusi’s Endless Column (1938) has often been cited as a point of reference – a reference sustained by Andre’s own comment: ‘My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road. That is, a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point’. The materials themselves used in their elemental, unadulterated form are somehow redefined through their sculptural possibilities. And within his poetry Andre carries out a similar reassessment. Just as the hierarchy between form and space is overthrown in his sculpture and the essential tools are reconsidered, the supremacy of language or linguistic meaning is undermined and the visual form of the poem assumes an equal standing.
Carl Andre lives and works in New York. His work has been included in group shows all over the world and he has had many solo shows, including retrospectives at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1970), Laguna Gloria Art Museum, Austin, Texas (1978), Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1987), Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1996) and Musée Cantini, Marseilles (1997).
13 December - 2 Febuary 2001
Words and Small Fields
A two-part exhibition of sculpture and text pieces by American artist Carl Andre opens this December at Sadie Coles HQ.
SMALL FIELDS are a unique group of new works made from either brass plates or steel magnets. The special thing about these sculptures is their size – each unit measures only a few centimetres - so the tiny fields are small-scaled examples of Andre’s familiar formats. Laid out in the gallery, the alternating vertical and horizontal fields transform the space with their surprising scale to make the room feel like an enormous plateau.
SHOOTING A SCRIPT is a project that Andre has been working on for 25 years. The seventeen pages of manuscript, typed (with errors) on an old-fashioned typewriter, represent Andre’s attempt to find a geometric format for the 18 parallel but contradictory eyewitness accounts of a gunfight in Waco, Texas, in 1898. Various characters repeat, with increasing confusion, the violent end of ‘Bran the Iconoclast’ and his mortal enemy Tom Davies. Andre’s attempt to marshal these accounts into the structure of a poem, within a minimal layout, echoes the form of his sculptures but also gives the impression of a music score conveying the cacophony of the witnesses voices.
The original pages of typescript are exhibited at the gallery, and the whole project, SHOOTING A SCRIPT, is published as a limited edition artist’s book in an edition of 78.