Less is still less

The work of Carl Andre, one of the only Minimalists to accept the term, is often as barely there as sculpture can get. In the first book to survey his ascetic half-century career, a maximalist doorstop published this month by Phaidon, the art historian Alistair Rider, relates the story of a German artist who enthusiastically sought out Andre’s work at a gallery in 1967, only to become confused when he couldn’t find it.

This was because the work, 100 square plates of hot-rolled steel arranged in a rectangle almost completely covering the gallery entry-way, was directly beneath his feet.

He had mistaken it for the flooring, a mistake that comes with the territory in Andre country, where art — as Andre has said — gets perilously “close to zero,” meant to be experienced as much with the body as with the eyes and mind.

For more than two decades, Andre, who turns 76 this year, has been almost as spectral a presence in the art world as his most inconspicuous floor pieces. He has shown regularly, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and around the world, but he rarely appears in public and speaks for the record even less than he did when he was young, which was not a lot.

So, it was disconcerting to meet him one recent afternoon in the hallway outside his Greenwich Village apartment, where he was waiting on the other side of the elevator door; he smiled, stuck out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Carl Andre.”

Andre still dresses in the bib overalls that have been his uniform for decades, the sartorial stamp of an unorthodox lifelong Marxism. He also still lives in the same 34th-floor apartment, in a nondescript 1970s tower near New York University, where his life changed instantly and irrevocably one early morning in 1985, when his third wife, the promising Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, fell to her death from a bedroom window after an argument with Andre, who later told the police he was not in the room when she fell.

After a highly publicised trial, three years later, he was acquitted of second-degree murder, but the death cast a shadow over a difficult career, greatly reducing his visibility as a pioneer of one of the most important art movements of the postwar period.

The Mercer Street apartment became the symbolic locus of a deep divide in the art world between Andre’s friends and supporters and those who believed he was responsible for his wife’s fall, some of whom took up her death as a feminist cause at a time when female artists were struggling mightily for greater recognition.

Andre and his fourth wife, the artist Metissa Kretschmer, invited a reporter to the apartment for a rare yet wide-ranging conversation about the Phaidon book, Carl Andre: Things in Their Elements, and about a retrospective being planned by Dia:Beacon, for 2013, which will be the first American survey of his work since a 1970 show at the Guggenheim Museum.

The new show and the publication seem to suggest a slowly growing separation between views of Andre’s life and his work, beginning to occur as he has all but stopped travelling and making new work. Until relatively recently he insisted that pieces could be made only by him, on site, in response to the space where they would remain.

One of his last major permanent pieces — a long-planned outdoor work for the Chinati Foundation, the shrine to Minimalism in Marfa, Texas — was installed last year based on his plans but without his presence. Called “Chinati Thirteener,” the work covers a courtyard space of a U-shaped former Army barracks.

It is formed of a bed of brown gravel, atop which 13 separated rows of steel plates sit, evoking the railroad tracks that run conspicuously through the heart of Marfa — though, strictly speaking, Andre’s works aren’t supposed to evoke anything other than the materials from which they are made and the space they occupy.

During a reporter’s visit to Marfa in the spring, the plates, which had originally been a flat gray, had begun to bloom with what Rob Werner, Chinati’s curator at large, called “chrysanthemums of rust,” bright orange arcs and triangles formed by moisture on the metal.

The story of the evolution of his one big idea (though he shies away even from a word so indefinite, insisting, “There are no ideas hiding under those plates — they’re just plates”) has taken deep root in the lore of Minimalism over the years. Andre and the painter, Frank Stella, befriended each other in New York in the late 1950s, and Andre was deeply influenced by Stella’s rigidly pared-down parallel-line paintings.

As Andre tells it, on one occasion he was carving a Brancusi-inspired vertical wood sculpture with recesses suggesting the spaces between ladder rungs, when Stella took a look at the plain, uncarved back of the sculpture and remarked that it was good sculpture too. What he had apparently meant was that Andre might consider carving that side as well, but Andre understood the words differently, that perhaps the untouched flat side of the timber was better than what he had carved. He decided that Stella was right, “I had been thinking about using plain units of material anyway,”' he said, “but that absolutely crystallised it.”

He began, in a formulation that became the bedrock of his work, to think of sculpture not as cuts in materials but as cuts in space formed by materials. Or, as he also put it, with a Delphic flair that has marked his writing and a large body of word-based work he has made throughout his career, “A thing is a hole in a thing it is not.”

More than those of almost any 20th-century sculptor, his pieces have commanded space not vertically but horizontally, along the ground, which he describes as partly a practical matter. “Art is about seizing and holding space,” he said. “And it was always easier to do that by putting 144 pieces along the floor than by stacking them up.”' (He laughed when it was suggested that, in a sense, his works own the air rights above them.) But the flatness is also quintessentially American; he considers roads, he said, to be ideal sculptures.

The narrow road that Andre set for himself as an artist, one from which he has rarely strayed, has never been easy, even before the Mendieta case. Only over the past decade has he been able to live off the proceeds of the sale of his work, according to Rider, the art historian. For a time in the 1960s he paid the bills by working as a freight brake-man and conductor on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The Phaidon book does not address the questions surrounding Mendieta’s death head-on but acknowledges that it remains difficult to separate from his career.

“Reputations, it should be emphasised, never exist outside time,” Rider writes. Asked about the effect the death has had on him, Andre spoke forthrightly, if only briefly. “It didn’t change my view of the world or of my work, but it changed me, as all tragedy does,” he said. “But I have people who love me and believe in me.”

In the twilight of his career he seems to have little interest in memorialising it. Though he agreed to be interviewed to promote the Phaidon monograph, he declined to be photographed for this article and referred to the book almost dismissively in a terse Q and A on Phaidon’s web site as a thing “assembled by others from fragments of my work,” like a “geological core sample.”

Of the Dia:Beacon retrospective, he said — over Kretschmer's chiding — that he had informed the curators, “I can’t stop you from doing it, but don’t expect me to do anything to help.” He allowed that he might go to see it, but would not go so far as to say that he might enjoy it. “I’m a rather phlegmatic person,” he said conclusively, at the end of a three-hour interview. “I can’t really experience a thing until I’ve experienced it.”