Carl Andre helped establish the terms of Minimalism, which shifted the focus of art in the 1960s away from the heroic gestures of Abstract Expressionism toward rudimentary forms and industrial materials. He was a practitioner of the movement at perhaps its most austere, working primarily from a limited range of elemental metals along with granite, wood and brick. Typically employed in the standard forms in which any contractor could order them from a foundry or quarry, the materials were arranged directly on the ground, with a plainness and Pythagorean purity that brought to mind cairns or sacred tessellation. “I’m not a zealot,” Mr. Andre said in a rare interview with The New York Times in 2011. “I’m only a zealot subjectively, for myself. I have found a set of solutions to a set of problems in sculpture, and I work within those parameters. But it is limits that give us possibilities. Without limits nothing really good can be accomplished. I feel I’ve been liberated by them.” He was best known for his floor pieces — tile-like squares of zinc (as with this work), copper, steel, aluminum and other metals arranged into larger squares or triangles, meant to be walked on so they could be experienced bodily as well as visually. Abjuring any claim to Conceptualism, Andre once said of the floor pieces: “There are no ideas hiding under those plates. They’re just plates.”
Note: although most museums that own floor pieces do not allow them underfoot for fear of damage/deterioration, that’s not the case here at the Aardt Foundation, where visitors are encouraged to experience the work as the artist intended (subject, perhaps, to an exception for persons wearing spike heels).
