Andre, Carl

Andre, Carl (1935– ). American sculptor and poet, one of the best-known exponents of Minimal art. He was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, and from 1951 to 1953 attended Phillips Academy at Andover, in the same state, where he became a close friend of his fellow pupil Frank Stella. For the next decade he was variously employed (in the US Army and as railroad brakeman and conductor, for example), before beginning to exhibit sculpture in New York in the mid-1960s, notably at the ‘Primary Structures’ show in 1966. Typically he produces his sculptures by placing identical ready-made commercial units (bricks, cement blocks, metal plates, etc.) in simple geometrical arrangements without adhesives or joints; the works are dismantled when not on exhibition. His most characteristic pieces abjure height and are arranged as horizontal configurations on the floor (‘more like roads than buildings', in his own words); some of them are even intended to be walked upon. However, Andre has also used three-dimensional ‘natural’ products such as logs or bales of hay as his units, and in addition has made ‘scatter pieces’ consisting of randomly spilled bits of plastic. Sometimes his sculptures are so visually unremarkable that they fail to be recognized as human artefacts; in 1971, at an exhibition at Arnhem in the Netherlands, a work by him was mistaken for rubbish and cleared away by a park attendant. The term ‘Lost Sculptures’ (on the analogy of ‘found objects'—see OBJET TROUVÉ) has been applied to such works that may be read as nondescript parts of the everyday world.

In Britain Andre is best known for the sensational publicity accompanying ‘the Tate bricks’ episode in 1976. His Equivalent VIII (1966), consisting of 120 firebricks arranged two deep in a rectangle, was vandalized and there was an outcry about the alleged waste of public money on its purchase by the Tate Gallery (which had occurred some four years earlier). Andre made headlines again in 1985, when he was charged with murdering his wife (who died after falling from a window); he was acquitted of the charge.