In 1976, the Tate published in a biannual report that it had purchased Carl Andre’s Equivalent VIII, a 1966 sculpture consisting of an arrangement of 120 plain fire-bricks. Stacked two deep in a neat rectangle, six bricks across by 10 long, the pale bricks sit directly on the gallery floor. Tate still occasionally shows them as a classic example of minimalist art. If viewers look down as they skirt their terse, unyielding, low-slung presence, there isn’t much there to give them pause. It is a statement, if not a particularly deep one.
Neither particularly confrontational, nor enveloping, the familiarity of the materials and their arrangement are unlikely to provoke a shrug, much less argument. If there was once a mystery as to why they were there at all, it has long gone. This is what certain kinds of artists did then, and they still do such things now. We are accustomed to provocations of all sorts in the gallery. But for a long time Andre’s bricks – which became known as the Tate bricks – caused great controversy, generated newspaper headlines, febrile arguments and any number of cartoons and jokey photo-opportunities. Bricklayers offered to produce cut-price versions, and the Daily Mirror ran photos of smiling brickies with their own versions of Andre’s sculpture under the headline “ARTYCRAFTY: a brickbat from the boys on the building site”. Oh, how we laughed.
All eight of Andre’s Equivalent sculptures used the same numbers of similar bricks arranged in different configurations, though none as fanciful as the herringbone patterns and decorative squares of London building brick depicted in the Mirror. Andre’s sculpture also became the basis of an attack on Labour’s cultural policy by the Conservative opposition. Andre’s Equivalent sculptures took their title from a famous series of photographs of clouds by Alfred Stieglitz, and were also inspired, as was much of his work, by the four years he spent working on the Pennsylvania railroad as a brakeman, coupling and shunting chains of freight cars in the early 1960s. As well as providing an income, the work tore him away, he said, from the pretensions of art. A grandfather and an uncle had been bricklayers and building contractors, though this fact never made the British press.
Andre made sculpture and wrote poems as though he were arranging and rearranging wagons laden with steel and wood and coal. He stacked things up, and he laid them down, arranging things in ordered rows and squares and rectangles. Sometimes they took a bend. All this harked back to both his work in the freight yards and the wider context of his urban, industrial Massachusetts background. In his teens, the boy from Quincy, Massachusetts, also visited an aunt in England and went to see Stonehenge. This, and later visits to the gardens of Kyoto, remained abiding influences.
It was all a long time ago, and Andre’s death in a hospice at 88 makes the ideas and idealisms of minimal art feel like passions of another age which have now been thoroughly assimilated, digested, analysed and critiqued. Whether or not you recognised them as art, you could easily trip over Andre’s low stacks as you made your way across the gallery to look at something else. Viewers in the 1960s were unaccustomed to having to look down at art so close to the floor. Soon, Andre began making scatter pieces of tiles, and lines and grids of zinc, aluminium and steel plates that viewers were actually invited to walk over. They were rather beautiful, even as they became scuffed or scratched by people’s footwear. About more than just a display of materials, in all their variety and differences – the mute metallic greys, with their shifts in reflectivity, in warmth and weight and mass – it was space, and the idea of sculpture as a place, that was at the heart of what he did. For a long time Andre’s career, with its museum shows, prestigious galleries and acres of learned exposition continued apace. He, and minimalism, were canonised, even though, like Richard Serra, he rejected the term.
Somehow younger artists, like his audiences, had to find ways of negotiating Andre without tripping or stumbling. He invoked Taoism, and the simple idea of being there and slowing down. However radical it once was, and whatever the achievements of his sculpture and how beguiling and understated it could be, Andre’s work has had diminishing returns over the past half century. Artistic consistency and rigour can feel like repetitiveness, more of the same old same old. But one never went to Andre looking for novelty. It is always the same and always as different as looking at the sea.
Coming upon an Andre as you turn a corner in a gallery can be a lovely surprise. But for all the smaller controversies it has generated, it has become almost impossible to look down at Andre’s bricks, to tread his floors of metal plates, or gaze at his constructions of cut ash and cedar timbers, without thinking of the death of the young Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta, Andre’s third wife, who died in a fall from Andre’s 34th floor apartment in lower Manhattan, one night in September 1985.
The two had been drinking, and were alone. Neighbours had heard them arguing. Mendieta was 36, and they had been married eight months. Two days later Andre was charged over her death. He was never found guilty. After Mendieta’s death, Andre’s career faltered. He was called “the OJ of the art world”, in reference to OJ Simpson, and his shows were picketed. At one New York opening, more than 500 protesters showed up with placards reading “Where is Ana Mendieta?”
Some friends defended him (notably, Frank Stella helped pay his bail and defence) while others cut him off. Andre continued to live in the same apartment, and he married again, but his personal and artistic reputation never entirely recovered. Dementia took hold in his last years. Major museum shows in Europe continued after Mendieta’s death, while they dried up in North America for almost a quarter-century. For a long time catalogue essays, however serious, avoided mentioning Mendieta’s death.
Andre’s art had limits and limitations. He did what he did, in every sense, and did not have much truck with the academics and theoreticians who played such a part in his artistic elevation. He remains a divisive figure. In 2022, the American curator and writer Helen Molesworth made a lengthy series of podcasts examining Mendieta’s death. This is the fullest account I have come across about what might have happened that night and its repercussions at the time and in the light of the #MeToo movement and today’s cultural politics.
A dissection of art world mores, of money and morals and righteous indignation, Molesworth’s Death of an Artist is much more than a skewering of one man’s reputation, and grapples with the difficulties of looking at his art now. Can you still enjoy the work of an artist you personally revile? Molesworth is never to be taken lightly, and this utterly fascinating enquiry into personal and art world politics deals brilliantly with the ambiguities and ambivalences of Andre’s life and art, which remain inextricable.