Sorry to go off topic but this is Modernism gone wrong. Biggest con of all. Placing objects in space? Andre admits he doesn't bother to spend much time on his designs. Yeah no kidding. He said that he waits until he gets to the venue and then he allows the space to influence his design. For the love of god, you neatly stacked bricks in a 6x10 rectangle. You placed metal squares on a floor in a checkerboard pattern. How original.
Carl Andre must have been laughing his head off when he was home alone.

Check out his mature sculptures:
https://www.moca.org/exhibition/carl...pture-as-place


Also, have you seen this guy's poems? He used a typewriter to set down text in rows and columns and people enjoy finding comparisons between his choice of text columns and his minimalist sculptures.

blue
wash blue
cut wash blue
sing cut wash blue
word sing cut wash blue
cry word sing cut wash blue

(he would hate what I did here because it has lost the original typewritten look)

http://galeriearnaudlefebvre.com/exhibit.php?exhibit=52

"Andre has never learnt to type properly, and later confessed that all his typewritten poems had been produced by hitting the keys with the finger of one hand. But for him this was important in that it made the act of setting them down all the more machine-like. “It was like actually embossing or applying physical impressions on to a page”, he later explained, “almost as if I had a chisel and was making a cut or a dye and making a mark on metal.”


oh brother

We know Carl Andre is terrible, but it tells us nothing about Modern Art other than its worst examples are gimmicky.

Perhaps he was, but the joke could hardly be said to be on the Tate Gallery. From the link:

Speaking of 1972, I wouldn't mind having a little piece of Robin Hood Gardens.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-41931440

In my salad days, I thought philosophy was interesting. So I opted to take an introductory course, Philosophy 7 (only philosophy would number the introduction "7"). The first assigned book was Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception." I got through exactly one-half on one page. When I got to this:

I would sense precisely insofar as I would coincide with the sensed, insofar as the latter ceases to have a place in the objective world. and insofar as it signifies nothing to me.

I gave up; alas, this did indeed signify nothing to me. But not wanting to let my first "sensation" queer the deal, I tried again. I lasted a page and half this time. He rattled on incessantly about a white spot on a "homogenous" background.

Luckily for me, Nixon invaded Cambodia and all hell broke loose on campus (I was among the chief hell-raisers); all classes were cancelled, and we all got "B"s. (Not quite so lucky for the Cambodians.)

https://people.rit.edu/kecncp/Course...70904_045r.JPG

IMHO, when the background surface upon which the "painting" rested is as "interesting" as the "painting" itself, the "artist" was a fraud. In this case, a drunkard and fraud. When Pollock asked his wife "Is this a painting?" one suspects he knew the answer. No matter how much Greenberg or his descendants rhapsodize about indexical interpretations or fuliginous flatness.

I don't understand why anyone writes like that, and I don't understand why anyone reads that sort of prose. It feels like masking thoughtless ideas under a visage of academia, and I call bogus on it. It really doesn't, and shouldn't, require impenetrable writing to understand this artwork.

There are sooooo many other art humanities, history, and philosophy books available. Most are easy to understand and will give you an appreciation of the work at hand. Reading the stuff posted is like giving up on math because you started with Reimann, though I don't think the comparison is fair. Reimann has actual purpose, and I can't be sure the writing posted here has any at all.