Carl Andre: Blue Lock, 1966

Carl Andre describes his early work as first form- and then structure-oriented. Beginning with his planar floor sculptures of the mid-sixties, which have become emblems of minimalism, the emphasis on structure then gave way to a concern with place. The viewer’s temporal and spatial experience of a sculpture became more important than the work’s intrinsic structural relationships.¹ Andre in fact considers drawing unsuitable to his goals because he understands it as giving precedence to the conceptual over the experiential. He prefers to call his works on paper “meditations on sculptures.”

The work pictured here relates to Andre’s three-dimensional Blue Lock Trial of 1966, and Blue Lock and Black Lock, both of 1967 and since destroyed. Modular rectangular chipboard slabs form a rectangle in the first object and a square in the latter two. All three were executed as models; hence the painted, non-durable material.²

The drawing translates central aspects of those three works into two dimensions. Andre’s Locks were among the first of his sculptures designed to direct the viewer through a specific spatial experience. A gray line frames each of the two ground plans, articulating and enclosing the surrounding space, very much the way the sculpture does in three dimensions. The letters filling the adjacent grids are oriented in four directions. As a consequence, the viewer turns the sheet and observes it from shifting points of view, paralleling the movement of a viewer around and across the Locks. Not registered in the drawing, however, are other spatial effects of the sculpture, such as the fragmented view from its top or the distortion of perspective that can turn a rectangle into a trapezoid when the sculpture is viewed from a distance.

The Lock sculptures fluctuate between order and disorder. The grid structure “locks” or fastens all its modules in place. Since the units are not attached to each other, however, the viewer’s movement over them shifts the plates slightly, disrupting the regularity of the grid.³ This lapse of order into disorder is reflected in the drawing in two ways. Whereas the figures in the lower section follow the thicker lines of the paper grid, those in the upper section deviate from it, creating a tension between the drawn and the printed grids. Furthermore, the regular patterns of the words lock and blue contrast with the irregularity of their handwritten letters, an effect that is especially visible in the lower right section, where the letters are mirrored distortedly along the grid’s lines.

Finally, the virtual disappearance of mass as it presses into the ground in Andre’s flat and thin Locks is reiterated in the drawing as well. With the exceptions mentioned above, the drawn grid mimics the paper grid and lets it shine through, thus creating a similar effect of merging with the ground.

Notes:

1. Carl Andre, "Interview with Carl Andre," by Phyllis Tuchman, Artforum 8 (June 1970): 55.
2. Blue Lock Trial is what Andre calls a "paint sample," a color test for Blue Lock; it is owned by Lawrence Weiner, of New York. Blue Lock was executed for the American Sculpture of the Sixties exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum. Hence the notations "NY" and "LA" in the drawing. Black Lock, a second version for the same show when it moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was painted black in memory of Ad Reinhardt, who had just died. At the time, Andre could not afford to execute the sculptures in steel. Although it violated his concern for the inherent properties of a material, the "expedient unsolution to the problem" was to use chipboard and paint the LA Lock blue to indicate steel, in the manner of engineers' construction plans. The sculpture was executed as originally intended, titled Den Haag Steel Lock, for the Haags Gemeentemuseum, in 1968. (Andre, conversations with the author in New York, 11 August 1996, and by phone, 7 March 1997.) Andre has also said that to him at the time blue denoted "objectness." (Andre, "Interview," 49.)
3. Andre notes that walking on his sculptures requires a basic "tactile tact of the spectator." (Andre, "Interview," 47.) This dialectic of order and disorder is diminished in Andre's "magnetic fields" of the same period, in which magnets keep the grid firmly in place.

Citation:
Text by Christine Mehring, from "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection (Harvard University Art Museums, in association with Daco-Verlag Gunter Bläse, 1997; reprinted 1998). ©1997 President and Fellows of Harvard College.