Reacting against Clement Greenberg’s declaration that the trajectory of modernism was to flatten the medium to a purely visual surface, minimalist artists took control of the critical discourse. Through published essays and manifestos, artists emphasized the sensory experience of the primary elements of their works. As artists’ writing became more significant, the distinction between sculpture, painting and language blurred. While his colleagues used a prose style of writing to explain and encourage a new literality in art, Carl Andre rebelled against the dominance of structured language by focusing on the “objecthood,” the essential property, of a word or a letter. By tearing up the roots of what he called the “prevailing order of language,” Andre succeeded in developing a criticism that was not divorced from its object.
Andrea Rosen Gallery
4th Steel Square . 2008
Lever . 1966
