7. A LESSON FROM CARL ANDRE
“Closure of 3 vectors indicates the possibility of art production”
My wife bought me an exhibition postcard made by Carl Andre and gave it to me for Christmas last year. It was from a 1976 exhibition called Prime Terrane at the Portland Center for Visual Arts and included stones that Carl Andre had found and placed atop concrete blocks. I was happy to receive this postcard because there aren’t many out there. There is this one in the Wayne State archives, there is one referenced in the materials from Sculpture as Place, a Dia:Beacon exhibition, which is probably the same one that is referenced in this PDF from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s catalog, listing it as being from the collection of the artist.
Anyway, I have one, and this is a photo of my edition:
Carl Andre exhibition postcard (1976), offset print on paper, 6”x4”(front)
What strikes me about this offset printed card is the diagram. It succinctly describes the convergence of three requirements along three continuums which are necessary for a work of art to manifest: the artist, the materials, and the money.
I already have the glacial stone, and it has some objective characteristics that stand in relation to the subjective characteristics of me as the artist (including my body, my flexibility to pick up and leave for a third of a year, et cetera). These are also entangled with the need to finance an expedition-scale project like this.
I posted yesterday about not advancing to the final round of Creative Capital for this project for this award cycle. My budget for this project is 12 pages long, and surpasses the CC award amount anyway. Even if I eventually land an award for this project, I’ll still need to bring other partners to the table.
When I look at this image on the Andre postcard it is clear to me that there is another temporality at play in the movement of this granite stone to the Arctic Ocean, and it’s not the temporality of deep time, or the pace of a slow walk north. It is the economic pace and the timing of institutional support that will determine when this subjective artist (with all of my contingencies and relational entanglements) takes this objective stone (which isn’t going anywhere on its own) to the mouth of the Hudson Bay.
One way or another, it’s going to happen, but not until I can pull together the institutional support. If your institution can help, I’m happy to talk.