Feature: Carl Andre reads his Poetry
“Most poetry is better comprehended when read aloud” – Carl Andre
Carl Andre was writing poetry before he was making sculpture. He started in the fifth grade, taking inspiration from the words of Byron, Keats, Shelley and Whitman read aloud to him by his father. When Andre moved to New York in 1957, his primary artistic motivations were literary, and he continued to produce poems consistently into the 1970s.
Although Andre’s work with words is considered secondary to his prolific career as a sculptor, there is a consistency between the two both in the methods employed and the forms produced. While the sculptures are constructed through the arrangement of preexisting materials such as copper tiles, clay bricks, and wood blocks, his poems are similarly built from words borrowed from external sources.
To create the poems, Andre breaks down his selected texts and systematically rearranges the words following a predetermined logic. In some cases Andre imitates literary genres like the sonnet, novel, or opera, and in others the structure is fundamentally visual, with the words arranged as a map, a banner, or a trickle. The poems cover a wide range of subjects including politics, history, and the artist’s biography, depending on the original texts from which the words are selected.
QUINCY INDEX I, for example, is a straightforward alphabetical list of proper nouns that describe Quincy, Massachusetts, the town where Andre was born. AN ABSOLUTION FOR THE NAMES OF WORDS, in contrast, is an arrangement of words from the front page of the New York Times on the day following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, organized according to the frequency with which they were used in press covering the event.
Andre has always been conscious of the two aspects of poetry: as an image on the page, and as words, spoken. Paula Cooper Gallery has regularly exhibited Andre’s poems as images, and is thrilled to share this selection of printed pages in combination with the words read aloud by the artist for the very first time. For more information on these and other poems by Carl Andre, please email info@paulacoopergallery.com.
Further listening:
During an exhibition of his poetry at Lisson Gallery, London, in 1975 Carl Andre spoke to William Furlong of Audio Arts, a cassette-based audio magazine produced from 1973 to 1996. In the recording, Andre moves through the gallery describing the poems and the texts they reference, connecting his work to American history. Listen to the cassette here.
In 2006 Carl Andre read a selection of his poems at the Tate Modern, his first time performing to a live audience since the 1970s. Listen to the reading and a discussion between Andre and the art historian Richard Cork here.
On the occasion of the artist’s retrospective Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010 in 2015, Dia invited Pierre Leguillon to speak about Carl Andre as part of their Artists on Artists lecture series. Listen to the audio or watch a video of the lecture.
All images © 2020 Carl Andre / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.