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.