Carl Andre: Blue Lock, 1966

by Christine Mehring , 1997

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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.