3.28.25 — Control Freaks
One more excerpt this week of this site’s rich history, after a look in depth last time at a work by at Rembrandt. If I may stop a tad short of the present in art’s history, I take you back to the site’s beginning. Carl Andre’s 1995 show was too good to be true. This was Minimalism as fine sculpture—or at least designer furniture. Its purity would outlast the passing tastes of a multimedia age, much less another weekend in Soho. The handsome, polished surfaces proclaimed no less, or did they?
On a closer look, one could start to see why performance art and Minimalism grew up together. Both put the artist as actor right in the space. Both celebrate chaos while tormenting the viewer with blankness and boredom. Both challenge the community to a game, and the artist refuses to be the first to quit. And yet the community may find at last a gesture of welcome. Every so often I like to use this blog to excerpt an extended essay in review of a single artist and invite you to read more. Here I take you back to almost the beginnings of this Web site, eighteen years before my home page even had a blog.
Entering at Soho’s pioneering gallery, Paula Cooper, I faced only the bare walls. At my feet, two broad paths curved slowly toward the far corners. I mistook their smooth, off-white paving for marble, but the actual cedar planks were hardly less refined. They touched at one corner, angled apart precisely to remap the room.
Clearly I was mistaken, too, in thinking of paths. A sign by the door forbid me to touch, let alone leave a footprint. For three decades, Carl Andre has made plain materials laid flat to the ground into his signature, and this time no one was going to efface it. He might as well have set his literal mark on woven paper, to be preserved behind glass. The alleged participatory art of the 1990s and “relational esthetics” may seem far away.
Careful not to nudge the curves one inch aside, I walked hesitantly forward, and the floor narrowed uncomfortably beneath me. Only another visitor stood between me and a dead end. As I looked at him and back at the door, 
I knew I stuck out. A safer part of the floor lay maybe a yard away. I considered jumping, but I might not make it, so I retraced my steps to the gallery entrance. The phrase “walking the plank” started to sound all too pointed.
In the modernist insistence on materials, Postmodernism has seen a reductive arrogance. They note the signature of the creative genius, the artist’s insistent control over the viewer’s experience. Feminist critics know, too, that “he” is almost always the right pronoun. To add injury to mythic insult, Andre may have caused his wife’s death. Yet as I leaned gingerly over the hard wood he had so lovingly prepared, I thought how different, how unpretentious, Minimalism once seemed—like a model for the subversive everyday art of Joseph Zito and Neo-Minimalism today.
From the first drawings scrawled on cave walls like graffiti, art has shouted, pleaded, seduced, and cajoled: “look at me.” Often it served kings and churches. Increasingly it had to please new wealth—or the artist alone. Either way, it said, “I control what goes through your head.” All that changed with the 1960s. It was time for artists and patrons to stand aside so that others could take a look around.
Now there was world enough and time to enter the experience of what one sees, and what you saw was what you got. With Tony Smith in sculpture or with Minimalism, even seemingly prefabricated art turned from the denotation of oil painting to the connotation of the everyday. Recall that man who stood between me and a dead end. He was really quite at ease, his back arched comfortably against the wall. Something made me too want to hang around. As I at last turned to go, he reached out his arm to welcome his girlfriend.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.