Collection of texts by Carl Andre. Introduction by James Meyer, bibliography compiled by Jeffrey Thompson. Figures mentioned or included in the anthology include Tibor de Nagy, John Myers, Sol LeWitt, Leif Nylen, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Smithson, Hollis Frampton, Arshile Gorky, Eva Hesse, Konrad Fischer, Lee Lozano, Karl Marx, Robert Morris, John Chamberlain, Damien Hirst, David Novros, Brice Marden, Henri Matisse, Joseph Wright, Reno Odlin, Ezra Pound, David Sylvester, Auguste Rodin, Alexander Rodchenko, Vladimir Tatlin, Constantin Brancusi, EC Goossen, Michelangelo, David Smith, Gertrude Stein, Frank Stella, and George W. Bush. "Just as Carl Andre's sculptures are 'cuts' of elemental materials, his writings are condensed expressions, 'cuts' of language that emphasize the part rather than the whole. Andre, a central figure in minimalism and one of the most influential sculptors of our time, does not produce the usual critical essay. He has said that he is 'not a writer of prose,' and the texts included in Cuts - the most comprehensive collection of his writings yet published - appear in a wide variety of forms that are pithy and poetic rather than prosaic. Some texts are statements, many of them fifty words or less, written for catalog entries and press releases. Others are socratic dialogues, interwoven statements, or in the form of questionnaires and interviews. Still others are letters - public and private, lengthy missives and postcards. Some are epigrams and maxims (for example, on Damien Hirst : I DON'T FEAR HIS SHARK, I FEAR HIS FORMALDEHYDE) and some are planar poems, words and letters arranged and rearranged into different patterns. They are organized alphabetically by subject, under such entries as "art and Capitalism," "Childhood," "Entropy (After Smithson)," "Matter," "Other Artists," "Poetry," and "My Work," and they include Andre's reflections on Michelangelo and Duchamp, on Stein and Marx, and such contemporaries as Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, and Damien Hirst. The central theme of the book is the primacy of matter and the haptic encounter. Matter, according to Andre, is the essential ground of being and representation. Sculpture, of all the arts, is uniquely able to impart this fundamental truth : sculpture alone reveals its physical nature, the space it inhabits, and one's bodily being as existing within this space. The stakes of this claim are enormous. Sculpture, for Andre, is an antidote to the broader dematerializing tendency of advanced capitalism. In a world in which the replica and virtual encounter are prized, the experience of sculpture, of matter-as-matter, remains, the artist insists, fundamentally unassimilable." -- publisher's statement. Includes list of illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index.
