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Artist or Maker: Carl Andre (b. 1935)
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Provenance: Acquired from the artist
Doug Ohlson, New York
His sale; Christie's, New York, 16 November 1999, lot 33
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
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Exhibited: Krefeld, Haus Lange und Haus Esters and Wolfsburg, Kunstmuseum, Carl Andre Sculptor, February-April 1996, p. 69, no. 4 (illustrated in color).
Marseille, Musée Cantini, Sculptor 1997 Carl Andre, July-September 1997, p. 94.
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Literature: C. Andre and A. Westwater, Carl Andre Sculpture 1958-74, Bern, 1975, p. 19.
R. Sartorius, Carl Andre, Eindhoven and Den Haag, 1987, p. 16.
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Notes: Executed in 1964, Fir Crankshaft Exercise is a unique and rare sculpture dating from Carl Andre's return to the art scene. From the end of the 1950s, Andre had worked on the railroads, writing poetry and occasionally creating his sculptures. However, in 1964, the year that he created Fir Crankshaft Exercise, he was asked to participate in a joint exhibition at which he showed his Cedar Pyramid, and from this moment onwards was one of the high-profile leading lights of Minimalism.
Fir Crankshaft Exercise is the result of a progression of cuts into a piece of fir, which Andre used a lot in his sculptures of the period, preferring humble, everyday materials. There is a formal elegance to the simple pattern of alternating cuts. It is space itself that appears to have been cut with these rigid, right-angled incisions. This sculpture is the product of repeated actions, of Andre again and again angling and re-angling the block in order to eke out the final shape, which itself has been dictated by repetition, granting this the formal elegance of a gothic column, reimagined for an age of industry, geometry and Minimalism.
Andre's sculptures are not intended to be autonomous, self-contained objects, although he stated that they contain all the ideas that they need. His is an art that is not self-referential, that is, not involved with the nature or purpose of art. Instead, it is a statement of metaphysics, or rather of physicality: "My work has not been about the least condition of art but about the necessary condition of art. I will always try to have in my work only what is necessary to it" (C. Andre, quoted in K. Baker, Minimalism: Art of Circumstance, New York, London & Paris, 1988, p. 52). Fir Crankshaft Exercise has an insistent physicality that extends to our understanding of the real, physical world around us. The directness of Andre's act, of his shaping of this block of wood into this modern, sleeper-like curlicue or crankshaft, owes itself in part to the legacy of Constantin Brancusi, whose Endless Column this sculpture echoes. However, under Andre's direction, the cult of the material, the worship of the raw elements that compose sculpture, becomes an emphatic expression of existence itself.
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