Literality and Absence of Self in the Work of Carl Andre

This essay considers a short period in the early career of the Minimalist Carl Andre, in order to show that the literality arrived at in his work was not simply posited as an a priori characteristic of the materials he used, but was produced as a rhetorical effect through the negation of conventional artistic modes of expression through such procedures as dissociation and mechanical self-patterning. To support this reading, the essay also considers the parallel development undergone by Andre's poetic production in the same period. According to this view, literality is treated as a figure rather than the absence of the figural. The absence of self that is the correlative of literality is then reconsidered in the light of the view. It is argued that the absence of self in Andre's work is similarly produced as a rhetorical effect, but what follows from this is not the reintroduction of self in the form of the producer of such an effect, but rather an insight into the figurality of self as contingent upon its material realisation.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Minimalism (technical communication) · Negation · Period (music) · Physics · Poetry · Realisation · Rhetorical question · Self · Mathematics · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory

• Privileging the Object of Sculpture

  Open Access•David J Getsy•Art History•2005

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