The recent work of Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre at the Anthony D'Offay Gallery.
 
LONG BEFORE he became famous as the creator of the Tate Gallery's Equivalent VIII - alias The Pile of Bricks - Carl Andre used to while away his time by writing pastiche pop songs. 'Art and nature ain't never goin' to rendezvous / So rock with me baby and we'll rock the whole night through,' was one of his finest, penned in the late 1950s. Carl and the Minimalists didn't get it together as a rock band, so it was never recorded; still, it remains a useful summary of at least one of Andre's primary aesthetic principles.
 
Art and nature are no closer to a rendezvous in Andre's latest exhibition, 'Six Sculptures', at Anthony D'Offay Gallery. Andre still works with resolutely ordinary, workaday materials: the first work you see, or rather step on, as you enter the gallery is a spreading carpet of weathered, rusting sheets of steel, 45 in all, laid out in grid formation on the floor. The rest of the work on display, dating from the early 1980s to the present, testifies to Andre's continuing obsession with what, in the critical jargon of the 1960s and 1970s, was called horizontality and modularity. Seemingly purged of reference to anything other than the urban world, Andre's pat arrangements - of steel sheeting, of blocks of stone or lead - announce the strength of his continuing commitment to the reductivist faith. Evidently undeterred by the reception his bricks received at the hands of the British tabloids, The Minimalist They Couldn't Gag is back in town.
 
Andre's art is still, on the surface, as calculatedly banal as it ever was, with its endless self-repetitions and its complete rejection of technical virtuosity. His 128 Lead Solid...

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