cover image Cuts: Texts 1959-2004

Cuts: Texts 1959-2004

Carl Andre. MIT Press (MA), $48 (317pp) ISBN 978-0-262-01215-7

While Andre's minimalist contemporaries Robert Smithson and Donald Judd are almost as revered for their writings as for their art, Andre has, until now, had his greatest textual presence in Lucy Lippard's acclaimed assemblage Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, which features a number of Andre interviews and texts. The title of this collection is remarkably apt. It features text that has been snipped out of letters and notebooks, poems and aphorisms that have accumulated over nearly 50 years, artist's statements demanded by varying shows in various eras, and material from interviews. These ""cuts"" have been sutured together by Meyer (Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties) and edited by him ""for clarity and flow."" (As for Andre, ""the vast majority of the texts he did not touch."") The results seem to reflect the editor's vision as much as the artist's, with ponderous headings (""Form"" ""Infinity"" ""Mass"" ""Time"") providing scant context for what largely feels like an artist's process work. They undoubtedly add to our knowledge of an important artist and of a crucial era in American art (particularly in Andre's many writings about other artists), but as a book, they do not add up to more than a miscellany.