Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

In 1963 Carl Andre made a series of typed poems called Historical References.  Several of the pieces tell the story of Eadweard Muybridge and his wife Flora, Muybridge’s ‘animal locomotion’ work for Leland Stanford and Muybridge’s killing of Harry Larkyns, who was his wife Flora’s lover. Four hundred and sixty-five of the pieces are in the collection of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas, where examples are on permanent view. (Others are in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.) Each is on a sheet of standard, white, 8 1/2-by-11-inch paper.

While Muybridge’s Historical References works also address Jackson Pollock, Charles Lindbergh and plenty of others, I’ve been thinking about Andre’s Muybridge-related poems because National Book Award-winning author Edward Ball is recently out with a new book on the Muybridge-Stanford-Larkyns story. It’s titled “The Inventor and the Tycoon.” Ball came on this week’s Modern Art Notes Podcast to talk about it. While this work dates to early in Andre’s career, it’s hard not to be fascinated by work of his that directly addresses the story of an artist who was acquitted of murder.

These Andres are simply typed words on single sheets of paper, but they’re strikingly physical. Reading them is difficult: As I worked through each of the little boxes above, I felt myself slowing down the movements of my eyes so that I could makewordsoutof each stringofcharacters. I was conscious of moving my head ever-so-slightly to move from one box to the next across the page, and then down it. I’m tall, so after reading about 10 type-boxes I was conscious of how hard it was to stand there, perfectly still and bent half-over, so that I could work through each box.

A few days before I was at Chinati I’d been at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, where I’d walked on Andre’s Slit (1981). As it turns out, there’s a relationship between the physicality of reading Andre’s poems and walking on one of his floor pieces. Both do their work on the viewer only when you physically engage with them, when you make yourself do something you’re not accustomed to do: Even now, 45 years after the first Andre floor piece, I’m not accustomed to walking on sculpture. I’ve walked on at least two dozen of them and the act still produces a thrill rooted in transgression. I am accustomed to reading books or magazines, I’m even accustomed to reading e.e. cummings poems or Guillaume Apollinaire calligrammes. I am not similarly accustomed to reading perfect little boxes made up entirely of letters. Solving each box is a little thrill. It feels like code-breaking.

“Andre designed the shape of poetry according to his own understanding of the word as a concrete module, similar to the squares of industrial metal, wooden timbers, or bricks in his signature three-dimensional pieces,” wrote Chinati’s Rob Weiner in an essay on the typed works in Chinati’s collection. “His poems don’t always incorporate complete sentences, phrases, or even associative terms, but use words sequentially.”

That’s kind of a big deal: Andre’s use of type and words echo Muybridge’s use of sequential images: They don’t present the entire thing. Instead each is a utilization of a tool (typed letters or photographs), something that gives us a fuller — but not complete — understanding of a thing (with spaces inserted): “MUYBRIDGE MAKING PHOTOGRAPH OF SENATOR STANFORDS FAST GELDING OCCIDENT” or “FLORA MUYBRIDGE BEING INTRODUCED TO MAJOR HENRY LARKYNS FOR THE FIRST TIME.” (Maj. Larkyns’ first name was actually ‘Harry,’ but oh well.) [Image: Muybridge, Occident Trotting at a 2:20 Gait, 1878. Collection of the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, Stanford University.]

But what I love most about Andre’s poems is that they fit in these perfect little areas and that they seem to fill them so completely. Each word-box in the sheet from Historical References above is nine characters wide (MUYBRIDGE: nine characters) and seven characters tall. Andre makes it all fit, every time (with one typo). This took concept, planning and detailed foresight. Sure, there are spaces between the parts of each letter, but somehow my I remember each as a fuller, blacker box of text than it really is.

(I can relate the difficulty of that to my own experiences as a young journalist in the mid-1990s. Once upon a time, newspaper writers wrote to a certain number of column-inches: In my example, I wrote my stories in Microsoft Word and had to figure out how many characters translated into how many column inches in the newspaper’s software. That was 20 years ago, but I still remember that for the paper I wrote most often, 220 characters equaled a column-inch. Writing to almost exactly 15 inches — 3,300 characters — was a challenging abstraction to fulfill.)

Finally, Andre’s sheet on Muybridge ends with something of a puzzle: It references Muybridge’s ascent of Cloud’s Rest in Yosemite (or perhaps an Ascent of Cloud’s Rest?) in around 1875. Andre’s reference is probably to a series of stereographs Muybridge made along the trail to Cloud’s Rest. Perhaps Andre is closing his narrative by referencing a minor Muybridge series of narrative photographs. Otherwise, I’m stumped. Readers?

Related: Chinati newsletter No. 16 includes several essays on Andre, including a Caitlin Murray write-up on Andre’s typed poems. [The pictures here are details that I took on a recent visit to Chinati. Click on each image to see the full-size JPEGs.]