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Carl Andre, Artisan

The American Minimalist artist Carl Andre identified himself as an ‘artisan’ and considered his work to be derived from what he referred to as the ‘crafts of tile-setting and bricklaying’. This article examines these claims, and seeks to clarify the definition of the artisan involved, situating it in relation to the figures of the artist and the worker. In terms of definition, artisanal labour or craft is considered in its historical relationships with industrial labour and the development of art in its modern, autonomous sense, and specifically in relation to Andre’s work via his references to Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. It is argued that the materials and mode of action in Andre’s work were suspended between two conditions, determined by the forming activity of what Marx referred to as ‘living labour’, related to ‘craft labour’ or ‘art’, and the deadened, ‘merely material’ character of labour in capitalist industrial production. The article concludes by considering Andre’s identification with the artisan in relation to Jacques Rancière’s critique and complication of its political representativeness.

This peer-reviewed output is intended as a contribution to art-historical scholarship concerned with the art of the 1960s and 1970s, but more specifically as a theoretical contribution to the academic discourse on craft and its relationship to art and work.