Carl Andre: Haus Lange/Haus Esters, Krefeld/Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

Early in his career Carl Andre summarized the history of 20th-century sculpture with a simple maxim: "Sculpture-as-shape; sculpture-as-structure; sculpture-as-place." Shaped or modeled sculpture was the dominant practice from antiquity until Rodin; structural sculpture, a sculpture of repeated, joined units, emerged with Tatlin and Brancusi. In "sculpture-as-place" these units are unattached and laid directly on the floor; inviting one to walk around and across it, it's a sculpture that solicits bodily participation.

The best example of "sculpture-as-place" is of course Andre's own work - the terminus of a narrative that leaps rather breathlessly from Phidias to the 1960s. It was the special aim of this show to highlight this central aspect of Andre's project. Located in three exhibition spaces, including the Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld and the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (a smaller version subsequently appeared at the MoMA in Oxford), this latest Andre retrospective, the largest in the artist's career, stressed his sculpture's inextricable relationship with ambient space. As the show's curator, Eva Meyer-Hermann, observes in the catalogue, "In Andre's work place takes precedence over chronology, and the show is organized in terms of existing spaces."

Stressing the viewer's encounter with the work in various settings over other concerns such as chronology, Meyer-Hermann constructs an Andre whose practice has not evolved but is rather a continuity, a practice whose basic premises, developed three decades ago, are still pursued by the artist today. "With an oeuvre that has been taking shape for more than thirty-five years," the curator writes, "we expect to find that . . . one thing has evolved from another. Andre's sculpture possesses no such sequential hierarchy. Its basic postulates are the same now as they always were."

This thesis is convincing to a point. It is absolutely the case that Andre's method of arranging material units on the ground, often according to simple mathematical schema, has remained consistent since the creation of his brick works in 1966, the first to fully realize his notion of "sculpture-as-place." But did he always work this way? How did Andre come to produce the most horizontal sculpture of the century? In truth, the path to "sculpture-as-place" was hardly a fait accompli. Andre's work underwent a number of shifts during the years prior to the brick pieces, a trajectory that more or less follows the shape/structure/place narrative that he has himself suggested. He also produced several neo-Dada and "informe" works at the time. While some of Andre's early sculptures appeared in the show, their place within his development was somewhat obscured. For example, the Last Ladder, 1959, the final work from his carving phase, was shown at Wolfsburg with two recent "Manet" pieces in granite. The point was to stress Andre's consistency, and one can certainly observe a continuity between the vertical Ladder's repeated carved cavities and the rows of identical blocks in the "Manet" pieces. But the Ladder, following previous sculptural convention, is a vertical work; the granite works are horizontal. And while the Ladder is formed from a single piece of timber, the "Manets" are made of numerous discrete units. The series of decisions that led from one practice to the other could hardly be ascertained, especially as Andre's other carved works (not to mention such "structural" examples as Hourglass, 1962, and the "pyramid" pieces) were shown at Krefeld. Why were his few remaining early works presented separately, and halfway across Germany at that? Artists don't emerge in sui generis - they develop over time. Moreover, as the recent Mondrian retrospective showed, esthetic response may in fact be enhanced when an artist's trajectory is clearly mapped. A chronological account is especially useful when considering archetypally Modernist figures like Mondrian and Andre, whose practices consist in the elaboration of a particular formal system. Presenting Andre's achievement in an insistently present tense, "Carl Andre Sculptor 1996" was a warm celebration of a canonical artist, yet the show did little to explain how his practice actually emerged.

Despite its somewhat muddled presentation (an effect mitigated by the meticulous, chronologically organized catalogue) the exhibition, with its installational premise, could hardly fail to please, and the display of Andre's work was often exemplary. The villas in Krefeld, designed by Mies Van der Rohe, were filled with sculptures of a domestic scale. At Haus Esters one found exclusively horizontal works, while Haus Lange housed a more diverse group of sculptures: with its varied spaces, including public spaces downstairs and residential quarters above, it was the most appealing section of the show. Here were Andre's first brick pieces, the 1966 Lever and a recent version of the 1966 Equivalents I-VIII, the work that caused a scandal when one of its units was purchased by the Tate in the mid '70s despite the objections of Tories and tabloids alike. Here, too, was the 1966 Spill, a scatter piece of 800 plastic chips that anticipated the post-Minimal activities of Richard Serra and others. A smaller room upstairs contained Blue Eva Adamas, 1983, a work consisting of tiny, blue plastic units arranged in a grid pattern. Named for Eva Hesse, this fragile piece trembled and moved with each step.

The other section, "Wolfsburg at Large," was for me a more ambivalent experience. Wolfsburg, founded in 1938 as the site of Germany's Volkswagen plant, was intended, in the words of the Kunstmuseum's publicity literature, to be "a showpiece of [Nazi] urban, industrial and social policy," an all-Aryan town producing cars for the Volk. World War II may have "put an end to all of those plans" (the pamphlet is a masterpiece of subterfuge), yet the new Kunstmuseum has, since its creation in 1993, sought to acknowledge "the context within which it operates: in a city with a unique history, wedded to industry and technology."

In its attempt to lend cultural affirmation to Wolfsburg - a town whose "unique" history paralleled that of the work camp Bergen-Belsen, located just down the train tracks in Lower Saxony - the Kunstmuseum sports a factory look. Designed by Peter Schweger, it boasts metal grid ceilings, thrusting columns and an imposing atrium. Schweger is no Mies, and his deployment of an industrial vocabulary in these cavernous halls was disquieting. Whereas Andre's highly refined sculptures worked well with Mies' exquisitely detailed interiors, here they were overwhelmed. The sculptor's largest work, the 6 Metal Fugue (for Mandeleev), 1995 - a sculpture whose previous incarnation spanned the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum - took up a mere quarter of the Kunstmuseum's main hall. To be sure, the Wolfsburg installation was impressive, affording a view of several large works at once, and the side galleries allowed a more concentrated viewing of smaller works. But compared to the finely tuned Krefeld section it had a less convincing scale. "Sculpture-as-place," in Andre's sense, suggests a perceptual equilibrium attained between viewer, work, and site. This relation is called scale. A scale calibrated to the body, the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, distinguished the Minimalism of Andre and Judd from the Monumental work of Tony Smith and Ronald Bladen with which it is sometimes confused. At Krefeld Andre was presented as a Minimalist; at Wolfsburg he was transformed into a Monumentalist. It was precisely when this exhibition set up keen relations of scale that it most fulfilled the Andrean ideal of "sculpture-as-place."

- James Meyer