WINTERIZED

 

 

carl andre

 

 The last couple days I've been warmifying house and feet. Covered a window and screen door with polyethylene, a kinda clear plastic that lets the light through. Last year I let that room be cold all winter, but don't want a dead zone in the house this year. Put a space heater, one of those Italian radiator-looking heaters that stands on wheels, DeLonghi. Close to it, I put a box with a cushion inside it for Caterpillar, a private napping place for her. She'll discover it tomorrow. She needs a new place. She likes to move around from one place to another and she only has two. This will be her third. A good spot in a box near a heat source. She'll snuggle in there nicely. It will probably cost $10 a month to keep the room warm. It's worth that to give Caterpillar a comfortable spot. It's not spoiling her, but taking her for my partner, my special friend, which she is. Yesterday morning, after a cold-cold night, I went online to LL Bean and found some fleece-lined house shoes that come up over the ankle, as well as two pair of fleece-lined sox. Went to Gil's in town and bought four pair of long warm grippy sox. I will keep my feet warm this winter. Winter is a long time to be freezing below the knees. Warm footwear will do the trick. Caterpillar lives down there in the cold zone below my knees. Must look after her wellbeing too. She wears a permanent sweater. It's not so cold for her as for me. Or so I imagine.

carl andre

My friend Kathryn posted on facebook a video of making a space-heat source using two clay pots, one bigger than the other, a small bread pan, and four small candles per burning that last three hours. Sit the bread pan where you want it, put four little candles in the middle. Plug the hole in the small clay pot with aluminum foil and place it upside down on the bread pan over the candles. Then place the larger pot upside down over the smaller pot. The heat gathers in the small pot, runs out from under the rim, the bigger pot makes a chimney. Warm air rises from the hole in the big pot. It's a good hand warmer. The clay pots heat up and the big one radiates heat into the air around it. It doesn't feel like a big deal of heat, but when I walk by it, I feel it. I keep it on the desk to the right of the computer. I can feel it when the candles go out and it cools down, too.  It makes a good hand warmer and it takes the edge off the cold. It gives the air in the room the scent of hot clay, an earthy incense. The candles cost three and a half cents apiece. Three hours of comfortable space heat for a dime. No electricity involved. The desk is in a corner where the heat doesn't circulate so freely. This little heater takes care of the corner. The outer pot radiates the heat evenly around it and the chimney sends a flow of heat into the air. It is moderate heat, to be sure, but the outer pot gets so hot it can only be touched, at its hottest, very lightly for a second. The interior pot is really hot. This simple apparatus is the best possible hand warmer. Hold hand over the chimney hole and it warms up in a hurry. Place hands around the outer pot up close without touching and hands warm quickly there. I like it because it's an ingenious device that is simple and works on an obvious principle of physics: heat rises.

 

carl andre

 

Already I can tell the difference wearing warm sox in shoes with cold floor. I've taken to wearing a sweatshirt to bed. Without it, a cold night keeps me restless. Sweatshirt does it right. I've never been one in the past to make much of a fuss over the cold. Burned fire wood for twenty years and loved it. I like the heat from burning wood. Kerosene heat is warm enough, but it does not have the same feel of wood heat, or fire heat. The clay pot gives an elemental feeling of heat like the wood stove. It doesn't have electrical coils you dare not touch, or a fan or anything other than natural law, heat rises. I thought I wouldn't use it much when putting it together. Was really doing it to see how it worked, already knowing it would work, because it is so obvious. Now I see I will use it every time I'm at the computer this winter. It takes the chill off the corner. And it's fun in its simplicity. I look at it amazed by the simplicity like I look at Carl Andre's blocks of wood set in relation to each other, amazed at the art in such simple lines. I don't like the plastic over all the windows, because I can't see out. I'd rather leave the windows free of the plastic. The windows are better than paintings on the wall. Each window in this room has a birdfeeder visible in it and birds and squirrels and chipmunks gambol about as I watch. On a morning I'm late getting seeds to the feeders, at least one squirrel tries to attract my attention on the tree nearest the window, using its eyes to draw my attention. Evidently the squirrel believes if it stares hard enough I'll feel it and look. It works.

 

carl andre

 

Last winter, I was cold the whole winter. This winter, I'm going into it determined to keep warm. I keep the room at 65 degrees and wear a sweatshirt or sweater. Upper half is doing ok. It's below the knees I must deal with this year. This year I want heavy sox all winter long. They will make the winter easier to live with. In the past I had the attitude, tough it out. This year I don't care about toughing anything out. I don't have any say beyond the reach of my hands. I know this, yet often I live like I don't know it. Why would I want any say beyond my physical reach? Outside my immediate zone of interest, everything is other people's interest, not mine. My life has been about drawing my interest in from outside my immediate world. Media and beliefs about democracy keep us believing what is really happening is someplace else. Where you are is the nowhere point. I've been drawing inward from an old belief I held that in democracy it is important to engage at least one's attention. I don't believe that any more. We don't have democracy any more, if we ever did, and what I think doesn't even matter in a comment box on facebook. I've been brought up believing in America what I think matters. It only matters to me. That's good enough. It's best I don't have influence or decision-making power beyond myself. I don't make the best decisions for myself. I don't want to make lousy decisions for other people too.

 

carl andre

 

 

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MINIMALISM THE BOOK

     dan flavin, untitled, 1971

Every year I give myself a Christmas present. Give myself a birthday present too. I've done this for so long I don't remember when it started or my reasoning. Whatever the reasoning, I agreed with it in the time I could remember it, so now that it's gone I'd just as well go on agreeing with it. I think the first reason is it just makes sense. I remember suggesting it to somebody a few years back groaning because he hoped somebody would give him something in particular for his birthday. I said give it to yourself. That way you're sure to get it. He was appalled at the thought of giving himself a present. I was appalled that he was appalled. It makes perfectly clear sense to me. For one thing, which is secondary, but very important, this way I am certain to get something I want. I suppose it came to me in childhood when year after year I never got anything for Christmas or birthday that I really wanted. Give myself a present and I get at least one thing I want.

This Christmas my present was a fairly recent publication of the art movement in New York beginning in the 1960s, MINIMALISM, edited by James Meyer, associate professor of contemporary art and criticism at Emory in Atlanta. I've looked through it for the copyright page with the date of publication on it. I've found quite a lot of notation 1980 to present. I don't know how to find when "present" is, what year. I found notation that Sol Lewitt died 2007, meaning the book was printed after that. That's close enough to give me an idea of when the book was made. I imagine Meyer worked several years on getting everything together toward publication. I'm very happy with it. It's all pictures. Beautiful prints by the publisher of art books, Phaidon. Each picture has a paragraph telling something about it. In the beginning is a preface, which looks like it might be interesting. I have a 1988 book on Minimalism by Kenneth Baker, a good book for reading and the collection of pictures.

This new one, 20 years later, has entirely different pictures. The newer one has Anne Truitt in it and lacks the earth work artists like Michael Heizer and Walter deMaria. Robert Smithson is represented in the newer book, but indoor pieces instead of his outdoor works, which the Baker book includes. The earlier book has different examples of Eva Hesse's work. As time goes by, I appreciate Eva Hesse's works more and more. This later book has Carl Andre examples galore. He has done quite a lot with blocks of wood 3' long and 1' by 1' arranged in different simple patterns. One standing by itself he titled Herm in 1976. Andre makes arrangements of bricks on the floor, and steel squares 1' by 1' he arranges on the floor in like 20 rows of 5, or 12 rows of 12. I've seen the set on the floor in the Museum of Modern Art. Museum goers are invited to walk on it. I've walked on it twice. It was no bigger deal than walking on any flat surface. But it was an interesting kind of zone feeling, feeling inside Carl Andre's prescribed zone that he articulated by these tiles on the floor.

     carl andre

Andre has used the floor probably more than anyone for arranging blocks of wood or bricks. Carl Andre seems like there is little to nothing to what he is doing, in that way like Cy Twombly making childlike scribblings. It's a new stretch of the mind to be able to step into a room in a museum and see some bricks arranged on the floor, and a few 3 foot long timbers arranged in a pattern. It really pushes the mind to say, I can do that. But I didn't. Carl Andre and nobody else did that. Therefore, it's unique because he did it and I didn't. Now, anyone that does it is following Andre. Neither of the two books on Minimalism---not meaning to imply there are only two, but the two I have---has much of Elsworth Kelly. I noticed neither of them has anything by Alexander Lieberman. Maybe Lieberman was thought more an abstractionist. 

I keep this new book of Minimalism beside my chair. Every time I have a few minutes I open and look inside, read a little, look at a lot of pictures of beautiful works of art. I like Abstract Expressionism an awful lot, and Pop too, but it's Minimalism that really speaks to me. I believe Minimalism might be my favorite period in 20th Century art. I like all the others, but something about the minimalist object appeals to me. The newer book has a good collection of Agnes Martin grids and Robert Mangold pencil lines on beautiful colors. And there's a great collection of Robert Ryman works, largely white. I've come to appreciate Ryman a great deal. This is a good Christmas present to myself, something I will look at again and again and probably read every word in it. And it didn't cost a great deal, which made it possible. Say it 's selfish to buy oneself a Christmas present? Maybe so. But so is everything else we do. Like once I caught on that everything is a sin, I was set free. It can't be avoided, so it's no big deal. 

     frank stella



  

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