Carl Andre

Grass and steel are a combination of materials Carl Andre had previously employed in Münster in 1977. Ten years later he began by proposing a project for an overgrown embankment between Münster and Gievenbeck. It was a place where the city had once scheduled a section of the bypass. Doing without prefabricated materials, Andre planned to develop an installation with objects found on the site using simple tools.

But the artist then dismissed the idea. Instead, he worked on the selected section of meadow beside the Busso-Peus-Straße, once again with rusting steel panels that he had previously used in an earlier art action in the Konrad Fischer Galerie in Düsseldorf. These square sheets were distributed loosely over the uneven ground. Man-made objects and nature formed a coherent whole; both were exposed to the effects of weather, time and overgrowth. Carl Andre no longer simply placed his art on the ground; he turned the ground itself into an essential part of his sculpture. In contrast to the walkway motif he created in 1977, likewise with rusting steel sheets, here he established a spatial marker for the locality, which due to its history was “no longer a path […] and not yet a road”¹.

Daniel Friedt

¹ Georg Jappe, Skulptur-Projekte in Münster 1987. Rundgang, Münster, 1987, p. 135.