Paint By Letters

Criticism is pretty much after the fact," wrote Donald Judd in 1962. "Frank Stella's paintings are one of the recent facts." Some time later, Carl Andre wrote, "THEORY IS A SUBSTITUTE FOR EXPERIENCE/PROPHECY RESHAPES EXPERIENCE/SMITHSON IS A PROPHET."

This was not simply advocacy work on behalf of friends. In the 60s, as art historian James Meyer points out in the introduction to a newly published collection of Andre's writings, artists increasingly picked up the pen-to contextualize their work and to refute the claims of an ever-growing cadre of professional critics, whether overly literary or dryly theoretical. They often wrote, paradoxically, to insist on the primacy of the art-viewing experience. Foremost among these artist-writers was Judd, who, along with Robert Morris and Robert Smithson, published regularly in monthly art magazines. Andre, though less visible to the public, was no less active as a writer: He frequently contributed to exhibition catalogs, and has created over the last 45 years a vast corpus of taped and written interviews, correspondence and, above all, poetry.

Meyer has picked his way nimbly across Andre's "heap of language" (to borrow a phrase from Smithson), producing a handy volume that nestles texts from different decades together, and is arranged, like an encyclopedia, by subject. This emphasizes the consistency (detractors would call it repetition or limitation) of Andre's concerns. Meyer notes that, "Andre disavowed being a prose writer?he wrote only as much as was needed," and, "aspire[d] to the epigrammatic."

Indeed, the prose entries, which range in length from one sentence to several pages, are distinct for their poetic compression. His sentences are short and emphatic, often missing words that serve as connective tissue in more mellifluous writing: In a letter to Sol LeWitt dated 1970, Andre more or less does away with periods altogether, stringing together ideas about the artist's position in capitalist society with dashes serving as pauses for breath. His style occasionally borders on the harangue-as when he takes shots at conceptual and performance art-but the refreshing directness of his voice and his occasional (if unintentional) humor mitigate any annoyance.

But Andre's poetry-along with the prose selections offering his thoughts on poetry-is the highlight of this book. Much of what is included has never before been published. Meyer devotes half of his introduction to this work, highlighting Andre's emphasis on the particular (the word) over the whole (the sentence), an exegesis that also indirectly illuminates Andre's sculpture. Both practices-poem-making and object-making-are materialist, in the sense that Andre's ultimate fidelity to copper, zinc, words, wood and steel is an attempt to negate all meaning and symbolism; to treat "matter as matter." His refusal to solder together steel plates or bind words together into sentences is a celebration of what is already there, albeit with the caveat that each of these things is man-made. "I try to discover my visions in the conditions of the world," he writes.

Judd's prose shares Andre's concision-a Carveresque minimalism from two minimalists who disavowed the term as applied to their art-but his collected writings make for a very different book. The majority of this volume is given over to his monthly reviews and previews for Arts magazine, written between 1959 and 1965. These pieces are often declamatory and occasionally hectoring or dismissive, but always worth reading. There is no better written record of contemporary art shown in New York galleries during this period, a fact that makes this collection invaluable even before considering the relationship of these texts to Judd's art, which is arguably the most important body of sculpture created in the second half of the 20th century.

These days it can also be argued that market intelligence-the consensus of dealers, curators and collectors-has supplanted the critical intelligence epitomized by Judd and Andre's written work, and by the efflorescence of written discourse four decades ago. The near-concurrent publication of these two volumes offers a challenge to artists, and critics, working now to rejuvenate that great cultural conversation.