Carl Andre, Axle’s Castle, 1961

Alistair Rider

Until now, Axle’s Castle has never been exhibited in public. In 1965 Carl Andre exchanged works with his friend, the painter Bob Huot, and Huot became the custodian of this sculpture, which has remained in his possession for close to sixty years.[i]

The work dates from the first half of 1961, which was several years before Andre exhibited his work publicly. That opportunity eventually came in the fall of 1964, when the curator Eugene Goossen invited him to participate in the landmark group exhibition “8 Young Artists” at the Hudson River Museum. (Huot, incidentally, was a fellow contributor.)[ii]

Andre had first arrived in New York in the spring of 1957, and for around eight years had lived a hand-to-mouth existence, moving frequently between addresses in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn. For a while he worked as an editorial assistant for a publishing house, and then went freelance.[iii] Later he found work with the Pennsylvania Railroad, working as a freight brakeman at Meadows Yard at South Kearney, in New Jersey.[iv] In his spare time, Andre was writing typewriter poems and, in sporadic bouts of creativity, would produce paintings and sculptures with the limited resources that he had to hand. Axle’s Castle belongs to this early, relatively obscure phase in his life. This, though, is not a stage in his development that has been neglected or overlooked: if anything, it is a period that has attracted significant intrigue. In most accounts of Andre’s career, it is generally considered to be a decisive, gestational period.

Practically all artists have their formative moments, although Andre’s receives more attention than most because it also seems particularly exuberant. Compared to the measured nature of his mature work, his creations from these early years appear experimental, wildly diverse, and often joyously undisciplined. Additionally, they seem to speak vividly to the squalid, scruffy nature of the slum tenements and bars in downtown Manhattan where he lived and socialised.

Almost everything we know about the artist from this time derives either from Andre himself, who has referred frequently to these years, or from a small handful of evocative and anecdotal first-person accounts.[v] During these years, Andre enjoyed the friendship of some highly articulate and creative individuals, many of whom – like him – went on to enjoy illustrious careers. His close circle of companions included Barbara Rose, the revered critic and art historian, Michael Chapman, who became a notable Hollywood cameraman, Frank Stella, who was already enjoying national success as an abstract painter, Hollis Frampton, who, at the time was passionate about still photography, but would later go on become the celebrated structuralist filmmaker, and Rosemarie Castoro, the painter and sculptor, whom Andre met in 1962 and married the following year.

It was Frampton, though, who performed the greatest role in fashioning the received account of Andre’s creative development during these years of obscurity. In 1969, Frampton answered the request of the Netherlandish curator, Enno Develing, for a brief biographical sketch of the artist’s life and work prior to 1964, which was printed in the catalogue accompanying Andre’s major solo exhibition at the Haags Gemeentemuseum that year. In his report, Frampton explained that he had also maintained a photographic archive of everything his friend had created from this time, and many of these pictures also featured in the volume.[vi]

Among these pictures, we find the first published illustrations of Axle’s Castle.[vii] Frampton narrated how he had been invited by Andre in the summer of 1962 to document his latest round of creations, which filled the tenement apartment at 253 East Broadway that he had been renting temporarily. “There was finished work stacked on every horizontal surface and hanging on the walls”, Frampton reminisced. “I think there must have been sculpture standing in the bathtub. I don’t know how much was there: the film ran out before the job was done.”[viii]

In one photograph taken on that day, Axle’s Castle stands on the floor amidst a jumble of recent constructions.[ix] Pushed together are abstract paintings, wooden sculptures machine sawn into angular, geometric forms, untidy heaps of poured Portland cement set hard, and even an array of what appears to be fake fruit. If nothing else, the image attests to the bewildering multitude of art directions that Andre was then exploring. Surely neither he, nor anyone else in his circle of friends would have guessed which, if any, of these works would appeal to the few museum curators and gallery directors who occasionally ventured downtown to visit contemporary artists’ studios.

By 1969, though, when Frampton’s images of Andre’s early works were published, it would have been more than apparent which of these many experiments were the precedents of his mature style. From 1965 onwards – and right through to the present day – he has worked exclusively with pre-formed, regularly shaped modules of raw materials, such as timber blocks, bricks, or metal plates, which he places into simple configurations, without the use of additional fixatives.

Andre himself attributed his initial realisation that he could make works in this way to around the moment when he also created Axle’s Castle. In an interview in 1969, he explained how, in 1961, Stella had encouraged two eminent curators from the Museum of Modern Art, William Seitz and Peter Selz, to visit Andre in his studio to see his work. “I put them through the whole routine and showed them my stuff”, he recalled. “And they were down on the floor on their hands and knees. And it had taken me quite a while to realize that when you have three bars of iron piled on top of each other, you put them one next to each other, in the simplest possible arrangement that you can.”[x] According to Frampton’s memory of that day, Andre had showed them “small things with modules, glass & plastic prisms, steel bars etc.” Frampton also reported that apparently Andre proposed to the curators that even if they didn’t want to exhibit his work, they might well enjoy “playing with it in the privacy of their own offices.”[xi]

The pitch was not a success (Frampton acknowledged that Seitz and Selz left in a “pique”).[xii] But it does indicate that during 1961 Andre was increasingly associating sculpture with the pleasurable, childlike experience of messing around with separate, identical units that were scaled to be handled easily. A similar hands-on sensibility is evident in Axle’s Castle. This work is formed from twenty-seven stacking metal rectangular bars, each of which is pierced by two drill holes. It is probable that Andre purchased them from one the many hardware stores on Canal Street, although their original, intended purpose is lost to us now. For this sculpture, Andre used one of their holes to slot the bars onto a vertical stainless-steel rod, mounted in a relatively lightweight wooden base. The work is easily toppled, and only remains upright if the bars are distributed evenly around the central, axial shaft. Andre’s preferred arrangement seems to have been to fan them out, like steps on a spiral staircase.

It is quite possible that Andre was thinking of Axle’s Castle when he stated in 1965 that he had “evolved a kind of sculpture in which there is a fixed set of tones – one might even say an instrument or a piano, on which or with which I have composed a partita. Since I don’t fix the pieces together, others are free to compose their own partitas on a piano of my invention.”[xiii] However, it appears he soon backed away from implying that his works were freely available for visitors to interact with (an impractical proposition that surely would have resulted in many damaged sculptures). Nonetheless, the fact that the modules from which Andre’s mature sculptures are assembled are unfixed always implies at least a potential for gathering them up and rearranging them otherwise.

Formally, then, Axle’s Castle represents a notable transitional stage in Andre’s development towards the modular sculptures for which he would later become renowned. Butthe sculptureis more than just an important early precursor: it also provides an insight into the body of intellectual ideas that he was exploring at the time.

The sculpture’s title is a punning allusion to Edmund Wilson’s well-known 1931 survey of symbolist literature, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930.[xiv] That Andre was conversant with this publication is testimony to his longstanding and ongoing interest in modernist literature. It ought not to be forgotten that he was, in his early twenties, as invested in attaining recognition for his poetryas he was in exhibiting his sculptures, and throughout this period he was regularly composing experimental works.[xv] Although the book was written thirty years earlier, in the early 1960s Wilson still retained a formidable reputation in American literary circles as an astute essayist and forbidding public intellectual.

The book is named after Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s posthumously published and incomplete play, Axël (1899).[xvi] The protagonist of this overblown drama is the handsome, conceited, otherworldly Count Axël, who lives a reflective, hermetic life in a secluded castle in the Black Forest. It transpires that Axël is also the guardian of a prodigious hoard of treasure that been concealed for decades in the castle’s vaults. One day, a nun from a local convent stumbles on the secret and determines to break into the castle. But the moment she uncovers the riches, Axël accosts her. The implausible outcome of the confrontation is that the pair fall headlong in love. The nun, whose name is Sara, proposes that they should exploit the wealth by travelling the world. Axël, however, denounces the specious allure of experience, and extols the virtues of the life they currently possess, devoted as it is to the realms of imagination. He soon wins her over. Together they drink a goblet of poison and die in ecstasy.

Wilson’s decision to name his critical study after Axël’s dwelling place is inspired by his conviction that Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s character is symptomatic of a particular type of introverted character that is unusually popular in Symbolist literature. He saw the Symbolists as obsessed with individuals who share pronounced monomaniac inclinations, and who insulate themselves from the seemingly utilitarian, prosaic world by constructing an existence that revolves around their own eccentric refinements.[xvii] Politically, Wilson was at the time a socialist, and in places his study barely conceals his contempt for what he considers to be Symbolism’s unhealthy obsession with individuality and its haughty disregard for communal values and social experience. By the end of the book, he concludes that Symbolism was often backward-looking and reactionary. Nonetheless, he also recognised in the movement novel, emergent forms and an impressive openness to artistic experimentation that was nothing less than revolutionary. In his concluding words, the Symbolists “break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exultation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.”[xviii]

We may never know for certain what the twenty-six-year-old Andre drew from Wilson’s ambiguous analysis. But his decision to name his sculpture Axle’s Castle is ingenious. For one, it offers up a key to interpret the work figuratively, and to regard the composition as a simplified yet fabulous rendition of Axël’s ivory tower. And, if we pursue this line of reasoning further, then we might even imagine that the sculpture is an abstracted depiction of the self-absorbed, inwardly revolving character of Axël himself. This is a clever move on Andre’s part, because it provides him with the opportunity to establish a certain psychological distance between his own self and the persona that the sculpture might be thought to depict. In other words, it enables him to present his growing preference for a paired down, highly ordered, regular and modular form of sculpture as ideally suited for depicting a distinct type of eccentric temperament, one, indeed, that has an established literary precedent. 

It would not be long, of course, before Andre felt sufficiently assured of his sculptural modus operandi to shed the figurative alibi that Axël’s name provides. Instead, he came to celebrate only the radically simplified, abstract forms that, thirty years earlier, Edmund Wilson had first seen intimated in the experimental literature of Symbolism.