The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Conflict of Minimalist Interests" @wsj by Lance Esplund

'Breda' (1986) Bill Jacobson Studio

Beacon, N.Y.

Retired New York artist Carl Andre is a founding father of American Minimalism—a postwar movement of utopian abstraction so spare, clean and reductive that you could mistake its paintings for blank white canvases and its sculptures for empty packing crates. He's also among the contemporary art world's greatest living conundrums.

His austere, human-scaled sculptures usually comprise numerous pieces of unaltered industrial building supplies such as bricks, stones, two-by-fours, lead pipes, square metal plates and blocks of concrete or rough-hewn timber. Specified numbers of these nearly identical units are usually laid flat on the floor or ground and lined up end-to-end, back-to-back or stacked and combined in various permutations. Unjoined and untransformed, they are arranged with mathematical precision, by human hands, with only gravity to hold them in place.

At Dia:Beacon—Minimalism's mecca on the Hudson—you may not immediately recognize some of Mr. Andre's works as sculptures, as in his signature flat-plate, metal-grid carpets such as "46 Roaring Forties" (1988). A rectangular floor arrangement of 46 one-foot-square steel plates, it's literally a pathway, and the only place in Dia where visitors are encouraged—challenged—to walk on art. "Actually," Mr. Andre has repeatedly stated since the 1960s, "my ideal piece of sculpture is a road."

Born in Quincy, Mass., in 1935, Mr. Andre lives in Manhattan, where his work has been shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery since 1968. He stopped making art in 2010. Although Mr. Andre has been widely exhibited and collected in Europe, he hasn't had a retrospective in the U.S. since 1978-80.

Curiosity stirred, then, when the comprehensive retrospective "Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010" was scheduled to open at Dia. Co-curated by Yasmil Raymond and Philippe Vergne, the show will travel to Madrid, Berlin and then Paris. At Dia, it promised to be definitive—especially when the reclusive Mr. Andre temporarily came out of retirement to help install it.

Commanding a battery of enormous sun-washed galleries and bolstered by Dia's superb permanent collection of sculptures by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra, the Andre retrospective is methodical, handsome and perplexing—verging on clinical. In its blatant simplicity and transparency, it's among the most agreeable and undemanding assortments of objects I've ever encountered in a museum. But few major exhibitions have left me feeling as ambivalent. If you believed that a five-decade survey would finally illuminate Mr. Andre's oeuvre as either poetic or prosaic, you may discover, as I did, that it plays cagily in the margins. At times this show inspired keen sensitivity and Zen-like calm; at others it left me cold, bored as a stump—often within the same sculpture.

Without question, Mr. Andre is serious. A suite of videos at Dia show him waxing philosophically about art and painstakingly arranging his stripped-to-the-bone sculptures. He obviously cares. Or does he? Mr. Andre considers himself the first "poststudio" artist. Many of his sculptures' mundane materials can be factory ordered and installed by curators and collectors, and then disassembled and stored when not on view. (If you were so inclined, you could re-create your own Andres at home.)

One of his early assemblages, the unassuming and ephemeral earthwork "Joint" (1968/2014), can be seen slumping and decaying in the middle-distance from Dia's panoramic windows. Offhand, even charming, "Joint" consists of an uninterrupted 252-foot-long tawny column of 126 hay bales laid side-to-side, bisecting Dia's south field. Though stationary, "Joint" seemingly creeps up a gently sloping grassy hill, hugging the ground like a single-file exodus of grazing yellow sheep.

Inside Dia, "Sculpture as Place," self-effacing yet passive-aggressive, is not chronological but, rather, beautifully scattershot. We get walloped with understatement in near-gymnasium-scale galleries that offer a whole lot of not much at all. Mega-Minimalist sculptures waddle among ancient temple ruins, primitive dwellings, monuments and totems; graveyard, loading dock and lumberyard.

In "12 Mixed Pipe & Track Run" (1969), a forlorn line of slightly bent, rusty steel pipes suggests a giant whip or the massive severed tail of the nearby corner-hugging sculpture "9th Cedar Corner" (2007)—a tightly packed triangular grouping of 45 36-inch-tall, 12-by-12-inch blocks of Western red cedar. Elsewhere, waist-high solid-timber walls nearly barricade passage through the museum. In the 91-unit ziggurat "Triskaidek" (1979), similar timbers are stepped high against Dia's wall, suggesting flying buttresses or a pyramid face. And coiled across Dia's floors are wide bands of copper, lead, magnesium, tin and zinc. Luminous, they interrupt expanses of worn, warm-wood floors like whirlpools or mammoth snakes. Likewise, Mr. Andre's flat-plate-metal grid sculptures conjure reflecting pools.

But Mr. Andre's art eschews analogies. I sense he wants each abstraction to be what it is: nothing less; nothing more—even in "Breda" (1986), which refers to the 1624-25 siege and fall of the Dutch fortified city during the Eighty Years' War. "Breda" comprises 97 bricks of Belgian chalky-bone-blue limestone arranged in a column of crosses. It suggests a machine-tooled dinosaur spine, crenellated parapets, headstones and a long manned rowboat. But "Breda" never lets you forget the bare fact—the facelessness—of its humble materials and its modest manufacture, which brings me back to my conflicting responses to Mr. Andre's art.

Mr. Andre began as an erstwhile Dadaist and writer of Concrete Poetry. Displayed here are more than 200 of his visually dense, geometrically constructed typewritten poems, some of which resemble Dadaist graphic design or weavings, as well as several of his early, small, amusing Duchampian Readymades. Other inspirations include the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi, and Mr. Andre's employment in a factory and as a conductor for the Pennsylvania Railroad. A trip to Stonehenge cemented Mr. Andre's desire to pursue sculpture. But the irreverent Readymade—not the singular, enigmatic beauty of Stonehenge or the pared-down essences of Brancusi—is the core influence behind Mr. Andre's cool Conceptualism.

Heightening awareness, "Sculpture as Place" reminds us that the repetition of almost anything can get at the essentials of art. At Dia, I became acutely aware of distinctions among different wood grains, knots and textures; among different colorations and striations in individual bricks and stones. I compared the temperature and shimmer of various metals; the densities among pine, aluminum, concrete and hot-rolled steel. But I recalled that I've had equally expansive experiences perusing aisles of goods at the lumberyard and the hardware store.

Ultimately, Mr. Andre's store-bought, chance-based oeuvre is a gamble, if not a gambit. Provocative yet evasive, his sculptures demand too much and too little: They ask that you question what is and isn't art. But they don't do much else. En masse, their militant informality conveys distance and neglect—dumbing down sculpture to its least common denominator. Art is a dialogue among artist, artwork and viewer. In Mr. Andre's monumental Minimalism, objects are multiplied but not transformed. There's little sense of call-and-response. The artist, in absentia, leaves viewers to do most of the heavy-lifting.

Mr. Esplund writes about art for the Journal.