GARY GARRELS: 

What are the fundamental issues of sculpture?  

NARRATOR: 

Curator Gary Garrels 

GARRELS: 

Gravity, the relationship between the object and the ground; balance; the formal qualities of the materials that one is using.  

Minimalism — or Minimal Art, it’s called both — was something that began to develop in the late 1950s. It is something that developed very much out of an American idea of directness in relationships with materials.  

NARRATOR: 

Artists like Carl Andre were using unusual materials for sculpture. 

GARRELS:  

Copper, lead, zinc — and looking at the fundamental characters of those materials; that it’s the relationship, that the sculpture occupies a zone between the base, the floor, gravity and where we occupy space as human beings.  

Which was a very radical idea. There’s no fussiness, there’s no illusion. It’s getting to the most fundamental kind of experience and principles.