The picture of the barre de bois rond courtside-its round stack of colors repeating like the colors of the sweatbands on the wrists of the lovely arms of the beautiful young Black man who seems almost to reach for it with his hands, just so-however provocative, suggestive, erotically charged, it wasn’t, no never, “the work,” was it? He was, wasn’t he, fucking with the contingencies, regimented, rigged, of inside and outside, and of who decides what comes into focus when something uninvited or unacknowledged radiates its difference? The incompatibility of his enterprise: as he brought one of his homemade object-acts, uninvited, into a gallery or museum opening, gently leaned it against a wall or gently dropped it on the floor, amid the other artists’ works on view, only to be jettisoned, exiled, often, more often than not, artist and stick, abruptly from the proceedings or purposefully yet leisurely walked with a stick down the street or into a conference or nestled it in a pastry shop window, something strange and sweet amid the sweets or let it vogue in Le Grand Chic Parisien, oblique or (even) obtuse to the 1930s fashions, objets, and jewels tapped it like a kind of herald to conversation in a pub or slanted it against the fence while guys enjoyed a pickup game of hoops on the other side.
“Your baton is at once an object and an act.”Īndré Cadere, New York City, November 1975 (detail), thirty ink-jet prints, each 9 7⁄8 × 11 3⁄4 or 11 3⁄4 × 9 7⁄8". “You use the baton to put a monkey wrench in the works.” “Yes, that’s it. “Boy with stick,” Sylvère Lotringer called him.
“Prankster” and “vagabond,” as art historian Sanda Agalides positions him, Cădere, not just after he starts traveling with his multicolored and coded bars of round wood/ barres de bois rond/ bară_rotundă_ din lemn-simultaneously art objects, itineraries, parasitic programs, and conceptual devices he put in motion in 1972 and for which he is best known-was “structurally incompatible with, and opposed to, all entropic regimes of power,” wasn’t he, and regarding not just Russification but also those entropies which hebetate art in the name of art, even so-called institutional critique? Once he immigrates to Paris in 1967, he rarely mentions his former life and artmaking activities, exiling that narrative along with any notion of straightforward autobiography, of the “social and political hide-and-seek” of his existence in the gulag, but this doesn’t mean he was compatible with the West’s artistic machinations and circuits, does it?
Given where his mind would lead him, his posing for social-realist paintings by artists approved by the state perhaps disciplined him in ironies that even the banned books being passed around didn’t.īut you could also say the above sketch, pre-stick, is too pat, no? Incompatibility, even, with Romania, where he was born the son of a diplomat who was arrested in 1952, then convicted, without a trial, of “intensive activity against the working class” and imprisoned for four years? The Cădere family lost everything.Ī “young with a ‘bad dossier,’” Andrei Cădere graduated from high school and was drafted into the “labour brigades,” a conscription “very close to penal servitude.” Despite diribau, as “the forced labour performed by those who had ‘problems with the regime’” was termed, curator and scholar Magda Radu writes, Cădere “entered the art world as a life model and assistant in the studios of artists who received official commissions or worked within the state system.” The gigs paid him a basic income, but Stalinized life was brutal. The incompatibility of the exile, of the emigrant? YOU COULD SAY, couldn’t you, that André Cadere’s métier was incompatibility? Bruce Benderson, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession He’s spent his whole life waiting for luck, looking for signs of it with a kind of fatalism, and he supplements this fatalism with the best skills of a shrewd hunter and gatherer, picking up booty like me. André Cadere presenting his work on West Broadway, New York, December 11, 1976.