Saturday 25 November 2006, 19.00–20.30

'My poems are clastic textiles. That is, my poems are re-weavings of fragments of pre-existing texts, mostly not by me. I do not, in my poetry, try to find the words to express what I want to say. in my poetry, I try to find ways to express what the words say.'
– Carl Andre

Carl Andre makes a rare appearance to perform a live reading of a selection of his poems and then discuss their sources and construction with Richard Cork, the award-winning art critic, historian and broadcaster, whose books include studies of Vorticism, Art Beyond The Gallery, David Bomberg, A Bitter Truth: Avant-Garde Art and the Great War, Jacob Epstein, Michael Craig-Martin, and four paperbacks of his critical writings on modern art.

Most famous in the UK for his brick sculpture Equivalent VIII 1966, Andre was a leading member of the American Minimalist movement, which began in the 1960s. In addition to making sculpture, he also began to write in the tradition of Concrete Poetry, treating words as a form of material and displaying them on the page as a form of drawing or sculpture. Andre takes words or parts of sentences from existing texts, deconstructs their original grammar and syntax and then uses them as raw material to make the poems, structuring the units of language in a way that is similar to his use of sculptural matter.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£6 (£4 concessions), booking recommended