STICK 1927

André Cadere was the stick man, the artist known for carrying a stick. He took one wherever he went. This stick – or sticks, for there seem to have been a hundred or more during the course of his painfully short life – was not just a length of wood but a collection of smaller wooden cylinders painted in bright colors and threaded on a rod. The colors vary, and so did the sizes and permutations. But Cadere was essentially a one-work artist. What an innocent object the striped stick sounds – and looks. There is one on display at Modern Art Oxford painted in a particular combination of yellows, purples, and blues that somehow seems to evoke the 1970s when it was made. It's irregular, the 20 tubes slightly ill-matched like a child's dried pasta necklace, and one notices the pleasing carpentry of each piece. It might look as if it has something to do with other sculptures of that era that had numbers in mind – Carl Andre's bricks, say – but is much more crafted and charming. So much so that it's impossible to imagine these Barres de Bois Rond (as Cadere called them) as mischievous, still less subversive in any way. But of course, it is what the artist did with them that became the story. Cadere was a nomad. Born in Poland in 1934, he grew up in Romania but emigrated to Paris in 1968. He had scraped a living behind the Iron Curtain as a studio assistant to various painters, and in Paris, he had a short stint painting abstract works. I suppose it could be said that his Barres is a combination of painting and sculpture – which is pretty much the claim at Tate Modern, where they have a 1973 Barre – yet this seems beside the point. The Barre was an artwork that needed no gallery. Anyone could view it, and they could view it anywhere. Cadere carried it on the underground, to the shops, on the boulevards of Paris and the avenues of New York, through museums and parks and other people's exhibitions. He was like a pilgrim traveler with a staff. Hundreds of thousands of people may have seen his art inadvertently, many more than would ever have looked at it in a gallery, and indeed this was entirely the point. The work, such as it was, had no back, no front, couldn't be mounted on the wall like a painting or stationed on the floor like a sculpture. It had no stability and not much value (although Cadere did offer to sell his Barres at 30 French francs per centimeter in 1972). Thus they escaped the tyranny of the gallery system, for Cadere, as well as the forces of the market. The Barres could be shown only wherever the artist was. The means of distribution were in his hands, quite literally, with the predictable irony that fashionable galleries rapidly had Cadere in their sights. What he was doing seems so remote now that it isn't easy to imagine its effects in the 70s art scene, which is where the Oxford show comes in. The curators (one of whom, Lynda Morris, knew him well) have somehow managed to assemble all sorts of traces of Cadere's progress through the world in the form of spectral photographs, where he crosses the scene like a handsome ghost, as well as press cuttings, diaries, telegrams, private letters and preview cards (several for pubs in Oxford where he presented the Barres, presumably at the bar), which are among the last traces of his work. It wasn't a performance, exactly (he had nothing in common with contemporaries, such as Gilbert and George). It wasn't an intervention exactly, although he did beard museum directors in their dens and regularly turned up uninvited at art-world parties. Documents reveal his sharp dealings with powerful figures at biennales and group shows, skewering their pomposity. Photos show him mingling with the Manhattan glitterati to their half-excited discomfort.I especially liked his response to a hoo-ha over an international exhibition, where Cadere had leaned one of his poles against a wall to the wrath of the infinitely more famous stripe-man, the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren. Buren withdrew from the show in a huff. Cadere wrote in mock sorrow to the organizers that he was sorry that the presence of one of his sticks apparently meant nobody could see the immense work of Daniel Buren.