Sol Lewitt
Confronted with the works of Sol Lewitt, whose career has consisted of doing instructions for artworks rather than making the actual art, I’ve decided, instead of a review, to write the instructions for one. Here it is:
- Go to museum.
- Look at art.
- Return to office.
- Start to write.
- Resolve to find a new occupation.
- Finish writing.
If I might paraphrase Lewitt, this is “the machine that makes the art review.”
Were it not for a nagging conscience, I’d be done, now.
Lewitt, the subject of a big retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, doesn’t seem troubled by conscience. But, then again, he writes better instructions than I do. They are so precise that he could mail them to someone on the other side of the world, and that person could, with no other guidance, produce the work.
Here, for example, are the instructions for “Wall Drawing #46, 1970”:
“Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall. Black Pencil.”
Here is another:
“Ten thousand lines about 10 in. (25.4 cm.) long, covering the wall evenly. Black Pencil.”
Ten thousand lines sounds like a lot of work and arouses in us the kind of admiration we reserve for such oddities as models of world landmarks done with toothpicks. Although it’s an apparent point of pride with Lewitt that he doesn’t put his own hand in these pieces, you have to wonder if it’s an issue of expedience as well. Would he find the idea so worthwhile if he had to draw the lines himself? No matter. He has an “installation crew” of young, idealistic, and probably inexpensive workers to do that.
Another unusual feature of these wall pieces is that they have only a temporary existence. Most art is made for the ages, but Lewitt’s are painted over at the end of the show. It has to be that way, or Lewitt couldn’t make his point that it is the idea that is important, not the object.
Lewitt developed his detached, cerebral style in the early Sixties, partly as a reaction to the “hothouse emotionalism” of the abstract expressionist style, which saw painting as an existential act in which each frenzied stroke, each drip was an end in itself.
The other source of inspiration was Lewitt’s job as a graphic designer for architect I.M. Pei. Architects, he noticed, didn’t go out and put up buildings themselves. They issued the plans.
Lewitt’s been issuing his own plans for nearly 40 years now. With each decade, it seems, he has made greater concessions to the normal human appetite for decoration and visual stimulation. His previously austere vocabulary of obsessively drawn, faint lines has given way to sculpture, bold color, odd geometric shapes, and curvaceous stripes that cover gallery walls from edge to edge. The result is a visually pleasing, almost happy style – art as a fun environment.
But, it’s a little hard to see where fun fits into Lewitt’s conceptualist philosophy. Cheerful decorative art, with its direct appeal to the senses, would seem to sit at one end of a continuum and the airy philosophies of conceptual art at the other. It’s hard to avoid concluding that the playful color is anything more than eye candy, a kind of bribe to keep the audience from drifting away.
The core of Lewitt’s art is the notion that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” His art often seems to have some kind of built-in self-replicating program, like crystals, or a virus. The geometric forms he plays with in two or three dimensions – the squares, rectangles, triangles, and rhombuses – beget other similar forms, and, if the edge of the wall weren’t there to stop it, we feel, it would go on ad infinitum.
Unfortunately, the addition of color, variety, and a third dimension to Lewitt’s wall designs doesn’t enhance their claim to be art. The patterns are sometimes pleasing, as are the muted, fresco-like hues. But too much is missing here, too much is sacrificed for the sake of the machine-like character.
It’s one thing to point out that art is built out of ideas, and it’s another to think that the demonstration of this principle constitutes art. What, for example, would the instructions be like that would allow me, or anyone, to create a Vermeer or a Rembrandt? Or any image that consists of more than grids and quadrants and diagonal lines from one corner of a wall to another? Somewhere, deep in the structure of the Vermeer, there are lines such as these, but without all that’s built on top, these underlying geometries are practically meaningless.
In fact, the more one thinks about it, the more it seems that what Lewitt has done is to invent an art form that, by its very nature, excludes all the good stuff, the stuff that makes art art.
Whitney Museum of American Art
2000
