Monday.2/12 – Discussion of Sol LeWitt Show at the Whitney
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From the archive:
In an effort to add information for previous
events. Prior to the re-design, we are adding
short descriptions that were sent out as emails
and posted on the web.
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Monday.2/12 – Discussion of Sol LeWitt Show at the Whitney
CONTENTS:
1. About This Monday (+Beauty and the Brain, Bay Guardian article)
2. Variations On LeWitt Themes
3. Wall Power by Jerry Saltz
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1. About This Monday
Monday February 12
“Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” –Sol LeWitt, 1969
Just a reminder that tonight’s discussion will begin at 8pm and focus on the current retrospective of Sol LeWitt’s work at the Whitney Museum. Reviews of the retrospective from the Bay Gaurdian and SF Chronicle (SFMOMA) and the Voice follow.
Beauty and the brain
Sol LeWitt fuses style and substance in four decades of conceptual art.
By Glen Helfand (Bay Guardian)
IN THE INFORMATION age, it shouldn’t be so difficult to appreciate the inherent beauty of a good idea. Social changes and monetary fortunes are built on virtual foundations; it isn’t such a stretch to suggest that a truly salient concept can be as intellectually satisfying as a great painting.
Yet conceptual art, a 1960s-born movement rooted in making the idea the artwork, still encounters resistance, biases, and misconceptions among many art viewers. The general aura around conceptually based artwork is that it’s dry, theoretical, rooted deep in the mind of an insular artist, boring, text-heavy, and “just” about the idea.
The “idea,” however, doesn’t have to feel so academic. Sol LeWitt has trafficked in sharp, beautiful ideas for nearly four decades. He’s one of the major artists who put the conceptual into contemporary art, and while he’s consistently built on the aforementioned ingredients, he’s managed to disprove most of the stereotypes, turning them into an unexpectedly appealing and challenging body of artwork. Since the early 1960s he’s been working with systems and geometry, eradicating objecthood, and honing ideas to their most pure forms ¯ but you wouldn’t really gather that with a quick glance at his perfectly executed, seemingly abstract sculptures, works on paper, or wall drawings.
Fittingly, the thing that may surprise many about the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s major LeWitt retrospective, which opens this Saturday, is that it’s both breathtakingly gorgeous and intellectually engaging. The show includes more than 200 examples of his work that cover nearly 40 years of output, including early 1960s modular cubes, 1970s wall drawings rendered according to recipe-like instructions, and contemporary vibrant, go-go-hued wall paintings. LeWitt’s signature ideas, such as having others actually create most of his work by carrying out detailed instructions ¯ and adhering to the concept, even if the medium changes ¯ have influenced digital art and collaborative art and have even blurred the lines between high art and more popular visual forms.
“On the surface, [conceptual art’s] influence is apparent in the multimedia fluidity that today’s younger artists take for granted, moving effortlessly from painting to video to photography to drawing at will,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote last year. “It is visible in conventions that we all accept without question ¯ the wall drawings and wall paintings whose point of origin was primarily Sol LeWitt.”
In that article Smith mentioned as a recent manifestation of conceptual art’s influence the brightly colored wall painting that LeWitt had just completed for Christie’s new American headquarters at Rockefeller Center. That work points to the ways in which LeWitt’s art has even smoothly entered into the public sphere, perhaps covertly obfuscating the lines between conceptual art and design. At SFMOMA, two commissioned wall drawings have been painted in the atrium, and their rainbow hues immediately warm the austere granite lobby. LeWitt manages to make those leaps by creating things that are seductively beautiful, “beauty” being another contentious topic in the art world.
This rare combination of beauty and brains in LeWitt’s work has convinced many that LeWitt is one of the most important and seminal conceptual artists ¯ and artists in general ¯ of the 20th century. Especially in San Francisco, where conceptual art had its own distinct flowering in the 1970s, LeWitt is viewed with reverence by artists, curators, and arts administrators. Tom Marioni, a cornerstone of the Bay Area conceptual school, says that LeWitt’s writings, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” were “like the Ten Commandments for me.”
SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels, who organized the exhibition, says LeWitt is one of the essential figures in the development of the art that came after pop and minimalism ¯ and that his work has not grown stale or derivative.
Garrels cites LeWitt’s work as a catalyzing force in his own professional development as a curator. The last retrospective overview of the artist’s work took place more than 20 years ago at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Garrels says, but around 1980 there was a big change in LeWitt’s work, a change that is the origin of the SFMOMA show. “There’ve been two twenty-year careers, and nobody had tried to look at the overall arc,” Garrels says. “I like both halves.”
The first half is marked by an emphasis on pure idea as embodied by forms and systems. While in the 1980s LeWitt began to deal with complex geometric forms, his pieces becoming more sensual and lush, in the ’60s and ’70s, his work was very austere, reductive, and linear ¯ sculptures and drawings that express endless permutations of cubes. In the 1960s he made a number of cube sculptures that play with geometry and visually relate to minimalism. These mostly monochromatic works may outwardly seem dry and formal, but there’s playfulness bubbling beneath the surface. “I think of the idea of a system as just another way of making art,” LeWitt told Garrels in an interview. “Geometry is just another thing out in the world that can be used as art, like trees or toes.”
In LeWitt’s 1970s work, geometric forms were treated in more purely conceptual terms. At this point he created pieces that dissolve the separation between ideas and images. The titles themselves reveal the process of work, as in the 1969 piece Wall Drawing #28: On Four adjacent squares, 1: one line; 2: ten lines; 3: 100 lines; 4: 1,000 lines. All lines are straight and drawn at random. The formula is clear and pleasingly programmatic, while at the same time addressing representation. (“Obviously a drawing of a person is not a real person, but a drawing of a line is a real line,” LeWitt once said.) A similar strategy informs Ten Thousand Lines About 5″ Long, a 1971 piece that fills an entire wall at SFMOMA.
Subsequent works of this type add complexity and create tension between the title directions and the results. It’s much more difficult, for example, to visualize Wall Drawing #164: A horizontal line centered on the axis between the midpoint of the left side and the midpoint of the right side, and a diagonal line centered on the axis between the lower left and upper right corners. The texts grow unwieldy, the directions more intricate, and our minds get tangled trying to follow the process. Yet the drawings are strikingly simple and direct.
With LeWitt’s instructions serving as something like sheet music, teams of assistants execute these drawings. A crew of nearly 25 assistants from New York, Europe, and San Francisco has been working consistently for more than a month under the supervision of longtime LeWitt “project manager” Joe Watanabe to create the wall drawings at SFMOMA. “The underpinning, theoretically, is to separate the idea of art from the idea of craft,” LeWitt has said. “Not that craft is a lower or less-exalted activity, but there is a difference. All of the Renaissance artists, of course, used assistants. The architect doesn’t build the building. The composer doesn’t play any instruments.”
LeWitt is an artist of the generation that followed abstract expressionism, the American movement that cherished every gesture, drip, or painterly outburst that emanated from the brushes of highly revered artists. The advent of pop art and minimalism served as a response to all that emoting. Andy Warhol, the art world king of pop, was a contemporary of LeWitt’s and used early 1960s ideas of de-emphasizing the artist’s genius. Where Warhol used ideas about manufactured celebrity-hood, as well as commercial art techniques, LeWitt embraced minimalism’s more demure eradication of the artist’s ego. He even sidesteps the identity of “famous artist,” as he is not often photographed or interviewed and often doesn’t even attend his opening receptions.
Even at his most revealing LeWitt is rather elusive. His 1980 piece titled Autobiography (included at SFMOMA) is a project that involved photographing every object in his home and presenting the results in grid formation. In this formal exercise we see every banal detail of the artist’s abode ¯ chairs, utensils, wall sockets, etc. ¯ yet we learn next to nothing about the man himself. In life, he’s a lot like the rest of us.
“He has been such a persona in the art world without being a personality,” Garrels says. “He’s a role model and a standard of integrity.” Fittingly, as a persona he’s also most visible as an idea.
When the art gets sold, LeWitt is even further removed from the process. According to Jeffrey Fraenkel, the photography dealer who began selling LeWitt’s work in 1998, the “piece” itself is not the finished work but the idea ¯ each unique wall drawing is sold as a certificate of authenticity and an accompanying sheet with instructions.
This strategy adds a sense of enigma to the artmaking process. “When I met Sol, I didn’t know much about his work; it was a big mystery to me,” says Kathan Brown, who began working with LeWitt as a contract printmaker in 1971. “But it was such a revelation because it was so simple and straightforward and modest. It was about the real things in the world. Things like lines and colors. That resonated with me.”
Since that time Brown has forged a long partnership with LeWitt, who’s had printmaking residencies at her Crown Point Press, where a comprehensive exhibition of LeWitt’s prints, an important component of his oeuvre, is on view.
“His work is very accessible,” Brown says. “He says that it isn’t really about making it easy for people, but it’s not about making it hard. But what he does is surprising because it’s so simple, a ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ type of thing. The next thing he does is a surprise to people who know his work. How’d he get there?”
That’s exactly the kind of question you might ask when you enter the second half of the retrospective, a section filled with wall drawings that are strikingly playful and often vibrant with color. They have unexpectedly wacky yet descriptive titles such as Wavy Brushstrokes (1995), Squiggly Brushstrokes (1997), and Loopy Doopy (1998). These works are grander in scale and play with the effects of color, texture, and architecture in ways that are barely hinted at by early pieces.
Some attribute the shift to the fact that the artist lived in Italy in the early 1980s, a milieu where color and light have inspired artists for centuries. Yet the use of color also reflects the artist’s maturity. “LeWitt is as interesting at a late point in his career as at the beginning,” Garrels says. “He’ll be seventy-two this fall, and he’s still in his prime.”
LeWitt set down his conceptual foundations and has been able to address color and playful shapes as confidently as he dealt with geometry. “He’s completely democratic and wants to do every combination of lines, and then shapes and color,” says Marioni, who also describes the experience of LeWitt’s late work at SFMOMA as something akin to “walking on air.”
But of all Sol LeWitt’s ideas on display in this retrospective, the most persuasive idea that comes through is that LeWitt’s work seems to be primarily concerned with visual pleasure. “I start to feel happy around his work,” Brown says. “It’s wonderful to have a chance to come out of the museum and feel alive and upbeat.”
‘Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective.’ Feb. 19-May 21. Mon.-Tues. and Thurs.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m., SFMOMA, 151 Third St., S.F. $5-$9. (415) 357-4000.
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2. Variations On LeWitt Themes
SFMOMA retrospective to highlight his work
link to article (just copy and past into your browser)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/13/PK18922.DTL
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3. Wall Power
by Jerry Saltz
Published January 24 – 30, 2001
link to article (just copy and past into your browser)
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0104/saltz.shtml