Sol Lewitt; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Artist of purist tastes who was a founding father of
conceptualism
The Independent
14 April 2007
Charles Darwent
Solomon LeWitt, artist: born Hartford, Connecticut 9
September 1928; twice married (two daughters); died New York
8 April 2007.
On the evening of 24 February 2000, Sol LeWitt took part in
an odd event at Brandeis University in Massachussetts.
Before a mesmerised audience, the artist prised open a box
holding a work he had interred in it 25 years before. This
turned out to be another box - a one-inch cube of white
paper this time, which, when opened, revealed a diagonal
line drawn across its bottom plane beside the words "A line
not straight corner to corner", its maker's signature and a
date, 13 October 1974. LeWitt, who had clearly forgotten all
about the work, held it up to his face and frowned. Then he
muttered the disapproving words "minimal art", and sat down.
This episode sums LeWitt up in various ways. Most obviously,
it underlines his place in the development of conceptual
art, a role so central that he is still (if not entirely
accurately) known as "the father of conceptualism". In the
1960s, he had joined artists such as Joseph Kosuth in
rejecting the abstract formalism of the critic Clement
Greenberg in favour of work in which, as LeWitt wrote in a
1967 issue of Artforum, "the idea or the concept is the most
important aspect." "When an artist uses a conceptual form of
art," he went on, "all planning and decisions are made
beforehand. The execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea
becomes the machine that makes the art."
This meant, in effect, that materials and skill no longer
mattered and that art could consist of a paper cube
scribbled on with a biro, the biro-marks themselves, or even
of the idea of such things. Although this thinking had
recent precedents, notably in the early work of Robert
Rauschenberg and the Fluxus group, LeWitt quickly became its
most articulate exponent. In 1969, he published the
conceptual equivalent of Luther's 95 Theses, although -
LeWitt having recently been a minimalist - his "Sentences on
Conceptual Art" numbered just 35. The first declared that
"Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists",
the last, bafflingly, that "These sentences comment on art,
but are not art." Critics reeled.
Oddly, LeWitt's entombment of his 1974 paper cube was not
the first inhumation in which he had taken part. Six years
earlier, in 1968, he had buried a steel equivalent of the
work in the garden of a Dutch collector. Called Buried Cube
Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value, this
was widely seen as the artist's deadpan farewell to
minimalism, a movement whose reliance on materials had
become too baroque for LeWitt's purist tastes. In the same
year, he made the first of his famous wall drawings directly
onto the wall of a New York gallery. Instructed to paint
over the work at the end of the show, the gallery's
horror-struck owner refused. She insisted that LeWitt paint
it over himself, which he did without demur.
As with his cubes, it is tempting to read this overpainting
as a form of burial; to see the trajectory of LeWitt's art
as a process of removal, of willed loss. By drawing on
walls, he did away with the need for paper or canvas. He
also made sure that his work would not - could not - last,
permanence being altogether too material. One of his first
jobs had been as a graphic artist in the architectural
office of I.M. Pei in New York. Now, LeWitt used the
substance of architecture to cancel out the substance of
art, leaving it in the realm of pure abstraction.
Bound up in all this was a gradual erosion of the self in
his work, a tendency that reflected an almost obsessive need
for privacy. (LeWitt steadfastly refused to be interviewed
or photographed, remarking, tartly, that he was "not Rock
Hudson".) From 1968 on, his art was increasingly made by
teams of assistants whom he would modestly credit to his own
cost.
Instructions to these assistants were left intentionally
vague - the note on the bottom of his 1974 paper cube is
typical - and relied more and more on self- generating
mathematical systems for their execution. Hexagons,
geometric progressions and, of course, cubes, became the
mainstay of LeWitt's practice. Not surprisingly,
mathematicians loved him, seeing works such as Six geometric
figures in three colors on three colors and all their
combinations (1978) as problems waiting to be solved. Less
numerate members of the public found LeWitt's radical
excision of human narrative sterile and scary, and liked him
less.
This was, perhaps, based on a misunderstanding. Although his
work seemed increasingly dry, LeWitt's removal of himself
from his own picture suggested a certain vulnerability. Born
in 1928, he was the child of Russian immigrants. His doctor
father died when he was six, leaving him to be raised by his
mother and an aunt in a small Connecticut town. It is
tempting to see his art as that of a lonely child, insisting
on being taken on its own terms and calling for complete
devotion. Like mathematical equations, LeWitt's works can
only be solved with the participation of a viewer, and this
in turn imposes a kind of intimacy.
Nor was his exclusion of humanity ever quite as complete as
he seemed to hope it would be. In 1987, he responded to a
public commission by erecting a wall of concrete blocks
outside a government building in Hamburg in Germany. To this
structure - LeWitt disliked the term "sculpture" - he gave
the entirely narrative name of Black Form: dedicated to the
missing Jews. "Being Jewish," he explained, "I noticed the
absence [in Germany] of Jewish artists and curators, Jewish
bakers and candlestick makers." This, too, may explain
something of the defensiveness of LeWitt's work, and of its
underlying sense of loss.
Although Sol LeWitt may not have been conceptualism's sole
parent, he was certainly among its founding fathers. The
Young British Artists owe a particular debt to him. Martin
Creed's Turner Prize-winning The Lights Going On and Off can
be traced, via Michael Craig-Martin, to LeWitt's fascination
with the insubstantial. So, too, can Keith Tyson's
mathematically self- propogating Artmachine of the 1990s.
LeWitt's attitude to his own posterity, though, was
typically self-effacing and wry. "One understands the art of
the past by applying the conventions of the present," he
said. "And so one inevitably misunderstands the art of the
past."
Charles Darwent