[NYTr] Sol Lewitt, 1928-2007
ny...@olm.blythe-systems.com
sent by Bill Koehnlein
Sol Lewitt, 1928-2007
The Independent (UK) - April 14, 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/article2447670.ece
Sol Lewitt
Artist of purist tastes who was a founding father of conceptualism
by 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."
*
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