Sol LeWitt died last Sunday. Even if the name doesn't ring a bell you've probably seen a LeWitt if you've spent any time in a contemporary art exhibit. You may have encountered a stack of white boxes looking vaguely like the steel framework of a skyscraper under construction, the sculpture hovering between art and a plan for an artwork. Since it didn't seem to take much effort to make the sculpture--or it was suspiciously self-evident--the artist's name was somehow irrelevant, so you didn't put much effort into matching artist with work as you might with an artwork that evinced the hand of the artist--a de Kooning, for instance.
This experience is not intended as a slight on LeWitt--just the opposite. LeWitt was as self-effacing artist as one is likely to encounter in contemporary art. Michael Kimmelman recalls how LeWitt once meticulously photographed every square inch of his own apartment, then nearly forgot to include himself in the pictures. He is a transitional artist between modernism and postmodernism. Now associated with Minimalism and Conceptualism, his work had its roots in two signature modernist art movements, Russian Constructivism and Duchamp's conceptual art. From the latter he inherited a tension between eye and mind. From the former, the tension between idea and concrete form. LeWitt conceived the artist as someone who came up with the idea for an artwork. "In conceptual art," he once wrote, "the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work." Others could actually make the artwork, and oftentimes they did. Just as he sought to eliminate all subjectivity from the artwork, he also banished all "caprice, taste and other whimsies" in the production of an artwork.
The result was an art not for the eye. LeWitt's paintings and sculptures do not offer the rich visual experience of Renoir or Manet. Rather, his works were investigations into the mysteries of logic. "Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists," he famously declared. "They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach." We prefer to have our ideas both open and closed. We may have certain fixed ideas about art (a stack of white blocks isn't art), yet we'd like to think our ideas are capacious enough to include artworks we've never seen before (and yet the white blocks are kind of elegant and pleasing to look at). To see an idea fully manifested in space--as a fixed, compete object just simply there--is therefore a starling, maybe even irritating experience. Somewhere inside our encounter with the artwork as idea, as concept, is the inscrutability not of the idea, but the real itself.
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