If you haven’t yet made it out to North Adams for MASS MoCA’s Sol LeWitt exhibition, I suggest you do, and that you do it before the weather turns while you can still more or less have the museum to yourself. Only Massachusetts’ own little haven of contemporary art could pull something like this off, and it’s the exhibition’s scale (a 27,000 sq ft. space over three floors refurbished specifically for these 105 massive wall drawings) that makes it work. In a sense, Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings lend themselves to a retrospective like this. They don’t really have to be acquired, nor insured for vast sums of money or securely transported. They only have to be drawn, though, if you watch one of the timelapses, you’ll see that this isn’t easy work. LeWitt’s early drawings may have been monotonously demanding to execute, but the latter stuff of the exhibition’s upper floors required dauntingly precise masking, projection, drafting, and measuring techniques, as well as a scientific eye for how colors meet. 22 of LeWitt’s former legion of assistants teamed up with 30-odd students from Williams, Yale, and Mass College of Liberal Arts, among others, to execute these 105 murals.
LeWitt’s cubic sculptures and wall drawings are some of the purest pieces of conceptual art out there. They ask all the right questions and engage their viewers in all the right ways, without falling into the post-pop (in a few cases, even pre-pop) traps of being nothing but witty one-liners or being so esoteric and controversial that their value is determined by how many people they piss off. LeWitt’s ideas were clear and articulate. His Sentences on Conceptual Art and Paragraphs on Conceptual Art are some of the first stops in the Conceptual Art literature. Of varying complexity (and simplicity), they are purely about the process of art-making and investigate the nature of the artwork by democratizing the process that creates it, and pushing the work itself to the end of the equation.
Left: Wall Drawing 414. Right: Wall Drawing 413 (Drawing Series IV (A) with India ink washes. 24 Drawings. March 1984. India ink wash. LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut)
The MASS MoCA exhibition is an exhibition of process. So much of it focuses on the execution of the drawings–including a documentary video of mostly time-lapsed footage aptly accompanied by a Steve Reich soundtrack. You’re not allowed to forget that LeWitt only provided the instructions for these drawings and that’s how LeWitt would’ve wanted it, with viewer’s attention pulled from the individual artwork and re-focused on the idea behind the body of work presented–on the concept. What’s so beautiful about this (and I don’t know if this is how it’ll work out, but I’m sure LeWitt would’ve wanted it this way) is that when 2033 comes around and it’s time for MASS MoCA’s Building 7 to be filled with some other unprecedented exhibition, everything can just be painted over. Not returned, loaned out, moved back into storage or another gallery, but just painted over as if MASS MoCA has decided on a different color scheme. The art-making machinery of the idea of LeWitt’s instructions remains intact, while the work itself is ephemeral, temporary, and almost a second thought.
Of course, LeWitt doesn’t throw aesthetics to the wind. They’re certainly here, across 3 floors and 4 decades in countless permutations of shape and color and on an immense curatorial scale, with drawings flowing into one another in a retrospective that provides a career survey more thorough than anything I’ve ever seen. The 1st floor brings together drawings from the 1970s height of Conceptualism and Minimalism–the most historically important portion of the show and LeWitt’s career. I’ve decided to skip dwelling on specific works here, since there are just so damn many and they’re so easy to browse on the exhibition’s excellent website. These early works, mostly in pencil, are diverse in their own right. They alternate between the psychedelic arrangements of lines you might find on a dorm room poster, and the plainest geometric seriality. Some are broad and vivid pen drawings, others are pale and washed out. One connects the gallery’s architectural points and many mirror the precision of architectural drawings. You see LeWitt establish his basic vocabulary of shapes and lines, woven into patterns like textiles under a microscope.
Wall Drawing 584H (Squares, divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts. Within each part, color ink washes superimposed. The squares are bordered by a ½-inch (1¼ cm) white band and a 4-inch (10 cm) black band. January 1989. Color ink wash. Courtesy of the Estate of Sol LeWitt)
Floor 2 brings us into the 1980s and 90s, when LeWitt began to experiment with pigment-based ink and acrylic washes, as well as crayon, ink, and chalk. Geometric rainbows of bright, washed out colors are formed by LeWitt’s then expanded visual vocabulary of broken lines, arcs, and simple figures and forms. Some drawings evoke television test patterns and others convey basic geometric progressions like mathematical proofs. The aesthetic begins to become more rooted in color than the patterns themselves.
Floor 3 (late 1990s to the artist’s death in 2007) further expands on LeWitt’s shape bank with waves, bars, and more complex curves. These drawings have a child-like expressiveness in their bright acrylic coloring. We get vivid high gloss colors that, despite the simplicity of the forms, are visually confusing–combining in such a way that blurs and distorts your vision as if you were trying on someone else’s glasses. The latest and final drawings in the show are part of a so-called “scribble” series begun in 2005. They show LeWitt’s return to his original medium of graphite pencil, but where previously in the show the medium mostly dictated the aesthetic, these stand out from the early graphite works of the 70s. His previous plays (through the 90s) with light and color are desaturated, producing simple luminous shapes done (or described) in six different densities of scribbles that don’t appear to be drawn, but rather to emanate from the walls themselves, creating textures and visual confusion for the viewer. White and black sway in an ordered field of gradations, almost as if we’ve zoomed out on an immense early drawing so that the repetitions of graphite lines become more congested and uniform.
Wall Drawing 880 (Loopy Doopy (orange and green). Semptember 1998. Acrylic paint. Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts.)
Left: Wall Drawing 631 (A wall is divided into two equal parts by a line drawn from corner to corner. Left: alternating diagonal black and white 8-inch (20 cm) bands from the lower left. Right: alternating diagonal black and white 8-inch (20 cm) bands from the upper right. January 1990. India ink. Collection of Frances Dittmer.) Right: Wall Drawing 614 (Rectangles formed by 3-inch (8 cm) wide India ink bands, meeting at right angles. July 1989. India ink. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the artist.)
