Sol LeWitt:
Incomplete Open Cubes
Nicholas Baume (ed)
Copyright © Paul Brown 2002
All Rights Reserved
This review was written for fineArt forum
for their November 2002 issue. http://www.fineartforum.org
Sol LeWitt
remains for me one of the most important artists of the 20th
century. And the Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes is
perhaps his most important work. The work was originally
exhibited at the Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris in 1974 and then
elsewhere in Europe and the USA.
In 2001 Nicholas Baume working closely
with the artist curated this exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum
Museum of Art in Hartford Connecticut - a museum that already
hosts one of the more important LeWitt collections and which has
a long established special relationship with the artist. We are
lucky that someone had the vision to turn the catalogue into a
book that now brings the work to a wider audience and at a time
when the late modernist period is being reviewed and revalued
after decades of neglect.
LeWitt is a conceptual artist, a
serialist and systems artist who once said "my own work of the
past ten years is about only one thing, logical statements using
formal elements as grammar". He is often associated with the
minimalist movement - a position he (like Dan Flavin) adamantly
rejects: "Recently there has been much written about minimal
art, but I have not discovered anyone who admits to doing this
kind of thing. [...] Therefore I conclude that it is part of a
secret language that art critics use when communicating with each
other through the medium of the art magazine."
For me LeWitt is one of a few artists
whose work bridges modernism and postmodernism. It is
simultaneously a pinnacle of modernism - the totally intrinsic
object - while at same time being "worthless". It can be made by
anyone without LeWitt's intervention and is void of traditional
aesthetic attribution - it's a signifier that is open to the
pluralistic interpretations of each and every one of its viewers.
In the Variations of Incomplete Open
Cubes LeWitt takes a simple question - how many of these
variations are possible? The resulting exhibition is a collection
of his notes and drawings together with 8-inch models of the
final complete set. For this "retrospective" Baume was also able
to include many of the larger 40-inch aluminium variations that
have never been seen together before.
The book contains a luscious collection of
photographs of the works together with facsimiles of LeWitt's
notes, drawings, prints and extracts from previous catalogues and
publications. Baume's essay traces the history of the work as
well as providing important contextual and critical information.
Pamela M Lee discusses the work in the
context of serialism and draws important comparisons with the
contemporary music scene - LeWitt owns manuscripts by Steve Reich
and other composers. She also refers to Rosalind Krauss' famous
criticism of the artist's work as obsessive - the "babble" of
serial expansion which fails to summarise by using "the single
example that would imply the whole". Here we see if not the
origin then the essence of the mainstream viewpoint that has led
to so much neglect of this period of art history. Neglect that a
book like this serves to redress.
Jonathon Flatley's essay takes LeWitt's
wonderful statement: "The idea become a machine that makes the
art" and compares Andy Wahol's "I want to be a machine". The
resulting essay brings a wealth of association to the work and
clearly illustrates its power as a "open" signifier. LeWitt is
important and so is this book. I'm grateful to the Wadsworth, to
Baume and to MIT Press for making it available.
Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes
Edited by Nicholas
Baume
With essays by Nicholas Baume, Jonathan Flatley and
Pamela M Lee The catalogue of an exhibition at the Wadsworth
Atheneum Museum of Art, Harford, Connecticut
MIT Press
ISBN 0-262-52311-6
http://mitpress.mit.edu/
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