To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Arts & Entertainment March 10, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2000/03/10/lewitt The writing on the wall Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt doesn't do his own work, doesn't make originals and doesn't follow his own rules. Thirty years on, he's still making people nervous. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Apollinaire Scherr The conceptual art Sol LeWitt helped spawn three decades ago is a particularly American kind, preoccupied with plain things like lines on walls, cubes in space. He countered the heroic angst of Jackson Pollock in the lowest key, with simple maxims such as "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art" and "One thing always leads to another." But LeWitt is still making people anxious. During a question-and-answer period at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on the opening day of his second traveling retrospective (the first was in 1978 and started off at the Museum of Modern Art in New York), audience members worried about one thing in the guise of many. Most of LeWitt's two-dimensional works appear directly on the walls, instead of on canvas or paper. When he has to transfer a "wall drawing" from one venue and size of wall to another, how does he know, someone asked, if he's preserved his original idea? (There are no originals, he explained, only variations.) Was the artist who draws and writes recipes for pieces that others execute ever taken aback by the result? ("I think of it conceptually and perceptually. So I'm always surprised and never surprised.") And when he's dead and can't do anything about it, how will he feel then about his abdication of control? LeWitt surfaced in their questions as the engineer of a "Modern Times" art machine that dements its own once-innocent ideas. The crowd was overtaken by the very anxiety in the art itself. "I'm trapped in my own premise that from the instructions, the work can be made," he said. This trap is the foundation for LeWitt's absurd comedy: It's Beckett with blocks and paint. LeWitt embeds the instructions for many of his pieces in their titles. The title of the faint pencil piece "Wall Drawing #73" (1971) continues, "Lines, not straight not touching, drawn at random, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall." The tag's cheerful confidence is perfectly matched by its total failure to prepare the viewer for the drawing, which resembles a topographical map of a landscape without any landmarks. From its description ("Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors"), you wouldn't know that "Wall Drawing #65" (1971) looks like a tangly expanse of dark hair -- a mess. In the first 20 years of his career, represented by half of the retrospective, LeWitt moved with mechanical hope from one fit of neatness to another until he'd filled thousands of spaces with piles of skeletal cubes; books of photographed sunsets, walls of bricks, his apartment's complete contents, all arranged in neat grids; and pencil scratchings and crayon markings of arcs, lines, circles, squares and their manifold combinations and permutations. The works are proofs that, once unspooled, simple ideas turn into chaos and complicated plans never amount to much. They offer themselves as pointedly inadequate rest stops on a one-way road to disorder or to banality. The pieces aren't tragicomic individually. As a serial artist whose whole premise is never to summarize, exemplify or represent, but to take an idea straight through to its pointless end without skipping a step and then move on to a corollary plan, LeWitt needs a big show to make himself clear. This one is too small. Particularly as it moves into the second 20 years, "Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective" inserts too many ellipses in the artist's exhaustive progress. Or maybe LeWitt himself became elliptical. For 20 years, it was important to him that his discrete elements (arcs, cubes, etc.) be boring; they weren't the story, just its tools. But in the '80s, he inexplicably began to paint enormous, isolated cubes, spheres and pyramids in rich Renaissance hues. The Platonic forms float on the wall in an invocation -- blasphemous for a small "c" conceptual artist -- of three-dimensional space. After years of insisting on taking his materials for granted, LeWitt seemed suddenly struck by a reverence for them that bordered on the sentimental. An artist doesn't have to adhere to the rules he establishes for himself early in his career. He can do whatever he wants. But LeWitt's art is its rules to a large extent; our pleasure in the uncomfortable condition that his proliferating series enacts has always depended on being absorbed by the plans, just as much as by their look. Moving from systematic explorations of first one element (grids, let's say) and then another (arcs) and another (squares) and another (lines), viewers play out the formulas on their fingers. You can hear them before "Incomplete Open Cubes" (1974) loudly working the math behind the grid arrangement. Getting churned through the art's machine, mirroring its monkey mind, you eventually took the basic absurdist premise that animated LeWitt, again and again, as necessary and your own. When he gave it up for something else, it was hard not to feel duped. But in the past few years, he has begun to return to the old story, this time as commentary. The pieces used to just act goofy; now, filled with thick stripes in bold colors, they look goofy. One 1999 wall drawing even reminds us what goofy means in the LeWitt lexicon. "Arcs in Four Directions" consists of four sets of concentric, brilliantly colored arcs, divided by two perpendicular black bands: a bungled painting of a target, spot-on in its bright futility. "Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective" remains at SFMOMA through May 21, then travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (July 22-Oct. 22); the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (Nov. 30-Feb. 25) and European venues, to be determined. salon.com | March 10, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Apollinaire Scherr is an arts writer living in the Bay Area.