Word: lewitt
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Does the ancient Puritan connection between virtue and boredom still run beneath the glitzy, pleasure-roiled surface of American culture? For the answer, go and visit the retrospective of Sol LeWitt's paintings, sculpture and prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. It will dispel your doubts, without necessarily offering you lots in the way of superior pleasure. The Puritans, as descendants of the men who tried to destroy the whole legacy of English medieval art, exalted the Word and the Idea and distrusted the visual icon. It was blasphemy to represent the face...
...texture--not to mention the primal infantile pleasure of smearing colored mud around on a virginal surface--associated with making a picture? The piety of this search, seen as an act of exemplary denial, is the ghost that haunts the machine of American abstraction--and the emotionless grids of LeWitt's work in particular. Not all abstraction, of course, some of which (most famously, Abstract Expressionism) is as lush as Frederic Church's skies or Marilyn Monroe's cleavage. But enough of it to make up a distinct subspecies of American abstraction, the big effusion of which came...
Which brings us to Sol LeWitt, there in the Whitney. There is no doubt of the probity and generosity of this artist, born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents and trained at Syracuse University and at New York's School of Visual Arts, with an additional background of architectural drafting in the offices of I.M. Pei. Every one of the seven essays in the show's thick catalog pays effusive tribute to the sum of LeWitt's virtues, his "openness" and his "honesty," his recoil from the cult of "heroic" personality and his generous encouragement of a score...
Actually, Muybridge's influence is a useful clue to LeWitt's intentions. Those photo strips of humans, horses and birds moving in space, their movement chopped into small progressive stages, are the direct ancestors (with cubes or grids substituted for the live subjects) of structures like LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974, which squeezes more variations out of a six-sided figure than you might have thought possible. And yet this solemn undertaking has more the air of a stubborn exercise than an imaginative act. Indeed, there are times when, as in The Location of a Line...
More engaging, because more romantic and genuinely beautiful, are the big accretions of small, white, open cubes, which look like the Platonic idea of ziggurats or ideal cities and recall LeWitt's interest in real-world architecture. Most of the mural-size "wall drawings" on display are fairly inert; their main characteristic is a sort of soothing, high-minded laboriousness that stands in for energy of conception. Still, their depiction of colored solids often has the decorative charm of the geometrical illustrations in old emblem books, and the color, saturated and speckled, is a big step up from the normally...