Review: Sol LeWitt - 100 Views
With the new book “100 Views,” Mass MoCA makes the attempt to link the work of Sol LeWitt with his very being in a manner that takes a cue from the artist’s work.
In this new accompaniment to the massive LeWitt wing, Mass MoCA tries to bring something that seems lofty and distant to the uninitiated not only down to earth but also straight on our level — eye to eye. It’s quite a goal for a book about abstract art, traditionally one of the most off-putting and alienating forms available to laymen. It’s not often wrapped up in an understanding or appreciation of the person who created the work, largely because there seldom is anything that seems very personal in the form at all.
That’s the key, though: The person is hidden in the structure of what has unfolded; the person has created the rules by which the work exists.
Learning to appreciate LeWitt means learning to appreciate a certain system, but so many things are like that. In learning the systems behind the most mundane parts of life — government, automobile engines, plumbing — you can begin to admire the minds that both craft those structures and build on them.
In my experience, this is done all the time with literature and film and music, and it was a revelation when I realized that physics and mechanics and all sorts of things were sprung from the same idea. Any artwork is very probably part of a system that is devised in order to create it — I’ve seen guys do amazing things with my car engine, working within that system for creative solutions. LeWitt is like the person who wrote the manual for the mechanic. He is the system maker.
As a revealer of systems, there might have been no greater than Albert Einstein, but in order for laymen to truly connect with his scientific ideas, it became mandatory at a certain point to reveal the humanity behind the formulas. People had to get to know Einstein the man to truly appreciate what was wrought by Einstein the mathematical poet.
Such is the case with LeWitt, and that is the main purpose behind this new catalog — not to tell the reader the meaning of the work, the typically dense art-theory essays that accompany such undertakings, but through short reminiscences of the man himself and what impact he and the work had on the person’s life. This cuts through the “art speak” that alienates so many to museum catalogs and gets to the heart of the work, which is shared with the man who created it.
We all struggle to decipher the parameters of the universe — whether through science or religion, we go through the maze of reality attempting to uncover the boundaries of what we can experience and what lies behind that. In that way, LeWitt’s work speaks to us all — his are the instructions everyone seeks, the plans to reality — each universe a large canvas on a wall, self-contained and with its own rules.
His wing in Mass MoCA is like a window to 100 alternate universes, laid side-by-side — and that’s why the wing itself is LeWitt’s greatest work. It’s the multi-verse itself, a fusion of quantum theory and art that no artist has previously achieved — and could not without the space provided by MoCA.
In “100 Views” editors Susan Cross and Denise Markonish have compiled a multi-verse of personal remembrances to equal the physical gallery space within the museum. LeWitt himself becomes a creature of relativity in the same way his works do. From each writer’s vantage point comes a view of LeWitt that is personal to them, while still subject to certain rules of personality — kindness, impishness, intelligence — that function as the inarguable physics of LeWitt regardless of the observer. In pairing these testimonies — some of which do go into the concepts that LeWitt addresses — with the work itself, a full portrait has been created of an artist whose creative space is a universe unto itself.
“100 Views” functions not unlike LeWitt’s art, taking form in a way similar to his artistic instruction to the other artists who realized his conceptions. Put everything in this book together accordingly, and it’s not a wall drawing that comes out — it’s the portrait of a man.
If the LeWitt wing functions as his body after death, this catalog is perhaps his mind and soul.
No Comments Comments Feed
Add a Comment