Blueprint for a Doodle

Sol LeWitt Dan Graham Robert Smithson Fiennes Art Appreciation Eric Doeringer in Philadelphia Introducing Ahmet Ögüt California Museums Cutting Back Paul McCarthy

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Sol LeWitt made it his mission to make art available to everyone by reducing it to its barest essence: a list of instructions. Finding his artistic métier in the late ’60s among Conceptualist cohorts such as Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, LeWitt quickly shrugged off the mantle of the heroic gesture while embracing Minimalist principles such as repetition and serialization. Throughout his career of some 40 years, his work always came back to one fundamental concept: the idea is paramount.

Nowhere is this more manifest than in his wall drawings, whose formulas and diagrams are playful and illogical rather than mathematically precise. Seemingly anyone could grab a pencil and make Wall Drawing #118 of 1971: “fifty randomly placed points connected by straight lines.” Or #46 from 1970: “vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.” Executing a Sol LeWitt drawing has been compared to explicating a biblical text or performing a piece of music; in other words, no interpretation is absolute. Yet as the final touches are added to the 105 wall drawings that will be on view for the next 25 years at Mass MoCA (a retrospective that LeWitt finished planning a year before his death, in April 2007), it becomes clear that even though the artist gave his assistants wide latitude, a stamp of imprimatur is inevitable. With LeWitt gone, whatever decisions are made over the course of the show will likely be definitive, and the margin for error is diminishing every day. For the most part, the assistants— dubbed “drafters” by LeWitt (the neutral term is more evocative of architects than artists)—happily accept their role as instruments, mechanically following the rules he outlined with meticulous care. “It’s very basic technician work,” says Megan Dyer, who has worked on LeWitt’s drawings for the past eight years and is an artist in her own right. “We’re like any other kind of artisan, like a carpenter. You’re given a set of blueprints, and you execute the piece.”

The exhibition takes up a three-floor wing in the former mill, and one stunning drawing after another shows the artist’s gradual loosening up over the years, culminating with the frenetic energy of the more recent “scribble” pieces. Visitors go unnoticed by the 54 workers (including 30 art students from local and national universities), who are wielding tape with the fluid movement of tai-chi masters, twisting tissue paper into Peg-Board, or squeezing ink from a sponge in order to get the dilution just right. But for all their concentration, there is also a sense of lightheartedness and excitement, an atmosphere LeWitt, whose generosity was renowned, would no doubt have encouraged. As he wrote in “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” his seminal 1969 essay: “It is difficult to bungle a good idea.”

"Blueprint for a Doodle" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.