In Terms Of

Tag: Labor

  • Much Detachment, Very Labor, So Painting

    The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness
    Thursday, June 4, 2015
    Jewish Museum, Scheuer Auditorium, New York

    Isabelle Graw speaks on “The Economy of Painting” (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    A well-attended lecture by Isabelle Graw, a professor of art theory and a founding editor of the journal Texte zur Kunst, was titled “The Economy of Painting: Notes on the Vitality of a Success-Medium and the Value of Liveliness.” Jetlagged from a flight from Germany, Graw framed her talk as an eight-step analysis of the naturalization of painting in the contemporary moment. In the late 1990s, she said, painters “felt pressured to justify themselves,” but this anxiety fell away by the early 2000s, because of social, economic, and historical reasons. Probably most important is that artists since then have absorbed the critique of painting and consequently renewed the primacy of the medium.

    Step One

    Graw’s term for the renewal of painting is “vitalist projection.” Her point of departure was Hubert Damisch’s ideas about the indexical signs traditionally associated with painting, such as the brushstroke, which imply subjectivity. Brushstrokes suggest “the traces of an activity to the eyes,” Graw explained, and act as a finger pointing to the absent or ghostlike author. That a painting isn’t actually alive but, because it exists in a material form, offers an illusion that it can think and speak—this is vitalist projection. The labor and lifetime of the artist are seemingly stored in the painting, she told us, but they are not reduced to it. And what a painting actually depicts, Graw argued, is irrelevant to this concept.

    Sigmar Polke, The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black!, 1969, lacquer on canvas, 59 1/16 x 49 7/16 in. (artwork © Estate of Sigmar Polke)

    One would expect Graw to provide examples from Western painting, from the Renaissance to modern times, to give us an idea of the kind of work that projects vitality. Instead she jumped to the late 1960s, when the German artist Sigmar Polke ironically staged subjectivity as a display of affect. Paintings such as Polke as Astronaut (1968) and The Higher Powers Command: Paint the Upper Right Hand Corner Black! (1969), Graw said, invoke the presence of the author but mock it. And based on its title, the latter work even suggests it painted itself.

    Step Two

    Graw stated that she spent a year scratching her head over the question “What is painting?”1 For her, painting is not just a picture on canvas but also an art that transgresses boundaries. Painting is revitalized, she said, when it pushes boundaries, like when the French artist Francis Picabia tacked a stuffed monkey to cardboard and painted words around it to create Natures Mortes (1920). Incorporating spheres of labor, consumer goods, and written text into the work, Graw said, breathed new life into painting. Similarly, Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968), a painting inscribed with German curses and insults, combined fashion, art, and design—the artist wore the canvas as a gown before hanging it on the wall. The Large Cloth thus becomes a discursive object that appears to be alive—it can speak to us. But apart from the abusive language, what does it say? Probably not much. As Raphael Rubenstein wrote in his review of the artist’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “It would be hard to find an artist in recent times who was less forthcoming than Sigmar Polke (1941–2010). He almost never gave interviews, and on the rare occasions when he did so, his responses either mocked or otherwise frustrated the interviewer’s quest for information.”2

    Installation view of Sigmar Polke’s The Large Cloth of Abuse (1968) at the Museum of Modern Art (photograph by Jill Krementz)

    Graw cited other historical artists who revitalized painting (El Lissitzky, Yves Klein, Niele Toroni) and added a few newer ones (Jeff Wall, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rachel Harrison) whose work addresses ideas about painting but usually does not incorporate any kind of paint. “It seems tempting to have a highly elastic definition of painting,” Graw said, “to detect it everywhere,” but she didn’t commit to going that far. Nevertheless, the medium can “push beyond the edge of the frame,” she said, “while still holding onto the specificity of the picture on canvas or to variations of this format.” I nodded my head to all of this—elastic definitions of art are good—but still had one major question: When exactly did painting exhaust itself? Why did the medium need to be renewed in the first place? How did painting become moribund? Graw failed to establish the norms against which her exceptions rebel. If academic approaches or religious iconography were to blame, I wanted to know how vitalist projection worked in them, or not.

    Step Three

    Graw discussed the narrow bond between person and product, in which the artist and his or her creation overlap. In performance art, she said, this congruity is achieved through the persona, a staged version of the artist. In the work of Andrea Fraser, who was Graw’s example, the character invoked by the artist can be separated from the artist herself. The identity of a painting and its creator diverge: the painting “cannot be reduced to its maker because it’s material,” Graw said, making the relationship metonymic. If I can discern a difference between painting and performance, according to Graw, it’s that a performed character is immaterial, brought to life by a person, whereas a painting is a physical object that has a separate physical presence. But since painting appears to be lifelike but really isn’t, what is she even going after? I began to suspect that Graw was proposing a theory of painting based on the lack of an idea. What a strange thing to do.

    Step Four

    Graw reviewed painting’s specific indexicality to the ghostlike author (which doesn’t exist, right?), starting with Charles Pierce’s notion that a sign must have a physical connection to an object, corresponding point by point. Pierce cited photography, which has a factual connection to the world and, in Graw’s words, “gives an automatic inscription of the object without presupposing an author.” Do people still take this nostalgic if not ancient view of photography—this it is mechanical, neutral, objective, and descriptive—seriously?

    Isabelle Graw at the Jewish Museum (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Step Five

    Graw decreed that an artist doesn’t have to touch a painting for it to have subjectlike power—a power that she  repeatedly nullified as being an illusion. Like the work of Andy Warhol and Wade Guyton, a painting could be made mechanically or by an assistant. Through this, she said, imperfections can become improvements, which I took to mean a revitalization. At this moment Graw acknowledged the primacy of painting over other forms of art, such as sculpture, to express subjectivity, but her argumentation was neither clear nor convincing. She pointed to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s preference of painting over sculpture in his writing on aesthetics, to the power given to painting historically, and to painting’s familiarity to us. Her defense (because other people said so) was on shaky ground.

    Step Six

    The American artist Frank Stella once said that painting is handwriting, Graw went on, and some have understood Stella’s work as undermining the signature style—despite him creating his own. The more artists erase themselves from their work, Graw said, the more their subjectivity appears in it. “So there’s no way to get rid of it, right?” she joked. Here Graw recognized that an artist uses a mechanical process—like when the German artist Gerhard Richter drags paint across a canvas with a squeegee—doesn’t signify detachment. Why can’t she apply the same logic to photographers?

    Martin Kippenberger, Untitled, 1992, oil on canvas, 180 x 150 cm (artwork © Martin Kippenberger)

    Step Seven

    A painting’s value is not its price, Graw said, but rather is “a symbolic and economic worth that is attested to it once it circulates as a commodity.” (She explored this idea in her enlightening 2010 book High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture.) Valuable art, she continued, must be attributed to an author—this in spite of millions of art objects in museums worldwide (including paintings) whose makers have not yet been identified, or never will be. As in steps one and two of her talk, Graw cited only a contemporary example: Martin Kippenberger’s series of Hand-Painted Pictures (1992), which satirized the desire to see the artist’s personal touch in painting. (Kippenberger often had assistants or hired guns make his work—sometimes too well, to the artist’s displeasure.) Graw explained that this desire becomes a fantasy in collecting: when buying an artwork, a collector also buys into a fantasy that he or she has now become part of the artist’s life. This idea was the most compelling in her talk, and I would like to see Graw develop it.

    After Steps

    The Q&A session was scattered, with conversation between Graw and several audience members revolving, in an uninteresting way, around the production of digital images, and around Karl Marx’s definition of value and labor. Graw summarized her argument again: liveliness is apparent in painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century—though she never established when, how, and by whom—and twentieth-century avant-gardes redefined that vitality as they integrated art and life, something we usually understand as emancipatory. Yet the new spirit of twenty-first-century capitalism, she began to conclude, has a similar strategy: control subjectivity by transforming life into a currency, if not a product to be bought and sold. Taking an autonomous, conversative view of the function of art, Graw said that painting today fulfills the connection between art and life. In fact, she said, it’s one of the last places for people to find fulfillment. I am reminded of that quote attributed to Henri Matisse: painting should be “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.”

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Her exact queries were: What do I mean when I say painting” and “What is my notion of painting?”

    2 Raphael Rubinstein, “Polke’s Plenitude,” Art in America (June/July 2014), 110.

    Watch

  • In Defense of Democracy

    Chantal Mouffe
    Thursday, March 27, 2014
    Columbia University, Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium, New York

    Chantal Mouffe, intellectual activist (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “People have lost faith in traditional democracy,” said the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe. “They have a vote but not a voice.” But rather than call for revolution, she emphasized the need for better, more inclusive representation within institutions of power, such as when which leaders “come to power through election in order to implement a set of radical reforms.” Mouffe, a professor at the University of Westminster in London, is a hero in certain circles, and this lecture, presented in collaboration with Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, offered her the chance to elucidate her views for a diverse crowd of students, professors, art workers, and activists.

    Mouffee summarized recent philosophical challenges to neoliberalism, running through the basic ideas of theorists such as Nicholas Bourriaud and Paul Virilio, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, especially concepts from Hardt and Negri’s book Empire (2000), such as “multitude,” the new term for the proletariat, Mouffe said. She posited that we’ve gone from disciplinary society of hospitals and jails to a society of control, that is, one of biopolitics, immaterial labor, and communications. The multitude uses communications to express itself freely: these subjects are active, not passive—a concept in which neoliberals and capitalists, whose globalization efforts have liberated them from modernity, would delight. In an absolute democracy, according to Hardt, Negri, and friends, minorities in the multitude would never aspire to form a majority or a state, but rather a common. This is liberation, not emancipation, Mouffe said, and it denies a hegemonic structure’s role in power.

    Mouffe reaffirmed her ideas about agonism—a political philosophy she has long promoted—by emphasizing that change comes from working with and within institutions, transforming and improving them over time. (Agonism posits that political struggle based on difference and diversity can be passionate, constructive, and respectful, in short, confrontation is good.) This is a passive revolution and organic change, to borrow concepts from the twentieth-century Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci. Even though the idea of swift revolution is enticing, representative democracy should not be abandoned or replaced. One gets to choose real alternatives, Mouffe said, in agonistic debate, which engages institutions instead of rejecting, resisting, or replacing them. “Pluralist democracy cannot exist without representation,” she said, expressing a point of view that, according to Slavoj Žižek, presupposes democracy is an idealized, optimum political form that cannot be questioned.1

    Chantal Mouffe at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Mouffe generalized about the role of aesthetic practices, stating that art which transforms political identity and modernizes affect is good. So is art that allows for other voices. Radical breaks in art and the tabula rasa, she continued, ignore the importance of incubation and deny the function of influence. Transgressive art, Mouffe declared, is not the most radical kind, and harboring the illusion of art being subversive has inevitably caused the avant-gardes to fail. For her, art should contribute to a multiplicity of sites and—leaving arguments about framing, context, and validation aside— take place both inside and outside the museum. During the audience Q&A, the art historian Terry Smith requested examples of such works of art. Mouffe was hesitant to offer names but eventually gave two: an unfamiliar name [pronounced “eh too jahr”] and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

    As one would expect, the Q&A session was a mess of convoluted comments disguised as questions. A man dressed like a Trader Joe’s cashier bloviated for several minutes about episodes in twentieth-century global politics before blurting out, “It’s not cool to talk about the communist party.” Mouffe responded by asking him where and when a communist revolution has succeeded. There are failures but also hope: “We have to keep trying,” she encouraged. “It’s a long process.” Indeed, I often think about how, in the United States, one hundred years elapsed between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Mouffe said that progressive political heroes of the past probably never realized how the “social rights of the welfare state could be dismantled,” as they have during the past couple decades under neoliberalism. Taking an agonistic stance, she fears that protest movements won’t succeed because they’re contesting existing institutions with the goal of deposing them. While I tend to agree overall that real change happens slowly, radical points of view—such as Occupy Wall Street—serve a crucial function of yanking political conversation into a certain direction. And some institutions—especially in the art world—would better serve their constituents if they were gutted completely.

    In Terms Of count: 9.

    1 Slavoj Žižek, “Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century?” Rethinking Marxism 13, no. 3/4 (2001).

    Read

    Ayesha Ghosh, “GSAPP Lecture Addresses Architecture’s Role in New Democratic Systems,” Archinect, March 31, 2014.

  • Spectacular Vernacular

    Brian Droitcour: Vernacular Criticism
    Saturday, October 12, 2013
    New Museum of Contemporary Art, New Museum Theater, New York

    Brian Droitcour performs one of his Yelp reviews (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “In fifty to one hundred years,” Brian Droitcour said during his lecture on “Vernacular Criticism” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, “the exhibition review might become a sonnet.”1 The arts of literature and theater were certainly on his mind, as he began his talk by reciting two of his cheeky Yelp reviews on venerated New York art institutions—the Frick Collection and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—from memory for a full auditorium.

    Regarding the former: “This museum is sooo random! I was there today and I heard a docent telling her tour group that ‘there was no acquisitions policy written down’ until 1951 and I was like, no shit lady. The Fricks were just buying whatever struck their fancy and now New York has this weird museum celebrating them and their whims.” And the latter: “The Guggenheim is the best museum in New York to go to on a date. If you go to the Met then your date will want to look at the Egyptian galleries whereas you want to look at Dutch painting, or whatever, and eventually you’ll reach a compromise that you both secretly resent…. The Guggenheim is good for a date because it doesn’t give you a choice. There’s nowhere to go but up the ramp.” It’s funny, as the saying goes, because it’s true.

    A writer on art and culture for various publications and a doctoral student in comparative literature at New York University, Droitcour began contributing museum and gallery reviews to Yelp in early 2012. (He also started evaluating books on Amazon.) As a result, and among other accomplishments, he has cleverly discredited the three primary complaints that art critics have grumbled about for several decades, namely: “No one reads us,” “We have no power,” and “We don’t make any money.”2 For his generosity to the company, Yelp has bestowed Elite Squad status upon Droitcour.

    This afternoon’s wide-ranging talk touched on numerous topics, including the formation of museums. In the Renaissance, Droitcour said, a museum was defined both as a room with all kinds of stuff in it and as a book containing a list of items in those rooms. He also described how early modern museums adopted a linear, progressive version of history popularized by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as its default for presenting achievements in art, passing over Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s notion of the rotunda, in which a centralized subject can view all sides from a single position without considering overly structured narratives.

    Droitcour also summarized findings in Helen Rees Leahy’s book Museum Bodies (2012), which analyzes the behavior of nineteenth-century gallery goers. I wonder if anyone has researched twenty-first-century museum behavior, explaining why people always crowd by the door of video installations, blocking others from entering and leaving, or why latecomers to a talk always stand in an auditorium’s aisles instead of making their way toward empty seats, because doing so might involve crossing the front of the room and interrupting the event—much to a speaker’s horror and the audience’s embarrassment. Droitcour kindly gave those folks standing in the aisle of the New Museum Theater permission to sit down, joking that “I don’t want to torture your museum bodies.”

    François-Joseph Heim, Charles X Distributing Awards to Artists Exhibiting at the Salon of 1824 at the Louvre, 1827, oil on canvas, 68⅛ x 100¾ in. (artwork in the public domain)

    Droitcour positioned the Enlightenment author and philosopher Denis Diderot (1713–1784) as the father of vernacular criticism, the term given to the type of unprofessional writing found on platforms such as Yelp. For twenty years Diderot described his experiences at the Paris Salons—the art fairs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that showcased the best in contemporary art before the aristocracy snatched it up—in an intelligible voice. With chatty and conversational “writing that echoed the voices of the people there,” Droitcour told us, Diderot promoted the value of engaging in public discourse while upholding aesthetic or critical standards, something that Jürgen Habermas theorized in his landmark book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962, translated into English in 1989).

    Having lived several years in Russia, Droitcour brought up relevant examples of vernacular participation in the arts from the Soviet era. For instance, Furnace was a culture journal that predated the revolution, “so Lenin hated them,” Droitcour added. He then discussed a few examples from Lynn Mally’s book Culture of the Future (1990), which chronicles Furnace and also the contentious, short-lived organization Proletkult, which had local chapters with their own publications. “No one could agree,” Droitcour relayed, “what proletariat culture should be like.” The population of Soviet Russia comprised what could be called “museum burners,” those who wanted to flatten the institutions to create a clean slate, and “heritage studiers,” those who tried to figure out what might be salvaged from the past. The critic, journalist, and government official Anatoly Lunacharsky, for one, desired to erect new structures from the bricks of the old ones. Proletkults initially encouraged amateurism as a way of challenging the status quo but by the 1930s began to affirm the old values. Vernacular culture, Droitcour said, was taken up in an essay by Dubravka Ugresic in her book Karaoke Culture (2011), Droitcour told us, which argues that amateurs ought to know their place. What a party pooper!

    Does Yelp love Brian Droitcour back? (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Moving to the present day, Droitcour explored the conflict of personal subjectivity in the age of smartphones. Corporations take subjecthood from people, he said, and people must behave like corporations in matters of sex, love, and social reproduction, developing and marketing their own personal brands.3 (The idea of “selling yourself,” however, certainly dates to the beginning of human civilization.) Yelp models this situation but adds a twist: content on the website and the app depends solely on voluntary writers, but the company eventually usurps the role of the writer, such as when restaurant owners place signs in their windows that boast “People love us on Yelp.” Droitcour feels that Yelp helps to destroy the old forms of public influence and control, such as the consistency of message in advertising, and thus upsets the stability of the bourgeoisie. Yet the same corporations that cannibalize personal affect, he continued, present themselves as neutral, even benign. The Yelp logo, Droitcour said, “doesn’t represent [any emotion] in particular,” and his contributions to the site don’t necessarily demonstrate “how I feel about Yelp values.”

    Exposing the establishment’s cracks and fissures is generally good, but the cannibalization of individual subjectivity quickly seals them up again. What makes the situation even more paradoxical situation is that Yelpers have strong opinions, but often over trivial matters, at least from an economic or political point of view. Droitcour cited a review of a Burger King in Rhode Island—indeed, many fast-food restaurants and chain stores strive to provide a standardized experiences but are always subject to individual responses dependent on idiosyncratic factors that corporations cannot control. By reviewing each establishment individually, diners and shoppers can finally express what it means to “have it your way,” or at least, “this was the way I had it.” Yelp is democratic because everyone gets a voice, and while a consensus isn’t reached, it continually evolves. The art in galleries and museums, the food at Burger King, and the experience of a hair salon are all fair game, Droitcour emphasized. Such a description, though, isn’t entirely fair, since smaller, independent businesses have more to gain or lose through Yelp, unlike places such as Olive Garden and CVS Pharmacy, which safely offer corporate stability that is impervious to complaints.

    Carston Höller, Untitled (Slide), 2011, stainless steel slide segments, polycarbonate upper shell, and steel supports, two floors tall (artwork © Carston Höller; photograph by Benoit Pailley)

    What does the art world have at stake? It’s hard to say. Whether positive or negative, a review on Yelp is not likely to influence museum exhibition practices or commercial gallery sales, nor is it likely to affect foot traffic. Publicity and marketing departments may notice a Yelp review, and maybe a curator or two will read a visitor’s response, but criticism on Yelp will probably not dent decision making and power relations at established art institutions. Droitcour read aloud portions of a Yelp review of Carston Höller’s exhibition Experience (2011–12) at the New Museum from Lisa B., who expressed bewilderment. “I don’t understand it,” she wrote. (Droitcour claimed that the Höller show earned the most one-star reviews of the New Museum.) Interpreting this and other reviews, he argued that these Yelpers are not rejecting contemporary art categorically but rather are protesting its incomprehensibility and homogeneity. Even the art historian David Joselit, Droitcour said, gave Experience a “one-star review” in Artforum. “Lisa B. and David Joselit are basically saying the same things,” Droitcour insisted, which is true only because both writers gave a thumb’s down to the frustrating show. The positions in the two reviews, though, are radically different, as Joselit situates the exhibition within recent art history and current events, while Lisa B. complains about having to wait in long lines for what turned out to be an underwhelming experience. One would hope that a shrewd, perceptive denunciation of an exhibition from a respected art-world figure like Joselit would make a director or trustee pay attention, but would such a text have the same impact if he had yelped his opinions?

    After an aimless Q&A with audience members, Droitcour concluded his talk with thoughts about Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, thinking of Yelpers as serfs toiling the digital soil of social media. The vernacular was the language of slaves, he proposed, and online criticism can emancipate them from their tasks. On a personal level, Yelp helps Droitcour loosen up his own production. “Why not write in the vernacular?” he said. “It works for me.”

    In Terms Of count: 2 (one of which came from Droitcour, who looked me in the eye at the moment the words left his mouth).

    1 The talk coincided with a curatorial project for the web, Fifteen Stars: An Alternative View of the Museum, for which Droitcour asked seven artists—“all of whom [were chosen] based on their pre-existing participation in social media communities (like Tumblr and Dump.fm)”—to illustrate five Yelp reviews of New Museum exhibitions. Here are Droitcour’s thoughts on the project.

    2 An explanation: Droitcour’s Yelp reviews are regularly voted “useful,” “funny,” and “cool” by fellow contributors, which indicates that people read them. Furthermore, because of his novel approach to art criticism he has gained recognition and notoriety that has led to a paid speaking engagement at the New Museum, among other opportunities.

    3 In a Facebook message, Droitcour clarified his position: “I don’t say that they must [behave like corporations…], I say that the currently dominant ideology says that they must, and I’m interested in people who don’t do that.”

    Read

    Brian Droitcour, “Vernacular Criticism,” New Inquiry, July 25, 2014.

    Orit Gat, “Art Criticism in the Age of Yelp,” Rhizome, November 12, 2013.

    Matthew Shen Goodman, “Denis Diderot, Yelper? Droitcour’s Vernacular Criticism,” Art in America, October 11, 2013.

  • An Almost Unimaginably Radical Act

    Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings: A Panel Discussion
    Wednesday, September 18, 2013
    Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

    Sol LeWitt in his Manhattan apartment in 1961 (photographer unknown)

    Unlike many of his colleagues, the American artist Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) embraced the term Conceptual art. And at a time when artists were abandoning the white cube to make work in the real world, the traditional gallery was for him the best place to show his art. In fact, in a 1969 interview with Patricia Norvell he said: “The gallery situation is, I think, a very good situation in that it’s an optimum way of showing things. A lot of my things are designed specifically for that particular space. Some galleries are better for showing art and some are worse. But I think that for a certain kind of art a gallery is pretty good.”1

    These facts might paint the artist as being more conservative than others of his generation. Conceptual artists were famous for their information-heavy, language-based approaches, which drew from science, mathematics, and sociology, among other disciplines, but LeWitt insisted that his work was irrational and absurd, even in spite of the clarity of the written instructions for executing his pieces. What makes him radical, perhaps, was his openness, the way he achieved a kind of Zen freedom in his perspective on not only making art but also living life. Famously generous for trading artworks with almost anyone and for being an all-around great guy, the artist might be publicly acclaimed as Saint LeWitt—if only he weren’t Jewish.

    Sol LeWitt, installation view of Wall Drawing #564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed, 1988/2013, dimensions variable (artwork © Estate of Sol LeWitt; photograph by Steven Probert for Paula Cooper Gallery)

    Tonight’s gathering, titled “Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing: A Panel Discussion,” supplemented Paula Cooper Gallery’s current exhibition, Wall Drawing #564: Complex forms with color ink washes superimposed, which largely comprises a three-walled piece that has not been seen since its debut at the Venice Biennale in 1988. The panel’s moderator, Jock Reynolds, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, asked Cooper (who was sitting in the audience) to describe her experience of LeWitt making his first-ever wall drawing, which was part of her gallery’s inaugural show in October 1968. Briefly, the work (illustrated below) consisted of two squares, each made of four smaller squares that were formed by parallel lines, drawn directly on the wall with an ordinary pencil, that went in four directions: vertical, horizontal, and two forty-five degree diagonals. As a businesswoman, Cooper naturally wondered what would happen to LeWitt’s piece after the show’s conclusion, asking him “What do we do?” He responded, she recalled, by suggesting they “just paint it out.”

    The art historian and curator Brenda Richardson called this approach “an almost unimaginably radical act that dramatically influenced the evolution and sequential redefinitions of art over subsequent decades.”2 Certainly decorating the surfaces of walls with pigment or ink, as seen in cave paintings, Renaissance frescoes, and modern murals, is among the oldest, most venerable forms of art. Richardson’s argument, however, largely emphasizes the ephemeral nature of LeWitt’s work (“just paint it out”), its obliviousness to commercial concerns, and the removal of the artist’s hand, that is to say, anyone with the instructions can re-create a work by LeWitt. Of course one could find examples of such conditions throughout the history of art, but that’s beside the point here—dematerialization was all the rage in the late sixties.

    Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1: Drawing Series II 14 (A&B), 1968, black pencil, 48 x 108 in. (artwork © Estate of Sol LeWitt; photographer unknown)

    Reynolds asked his three colleagues at the table about their experiences with LeWitt’s work. He had first encountered it himself in the 1970s at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which had exhibited Wall Drawing #260 (1975), a piece now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the panelist Ann Temkin is chief curator of painting and sculpture. Previously Temkin spent thirteen years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns and displays a work called On a Blue Ceiling, Eight Geometric Figures: Circle, Trapezoid, Parallelogram, Rectangle, Square, Triangle, Right Triangle, X (Wall Drawing No. 351) from 1981, which was installed a year later on a barrel-vault ceiling in the modern-art wing of the museum’s enormous beaux-art building. During her thirteen years at the museum, she said, this work complemented everything that had ever hung below it. Reynolds agreed, saying that LeWitt was brilliant at placing his art inside buildings. He should know, since he organized a retrospective of wall drawings in 1993 at the Addison Gallery of American Art, where workers created forty-four drawings in ninety days for an exhibition that was up for only two months. Reynolds is also the man responsible for the twenty-five-year exhibition Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), on view through 2033.

    John Hogan, the technical manager for the Estate of Sol LeWitt who oversees the creation of new wall drawings—including the Paula Cooper show—first heard of his former boss when he, as a young artist in Chicago, became intrigued by a type of art that could move around the world in an envelope, which to him was a political gesture. Hogan recalled that during all the years he had worked for LeWitt, the artist never scolded a wall drawer by saying “you’re doing it wrong.” Instead LeWitt told that person that he or she didn’t comprehend or understand the work. I’m not quite sure exactly what the difference is.

    Hogan relayed how his assistants, from high schoolers to professional artists, love doing the job: for the ideas, for the travel, and for the employment—LeWitt was apparently generous with wages. Thousands of people have realized wall drawings over the past forty-five years, Reynolds noted, and some of the “wrecking crew” that made Wall Drawing #564 sat in the front row of the audience. Reynolds even asked one of them, Krysten Koehn, to say a few words. She had joined the team as an MFA student in the Yale School of Art and explained the respect and appreciation she now has for the intimate nature of LeWitt’s work. Her own art, she revealed, had become more idea and processed based as a result. Later Reynolds would similarly call on Erica DiBenedetto, who as a graduate student helped organize The ABCDs of Sol LeWitt at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2008–9, to describe her curatorial experience. Who would Reynolds put on the spot next?

    The steady crew (from left): Ann Temkin, Jock Reynolds, John Hogan, and Béatrice Gross (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The clarity of LeWitt’s straightforward instructions, Hogan emphasized, belies the dedicated work needed to execute a piece. Everyone draws an “unstraight line” in a different way, he said, but a certain quality of line, color, and discipline is expected. Agreeing with Hogan, Reynolds said the idea, hand, and eye must work in tandem. Even though the artist died six years ago his work continues to evolve, Hogan noted. Sometimes artists bring new ideas for materials over time, and sometimes companies stop manufacturing the stuff favored by LeWitt. Nevertheless, he said, “the rendering should be optimum” to better present the idea, from straight lines to the crystalline facets produced by myriad triangular and pyramidal forms, as demonstrated at Paula Cooper.

    Béatrice Gross—the editor of a forthcoming digital catalogue raisonné of wall drawings, curator of Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings 1968–2007 at the Centre Pompidou Metz, and the only panelist never to have met the artist—firmly believed that a new iteration of an older work was not a copy or a reproduction, but rather that the “original” was the inaugural existence or embodiment of the work. Some wall drawings were made twenty-five times, she said, and others not at all. Because LeWitt had a pencil in hand until a week before his death, Gross noted that some of his late “scribbled drawings” had not yet been realized. The multigallery, multifloor installation at MASS MoCA has a few of these, which were dated to 2008 (LeWitt died a year earlier). Reynolds recalled that when visiting this show, the Conceptualist artist Mel Bocher was playfully astounded that his friend had outwitted him, discovering how a person could keep making new work even after passing on.

    An audience member asked Hogan how the color for the wall drawings is made and how it is communicated. Color choices are programmed, the technician answered, with simple combinations: overlays of red, yellow, and blue inks. At Paula Cooper, certain colors had only one or two combinations, while others had four or five. Regarding implementation, there is “no variable other than the human hand” when workers rub ink-soaked rags or draw hundreds of lines. The tools for making the work, LeWitt had insisted, should not be complicated. Again emphasizing quality, Hogan said the work should be concise and consistent but not clinical.

    Several times Reynolds and Hogan stressed how LeWitt saw each exhibition opportunity as a new project or experience. This, combined with the other elements of his practice—such as encouraging serialized production and chance operations within a single work—is “what young artists are still trying to wrap their heads around.”

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Alexander Alberro and Patricia Norvell, eds., Recording Conceptual Art: Early Interviews with Barry, Huebler, Kaltenbach, LeWitt, Morris, Oppenheim, Siegelaub, Smithson, Weiner by Patricia Norvell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 122.

    2 Brenda Richardson, “Unexpected Directions: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings,” Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, ed. Gary Garrels (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2000), 37.