LeWitt and the Art of Instructions
- PDF / 4,522,155 Bytes
- 20 Pages / 540 x 720 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 174 Views
In October 1969, Sol LeWitt installed seven gridded sculptures in, and drew on the walls of, Haus Lange. In the large hall on the ground floor, four basic drawing components were introduced in four separate drawings, each in the same 190-centimeters square format: vertical lines, horizontal lines, diagonal lines from lower left to upper right, and diagonal lines from upper left to lower right, white walls furrowed with lines of hard lead.1 All possible combinations of the four basic elements were played out in the eleven remaining drawings dispersed throughout the villa. For the exhibition catalogue, the wall drawings were redrawn: fifteen drawings, ink on paper, reproduced at about 3 inches square. While the LeWitt exhibition occurred near the beginning of the artist’s prolific career, the nascent practice already contained features of his mature work. LeWitt would author over 700 wall drawings in the next decade alone, but almost none would be drawn by the artist himself. Instead, LeWitt authors instruction sets: explicit directions for an array of assistants, school children, museum staff, artists, and gallery friends who execute the drawings on museum and gallery walls throughout the world. The instructions range from the minimal (Lines in Four Directions, Each in a Quarter of a Square, 1969) to the exhaustive (such as the 45 lines of text yielding a single line in the 1975 The Location of a Line series).2 Beginning in 1984, LeWitt augmented the instruction sets with additional specifications for materials and techniques to be used in producing a wall drawing: the primer (“Aqualock, two coats”), the paint (“Regal Satin Latex, Decorator white #215-01 [Benjamin Moore]”), the pencils (“Koh-I-Noor 22000 Series—2 mm leads”), the graphite (“8H or 9H”), and
[1]
Sol LeWitt, Three Cubes, Museum Haus Lange, 1969
58
[1]
M I E S VA N D E R R O H E : T H E K R E F E L D V I L L A S
the technique (“in drawings where there are multiple lines approximately 1/8” apart, five sharpened pencil leads are bundled together, so that the second and the fourth leads are spacers and the draftsman is able to draw three lines at one time”).3 More and more, it became possible for anyone with a modicum of manual dexterity and substantial patience to execute a LeWitt. Almost predictably, the instructions themselves took on the deferred aura of the artwork.4 The instructions for a drawing were typically affixed to the wall, adjacent to the drawings themselves; LeWitt explained that having both the instructions and the consequences of the instructions in close proximity was programmatically significant: If I do a wall drawing, I have to have the plan written on the wall or label because it aids the understanding of the idea. If I just had lines on the wall, no one would know that there are ten thousand lines within a certain space, so I have two kinds of form—the lines, and the explanation of the lines.5
Of course the instructions are more the refusal of an explanation, as Rosalind Krauss points out in an essay on the artist, more like “a gu
Data Loading...
