P.D. Magnus (research)

That some of Sol Lewitt's later wall drawings aren't wall drawings

This short note in Contemporary Aesthetics argues for the claim in the title.

Versions available

• PDF of the article
• published version
• the PhilPapers page for this

Abstract

Sol LeWitt is probably most famous for wall drawings. They are an extension of work he had done in sculpture and on paper, in which a simple rule specifies permutations and variations of elements. With wall drawings, the rule is given for marks to be made on a wall. We should distinguish these algorithmic works from impossible-to-implement instruction works and works realized by following preparatory sketches. Taking the core feature of a wall drawing to be that it is algorithmic, some of LeWitt's later works are wall drawings in name only.

Links and references

Because the paper was published as a short note, the final version omits some scholarly apparatus which I originally included. For the sake of completeness, here it is.

• Yoko Ono, Grapefruit: A book of instructions and drawings by Yoko Ono (Simon and Schuster, 1970).
• Jesse Prinz, Yoko Ono: Yes! Artbouillon, July 11 2013.
• Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on conceptual art", Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art, 1:11-13, 1969.
• Eric W. Weisstein, Algorithm, MathWorld.
• Brenda Richardson, "Unexpected directions: Sol LeWitt's wall drawings," in Gerrels 2000.
• Gary Gerrels, Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000); ref. on pp. 31-2.
• Wall drawing 793b at MassMOCA
• Others have noted the connection between wall drawings and algorithms but do not mention the shift in later work like 793B. See Domenico Quaranta, Lewitt's ideal children, Arte e Critica, (44/45), December/March 2005/2006 and Casey Reas, Software structures, Whitney Artport: The Whitney Museum Portal to Net Art, June 3 2004.

BibTeX

@ARTICLE(Magnus2018c,
	AUTHOR = {P.D. Magnus},
	TITLE = {That some of Sol Lewitt's later wall drawings aren't wall drawings},
	JOURNAL = {Contemporary Aesthetics},
	YEAR = {2018},
	VOLUME = {16},
	URL = {https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=844}
)