Saul on Sol
An Interview withSol LeWitt
By Saul Ostrow
Interviewing Sol LeWitt required a ride into the Connecticut countryside, where he lives with his wife and daughters. Many of the artists associated with Minimalism fled contemporary art's urban setting as soon as they could. This made me think about the nature of Minimalism and the complex and often paradoxical role that LeWitt's work plays in its development.I have known LeWitt since my days as an art student in New York in the '60s. At that time he was one of the hard core of Minimalist artists that included sculptors Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Smithson, as well as painters Jo Baer, Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold. Their works were characterized by an austere industrial aesthetic that made their pieces seem highly impersonal, intellectual and urban. After a visit to the local synagogue that he designed and the warehouse where he stores his vast collection, LeWitt and I retired to the comfort of his living room to excavate the past and shed light on the present.
Saul Ostrow: Was there a relationship between your thinking about art and John Cage's composition, his scoring of chance? It seems that Cage was a pivotal figure to many artists of the late '50s early '60s.
Sol LeWitt: The early '60s was a pivotal time. The thinking of John Cage derived from Duchamp and Dada. I was not interested in that. My thinking derived from Muybridge and the idea of seriality, from music. I thought Dada was basically perceptual, relying on the often outraged response of the viewer. Pop art was a legacy of this. I was not interested in irony; I wanted to emphasize the primacy of the idea in making art. My interest, starting around 1965, was in building conceptual systems, which grew out of Minimalism. Basically it was a repudiation of Duchampian aesthetics.
Ostrow: I'm asking because Cage gave the performers of his later pieces nothing more than instructions, as you did in your instruction pieces. The idea seems to go from Cage to the Fluxists and from there to the Minimalists and then the Conceptualists.
LeWitt: The Fluxists' conceptualism, which predated mine, was influenced by Duchamp. My thinking was a reaction to theirs. As far as Minimalism goes, I don't think it existed as an idea at all. It was only a stylistic reaction to the rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism. It was self-defeating, because simplicity of form could only go so far. It ended once the simplest form was achieved—exemplified by Robert Morris' installation of polyhedrons at Green Gallery in 1964, or Rauschenberg's white paintings, though of course Robert Ryman can still do white paintings of great depth and inspiration. In my case, I used the elements of these simple forms—square, cube, line and color—to produce logical systems. Most of these systems were finite; that is, they were complete using all possible variations. This kept them simple.
Ostrow: Once you start working serially, a certain amount of decision-making is being deferred. Say in the case of your wall drawings, which existed as a set of instructions. Giving the script over to someone else is adding another variable to the formula and has been interpreted as an attempt either to de-aestheticize the work or at least to distance the artist from the results so that it wouldn't be about the artist's taste. I once did one of your wall drawings myself. You sent me a set of instructions that read, "Using pencil, draw 1,000 random straight lines 10 inches long each day for 10 days, in a 10-by-10-foot square." The distribution of the lines in the square was totally up to me. I didn't know what you wanted it to look like.
LeWitt: What it looked like wasn't important. It didn't matter what you did as long as the lines were distributed randomly throughout the area. In many of the wall pieces there is very little latitude for the draftsman or draftswoman to make changes, but it is evident anyway, visually, that different people make different works. I have done other pieces that give the draftsperson a great liberty in interpreting an action. In this way the appearance of the work is secondary to the idea of the work, which makes the idea of primary importance. The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.
Ostrow: What about those artists working in what came to be known as post-Minimalism, or anti-formalism?
LeWitt: Minimalism wasn't a real idea—it ended before it started. Artists of many diverse types began using simple forms to their own ends. Almost every artist of the '60s and '70s took off from Minimalism in different directions. There was no other place to start if you weren't involved with Duchampian-type thinking or Pop art. Those lines of escape were what eventually became classic Conceptual art. In the end all these things melded together during the '80s and '90s, mainly due to Bruce Nauman, who combined the two ways of thinking.
Ostrow: I'm interested in what I take to be the implicit and explicit politics of your work. A lot is made of the dematerialization of art as a strategy, but on the other hand I still have a folded paper piece by you that I paid $250 for and as far as I know, because it was a condition you placed on those pieces, it's still worth only $250. Obviously that demonstrated a concern on your part for art's commodification and the ways it accrues value.
LeWitt: The '60s were awash in politics and revolution. Not only in art of course, but feminism, racial equality and opposition to war. Like almost all of the artists I knew, I was involved in all of these movements and was politically left-oriented. One of the ideas was the relation to art as a commodity. I thought by doing drawings on the wall, they would be non-transportable—therefore a commitment by the owner would be implied, and they could not be bought or sold easily. I also did a number of works that would be sold for $100—not $250; you were robbed. These were maps and postcards with drawings or cutouts, crumpled paper, folded paper, torn paper, and so on. Also since wall drawings were done from instructions, anyone could do one, no matter how badly, just as anyone can have a self-made Flavin very easily. I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked. From that time I began to do books as works in themselves, not as catalogues. I used photography in most of these pieces. The importance of Ed Ruscha in this cannot be ignored. Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.
Ostrow: Do you see the notion of a democratic art being a significant aspect of the development of both Minimalism and Conceptual art? Is it what led you to do public art projects in recent years? Is this part of the politics of the work?
LeWitt: That was one aspect of it. It was a way of questioning the general perception of art as inaccessible. Just as the development of earth art and installation art stemmed from the idea of taking art out of the galleries, the basis of my involvement with public art is a continuation of wall drawings. As soon as one does work on walls, the idea of using the whole wall follows. It means that the art is intimately involved with the architecture. It is available to be seen by everyone. It avoids the preciousness of gallery or museum installations. Also, since art is a vehicle for the transmission of ideas through form, the reproduction of the form only reinforces the concept. It is the idea that is being reproduced. Anyone who understands the work of art owns it. We all own the Mona Lisa.
Ostrow: Do you think Minimalists and Conceptualists saw themselves as saving art, as opposed to bringing it to an end?
LeWitt: As an artist in the late '50s I was aware that while Abstract Expressionism was the major form and that prodigious works were being made at the time, the end was in sight. Perhaps it was a generation thing, but I knew I didn't want to do it. It was a form I couldn't accept. I didn't want to save art—I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do. Every generation renews itself in its own way; there's always a reaction against whatever is standard. It was to be expected. The reason I think the art of the '60s is valuable, both the Duchampian and the non-Duchampian models, is that it freed art from the formal and aesthetic. It allowed art to move toward the narrative. Instead of the aestheticism and formalism of modernism, art became politicized, then socialized, then sexualized.
Ostrow: Do you see your work as an abstract narrative, as telling a story about permutation or about how language and objects differ? How important is language to your work?
LeWitt: Serial systems and their permutations function as a narrative that has to be understood. People still see things as visual objects without understanding what they are. They don't understand that the visual part may be boring but it's the narrative that's interesting. It can be read as a story, just as music can be heard as form in time. The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature. Words are another thing. During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art. I did a group of "location" pieces that would direct the draftsman in making the art. All of the tracks leading to the final image were to be shown. A person could read the directions and verify the process and even do it.
Ostrow: That brings us to the question of how you keep it interesting, how you keep it moving for yourself.
LeWitt: Unless you're involved with thinking about what you're doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating. When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another. In my case, I reached a point in the evolution of my work at which the ideology and ideas became inhibiting. I felt that I had become a prisoner of my own pronouncements or ideas. I found I was compelled by the innate logic of the work to follow a different way. Whether it was a step forward or a step back or a step sideways didn't matter. At that point I had moved to Italy. Quattrocento art really impressed me. I began to think about how art isn't an avant-garde game. It has to be something more universal, more important.
Ostrow: So at one point what you are doing is liberating, and then it becomes inhibiting and you have to liberate yourself from your own devices.
LeWitt: You shouldn't be a prisoner of your own ideas. Everyone gets into their own box and enunciates principles, if only in their own mind - you have your own constraints and your own structure that you think you're following, and then you realize that what you're saying is, "I can do this, but I can't do that." And then at some point you say, "Well, why not?" and the answer is, "Because I told myself I couldn't." If you keep telling yourself, "You can," then you are liberated. If you're totally constrained, all that's left for you to do is break the mold. "Every wall is a door."
Ostrow: Critics and historians don't like artists to do that—it ruins the narrative that they are invested in.
LeWitt: Artists teach critics what to think. Critics repeat what the artists teach them. If you then say, "Oh, that doesn't work anymore," they get terribly upset. But that's to be expected, too, because they have to learn something else. Academics love the academy.
Ostrow: A lot of people see Minimal and Conceptual art as having contributed to a situation in which art is no longer important because it has become anything and everything. What do you think its effect has been?
LeWitt: Minimal art went nowhere. Conceptual art became the liberating idea that gave the art of the next 40 years its real impetus. All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art. The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.
Ostrow: I think it was Adorno who said that the enemy of art is banality.
LeWitt: It shouldn't be boring.
Excerpted from BOMB Magazine, Issue 85, Fall, 2003.Published in Angle Issue #18 - January/February, 2005
