Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt gained fame in the 1960s, but he's not one to languish as an art celebrity. Rather, his work still vibrates with pleasure, energy and, most of all, ideas, now manifest in an exhibition at the RISD Museum.
The exhibition, running until May 2, features four of LeWitt's works in the museum's main foyer: "Wall Drawing #327" and "Wall Drawing #328," recently purchased by the museum, which have only been executed once before in Tokyo in 1980 are displayed. On a black rectangular background, two geometric forms filled with vertical or horizontal lines glow in white crayon. The dual tensions of contrasting form and line, and black and white make the wall drawings resonate like taut guitar strings. Significantly large works, they hang over the viewer, white lines pushing out from the void of blackness.
The adjacent wall carries a new mural conceptualized by LeWitt for the exhibition. Bright blocks of primary and secondary color acrylic pulsate outward in an almost physically affronting circle. The mural clings there like the sun at noon, looming with a heavy warmth.
The vibrant lines and geometrics of LeWitt's wall paintings inhabit another dimension in "Inverted Six Towers" (1987), a large, white sculpture from his "Open Cube" series. Made from painted wood, it measures over seven feet cubed, dominating the center of the room. The outline of blocks rather than their actualization, "Inverted Six Towers" traces, rather than asserts, physical space. The structure is a suggestion of what could be more so than what actually "is."
In the abstract conceptualization rather than the material realization of an object, we approach the significance of Sol LeWitt. The conceptual artist emphasizes the ideas from which the work emerges rather than its physical presence.
As LeWitt explained in "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," published in 1967, "When the artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decision are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair."
LeWitt did not paint the large circular mural. He did not draw the white crayon lines. He did not assemble the sculpture.
LeWitt created the plan. He conceived the instructions - sketches, dimensions and colors - and left the actual work to draftsmen. According to a museum pamphlet, one of LeWitt's assistants recreated the black-and-white line drawings. Meanwhile, the mural was realized by a team consisting of RISD students and the museum's technical crew, supervised by LeWitt's studio.
LeWitt's absence from the work's production asserts that "the idea itself, even if not made visual is as much a work of art as any finished product," as LeWitt wrote. We should read the exhibition less in terms of what we actually see and more in terms of the ideas behind the art. We should admire or criticize the works not just as aesthetic products, but rather as concepts realized.
But this is difficult. LeWitt's work is very real and very big. The irony is that work so conceptually driven has such great visual impact. The circular mural and wall drawings work well as explorations of color, form and line.
LeWitt is working in the realm of the abstract, which doesn't have size in any real sense. Yet while his conceptual project is without size - or color, pattern or form, for that matter - these aspects are realized to a much greater extent than so many works for which they are central. One feels that when LeWitt chose to embrace the conceptual, his works were given the room to expand.
