Your mind is exactly at that line
Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) was a pioneer of Minimalism and Conceptualism in the 1960s and 1970s in America. While he eschewed these art historical terms, his work stands as one of the leading innovations and legacies of that era. Your mind is exactly at that line, curated by Natasha Bullock, is a forty-year survey of LeWitt’s wall drawings, ‘structures’, archival material and works from his personal collection. The exhibition brings to the fore the notion of ‘concept’ versus ‘realisation’ or ‘idea’ versus ‘material execution’, the collaborative nature of authorship, and the dynamic or tension between LeWitt’s instructions, the allowance of improvisations by technical installers (whom LeWitt referred to as ‘artsworkers’ or ‘drafters’) and the impact of varying conditions of architectural and spatial environments.
Coinciding, not surprisingly, with Mass MoCA’s (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art’s) twenty-five year landmark exhibition of one hundred and five wall drawings (Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective (2008-2033)), this local, condensed version provides an insightful and skillfully installed overview of LeWitt’s rigorous approach. He wrote in Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (1967): ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work… all decisions are made beforehand and the execution becomes a perfunctory affair’. In 1968 his first wall drawing was exhibited at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, and following his peers, Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, LeWitt began to experiment with activating a site’s surrounds and contours—the wall and floor—thus making it an integral element of the artwork.
LeWitt’s early experiments with neutral, three dimensional structures and seriality is illustrated in Incomplete Open Cube (1974) and Wall structure 123454321 (1979), whereas his later playful inventiveness occurs in White Styrofoam on
Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #604H, 1989. Cubic rectangle with color ink washes superimposed, colour ink wash. © Estate of Sol LeWitt.
Sol LeWitt, Wall drawing #1274, Detail, 2006. Scribble column (horizontal), graphite, images. © Estate of Sol LeWitt.
