About the Sol LeWitt retrospective, which was organized by
the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and has now come to the Whitney Museum
of American Art, the first thing to consider is the artist’s credo. For Mr.
LeWitt has never been shy about making his intentions explicit. The
bibliography of his writings and publications on this subject is, indeed, one
of the most extensive in recent history. While other hands have frequently been
enlisted to execute his paintings and drawings, it is in his writings that we
come closest to hearing the artist’s own voice-the voice of a Minimalist who
found in the operational strategies of Conceptual art a perfect vehicle for the
creation of a copious production.
Here, then, is a paragraph from one of Mr. LeWitt’s key
texts, his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” first published in Artforum in 1967: “I will refer to the
kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea
or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a
conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are
made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a
machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative
of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes
and it is purposeless. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of
the artist as a craftsman. It is the objective of the artist who is concerned
with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and
therefore usually he would want it to become emotionally dry. There is no
reason to suppose, however, that the conceptual artist is out to bore the
viewer. It is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one
conditioned to expressionist art is accustomed, that would deter the viewer
from perceiving this art.”
To which should be added the following passage from the same
text: “To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.
It also obviates the necessity of designing each work in turn. The plan would
design the work.”
For its current incarnation of the LeWitt retrospective, the
Whitney has supplied a text of its own, from which I shall quote only a single
sentence: “A key figure in the development of Conceptual art in [the 1960’s],
LeWitt belongs to a generation of artists who, in their search for new
directions, found little promise in the hothouse emotionalism of the highly
venerated Abstract Expressionists of the New York School.”
Now you may not have thought of the paintings of Mark Rothko
or Willem de Kooning or even Jackson Pollock-never mind those of Ad Reinhardt
or Barnett Newman-as examples of “hothouse emotionalism.” And if, when you
visit the LeWitt retrospective, you take a look at the examples of Abstract
Expressionist painting from the Whitney’s own collection that are also on view
at the moment, you will find little to support this theory of “hothouse
emotionalism.” But never mind. This is what passes for deep thought at the
Whitney these days, and it is only meant to persuade us that Sol LeWitt has
never been guilty of such dreaded emotionalism, hothouse or otherwise. On this
point I am easily persuaded.
On another subject,
however-Mr. LeWitt’s claim that there is no reason to suppose “that the
conceptual artist is out to bore the viewer”-something more needs to be said.
For there is an immense quantity of
work in this retrospective-rooms and rooms of it-that this viewer found to be
almost unendurably boring. I am not suggesting that Mr. LeWitt has set out to
bore us, but a large measure of boredom is built into his depersonalized
method. When “the plan” designs “the work” and “the execution is a perfunctory
affair,” then boredom awaits us, whether or not the artist intends it.
It is worth recalling, in this connection, that back in
1967, when Mr. LeWitt published his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” boredom
was, so to speak, a hot issue in the art world. No less an eminence than Susan
Sontag had grandly proclaimed (in Against
Interpretation ) that “There is, in a sense, no such thing as boredom.” She
was writing in defense of what she called “the new languages which the
interesting art of our time speaks,” which would then have included Minimalism
and Conceptual art.
It was left to Barbara Rose, however, to offer up the
grandest defense of boredom in art. In a widely read essay called “ABC Art,”
published in Art in America in 1965,
Ms. Rose wrote as follows: “If, on seeing some of the new paintings,
sculptures, dances or films, you are bored, probably you were intended to be.
Boring the public is one way of testing its commitment. The new artists seem to
be extremely chary; approval, they know, is easy to come by in this seller’s
market for culture, but commitment is nearly impossible to elicit. So they make
their art as difficult, remote, aloof and indigestible as possible. One way to
achieve this is to make art boring. Some artists, often the most gifted, finally
end by finding art a bore. It is no coincidence that the last painting Duchamp
made, in 1918, was called Tu m’ . The
title is short for tu m’ennuie -you
bore me.”
As Ms. Rose was then married to Frank Stella, she brought a
special authority to this proposition. It was undoubtedly in response to this
defense of boredom that Mr. LeWitt felt obliged to deny that “the conceptual
artist is out to bore the viewer.”
Still, as the viewer makes his way through this immense
retrospective, he may be persuaded that Mr. LeWitt was indeed one of the
artists who, at a certain point in his development, was “finding art a bore,”
and as a hedge against boredom-the viewer’s, if not his own-began to embrace a
kind of razzle-dazzle brand of color design as a substitute for artistic
thought. So the monkish Minimalism of the 1960’s was soon followed by the
atrociously vulgar color design that now covers so many of the walls of the
Whitney Museum, all of it executed by hired hands. “A perfunctory affair,”
indeed, and it remains on view at the Whitney through Feb. 25
