Dennis Hollingsworth

Miguel and Mirentxu

My gallerist in Barcelona, Miguel Marcos and Mirentxu Corcoy Bidasolo (laywer, professor and law court judge in Spain) were visiting NYC on a tour of North America this Fall. Here they are, viewing the show of Sol LeWitt at Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea.

We visited DIA Beacon earlier in the week, and the sight of LeWitt's wall drawings capped off the DIA experience very nicely. My sense of the Beacon collection was that it was a succinct anticipation of the information age. It was interesting to see the history we lived through as if it is ancient. The work of the minimalists (Walter DeMaria, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Fred Sandback, Lawrence Wiener, etc) are preoccupied with seriality, rigor, instruction based production... everything struck me as variations on computer coding.

My thoughts turned to myself and my generation: what are we anticipating today?

From my perspective, Sol LeWitt is the fruit of the PostModern tree (in as much as one can label all that issued after the Abstract Expressionism, the height of the Modern epoch: PostModern). LeWitt is the fruit because his work, which I see in its essence, as art as a set of instructions. Cruising the galleries into the rooms housing the LeWitt wall drawings, there are a couple of pieces (that seem to be early works, I didn't record the info on the wall labels) that include the set of instructions within the drawings themselves. I have long believed that the primary expression of LeWitt's wall works are the instruction sets themselves and only secondarily the execution by the museum or gallery staff (and no doubt the executor of his estate who oversees its' dissemination) who would be tasked with such a job. I tend to focus on the inevitable variations in the execution of these instructions, the gaps in the instruction set originally issued by LeWitt.

Check out this blogpost that I had found via a Google search that claims that there is a correct and incorrect procedure for executing Sol LeWitt computer code, from an "Electronic Media Studio" taught by a professor Golan Levin. Here is the nub, an animated GIF created by the professor that overlays variations generated by the students over LeWitt's "correct" expression:

1. Color me skeptical.
2. Choose whatever color that you would think is appropriate.