Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists including Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne turned to site-specific, drawing-based installations in order to disengage aesthetic experience from the autonomous object, foregrounding the institution as its constitutive framework. Curiously, it appears to have escaped definition in reductive, purely material terms by even the most vociferous advocates of medium-specificity.4 Rather than positing an adherence to the ‘medium’ of drawing during this period, this article will suggest that drawing emerged as a key strategy precisely because it problematized notions of autonomy, materiality and medium-specificity. LeWitt is regarded as a founder of both Minimal and Conceptual art. Inspired
…show more content…
The author of influential writings on conceptual art, LeWitt had articulated the significance of the idea in the work of art. LeWitt's wall drawings, for instance, are much like musical scores: it is LeWitt's intention that they be originated by him, but be carried out by others, and that they are impermanent and repeatable. However, this was not true of all of his works. Thoughts of practicality led to an overgeneralization of LeWitt's conceptual stance and the idea that any of his works may be reproduced and still be authentic. Because LeWitt was alive (and still owns Standing Open Structure, Black), a telephone call resolved the question. Upon learning of the dilemma, LeWitt was amused but nonetheless did not agree to the recreation of his work, asking, "Would you repaint a Mondrian?"
In 1980 LeWitt left New York for a quieter life in Spoleto, Italy. Comprehensive traveling LeWitt retrospectives have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000). Like many of the wall drawings after this, Wall Drawing #1 consisted of a system of parallel lines drawn with black pencil on a white wall in four directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonal left, and diagonal right.) By drawing directly on the wall, the work’s duration was limited and ultimately the wall drawings are painted
The author of influential writings on conceptual art, LeWitt had articulated the significance of the idea in the work of art. LeWitt's wall drawings, for instance, are much like musical scores: it is LeWitt's intention that they be originated by him, but be carried out by others, and that they are impermanent and repeatable. However, this was not true of all of his works. Thoughts of practicality led to an overgeneralization of LeWitt's conceptual stance and the idea that any of his works may be reproduced and still be authentic. Because LeWitt was alive (and still owns Standing Open Structure, Black), a telephone call resolved the question. Upon learning of the dilemma, LeWitt was amused but nonetheless did not agree to the recreation of his work, asking, "Would you repaint a Mondrian?"
In 1980 LeWitt left New York for a quieter life in Spoleto, Italy. Comprehensive traveling LeWitt retrospectives have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1978) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2000). Like many of the wall drawings after this, Wall Drawing #1 consisted of a system of parallel lines drawn with black pencil on a white wall in four directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonal left, and diagonal right.) By drawing directly on the wall, the work’s duration was limited and ultimately the wall drawings are painted