Big Minimal Concepts

Slide at Memorial Art Gallery talk by Yale's John Hogan on the artwork of Sol LeWitt
Slide at Memorial Art Gallery talk by Yale’s John Hogan on the artwork of Sol LeWitt

John Hogan, a long time Sol LeWitt business partner and friend, spoke at the Memorial Art Gallery last night in conjunction with the recently installed “Wall Drawing #957, Form derived from a cube.” He explained how LeWitt’s thinking evolved as an artist, how he thought of himself as a composer and how he came to the realization that the idea is the art, not the execution.

His first wall drawing was installed at Paul Cooper’s gallery in New York in 1968 as a benefit for the Students Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. He sold the concept without a maquette. The buyer received paperwork like the one shown above (the title to Wall Drawing #957) and then hired craftspeople to produce the drawing on a wall as the MAG did.

We have seen many of LeWitt’s drawings over the years and I am always stuck by the way the isometric rendition of the forms plays with my senses. His forms don’t recede to any diminishing point. I came home with action points. Look up “Sol LeWitt – Sentences on Conceptual Art,” “Download Sol LeWitt app from the App Store.”

In this weekend’s NYT in an article entitled “35 Ways Real People Are Using A.I. Right Now” an entry by the artist Amy Goodchild called, “Draw like Sol LeWitt,” she described feeding Sol LetWitt’s instructions to various chatbots. “On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place 50 points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.” With OpenAI’s older model, GPT-3, it was mostly a flop but GPT-4 did OK. Imagine if LeWitt was alive for this.

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Untitled (Fence)

Mark Fox "Untitled (Fence), 2010 at the Culver road Armory in Rochester, New York
Mark Fox “Untitled (Fence), 2010 at the Culver road Armory in Rochester, New York

How did everybody know about last night’s opening at the newly refurbished Culver Road Armory? A solo show of an unknown artist in a brand new space on a Saturday night and the place was packed. Free drinks were offered to us before we had even signed in on the iPad mounted to the wall near the entrance. Valet parking, prices starting at 6000 without the frame and plenty of red dots on the wall. “This is not an artist crowd, this is a money crowd”, said the first artist friend that we ran into. It’s true, I don’t know many artists who wear suits or spiked heels.

I was bowled over by the crowd and I was thinking this must have been a social media fueled event because I feel more isolated now that everyone is so connected. I only knew about the show because Martin Edic told us about it at Wednesday’s Margaret Explosion gig. I started asking people how they knew about his event and I got the story that an art dealer, Deborah Ronnen, who lives in Rochester, arranged the show, for the building’s owners who must have rented the lights, constructed the temporary walls to show the work, bought the drinks and invited the in crowd. The former armory already has a law firm as a tenant and restaurant on the way from the Black & Blue people. This art show was a brilliant ploy to get potential high rent tenants to see the space as a happening spot. This may not be the case but it all sounds plausible.

And then there was Mark Fox‘s art. I loved it but not all of it and not all of it as much as some pieces. I liked the two dimensional work better than the piles of cut out handwriting. I loved “Untitled (Black & White Pools)” and “Untitled (Pools 2)” but my absolute favorite was “Untitled (Fence)” (is it untitled or not?), graphite and acrylic on paper with metal pins (shown above). This three dimensional piece was cut from painted paper and woven like chain link fence and then suspended on pins so it would play with the shadows from the light.

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