Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1136, 2004 Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967 that “What the work of art looks like isn’t too important.” His Paragraphs on Conceptual Art became the first clear description of a movement which was to change the face of art for generations to come. The idea, rather than its execution, was what mattered. Technically, then, you might be able to enjoy one of his later wall drawings, #1136, without bothering to go and see it at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. But actually, it’s well worth seeing: an assault on the senses, its colour leaps and buzzes like a psychedelic Jim Lambie. “It physically has a massive effect,” says Project Curator Julie-Ann Delaney, who oversaw the drawing’s installation. “When you’re in the room, it surrounds you on three walls, and it vibrates. He used simple visual tricks, like putting specific colours beside each other that start to recede, and the work almost starts to shake. The simplicity of it creates an incredible physical reaction.” Born in America to Russian Jewish emigrants, LeWitt straddled the nascent movements of Minimalism and Conceptual art. He went to great lengths to avoid the subjectivity so loved by his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, by working to predetermined plans, reducing content to the bare minimum, and having his work fabricated by others. “It is difficult to bungle a good idea”, he famously said. We have grown accustomed in recent decades to artists who leave their ideas for others to make. Marcel Duchamp is often quoted as the first artist to make that leap with his readymades. A few years later in 1922, legend has it, László Moholy-Nagy ordered some pictures over the telephone. But it wasn’t until LeWitt devoted himself to this approach in the 1960s that the art world really took note, and our notion of what makes a work of art – and who makes it – has changed forever. So, the fact that LeWitt died in 2007 makes little difference to the authenticity of the SNGMA’s new wall drawing; he made 1200 of them over a 40 year period, and all but the first were made in his absence. Originally, he believed that “anyone with a pencil, a hand, and clear verbal directions” could and should be able to install his drawings. He even encouraged unauthorised copies. But as the wall drawings developed, so did the skills necessary to carry them out. “There’s a lot of work in making something look as if it’s just landed there,” says Delaney. “If you’re going to reduce something to a minimal state it really has to look perfect.” Delaney put together a team of seven artists, headed up by one of LeWitt’s long-time assistants from Berlin. It took them a month just to get the room ready: every wall had to be resurfaced, and even the fourth, empty wall, was treated with same painstaking technique as the work itself. The team then worked from a diagram and some simple instructions: curved and straight colour bands, primary and secondary colours plus grey. “The colour choice is very deliberate and is quite rigidly stuck to”, says Delaney. “For many of the works it’s a certain brand of paint and certain colours, especially some of the later ones, as ours is. The physical height of the work, the way it surrounds you, is very much predetermined for such physical impact, and to be able to achieve that from a set of instructions is amazing. They’re obviously very carefully thought out.” The simplicity of his idea – which was paramount to LeWitt – disguises a great deal of hard work in its execution. “We used over 150 rolls of masking tape to produce this”, says Delaney. “It’s a huge amount of work to make it look like it was none.” Neil Clements, a young local artist, was picked for the team because of his own precise painting style. “The work was technically quite demanding,” says Clements. “The problem was that we were treating such a large area with the same degree of focused concentration that you would, say, a small painting. The final finish had to be completely consistent, despite having been made by a great many different hands.” LeWitt wrote in 1970 about the work of assistants like Clements, in his own typically quirky way. “The draftsman and the wall enter a dialogue”, he wrote. “The draftsman becomes bored but later through this meaningless activity finds peace or misery. The lines on the wall are the residue of this process. Each line is as important as each other line. All of the lines become one thing. The viewer of the lines can see only lines on a wall. They are meaningless. That is art." Clements won’t say if he has found peace or misery, but he does see the point of the artist’s statement. “The effect you're looking to achieve in these wall drawings is so contradictory,” he says. “If it's done well enough, all that labour seems to disappear into this holistic effect that the completed drawing creates, although it's all still visible if you go right up to the wall and stand at the distance it was worked at from.” LeWitt saw the draftsman as a collaborator in his work, and for Delaney, this is an important factor in the artist’s hands-off approach. “I think it was about this democracy,” she says, “that anyone should be able to carry out the set of instructions. He really reduced art down to its most basic essences, and I think doing that was about other people being able to take part.” Clements, after his stint at the wall, does not agree. “I don’t know if I feel the work is democratic per sé,” he says, “because at no point do you feel like you are making anything other than a Sol LeWitt. I would say, though, that these works are fundamentally social things, because of the sheer degree of communication and collaborative effort required to make them new each time.” Drawing #1136 has been made two times before, in San Francisco and in Liverpool. The Edinburgh version will be painted over after a year, but it will still exist as an idea, dormant again in its instructions and its signed certificate. “He really opened up questions around what is the work,” says Delaney, “where does the work go when it’s not on the wall, questions that we’re still working through. Even the medium: specific parts of the medium might not exist forever and then what happens to the work? They’re such eternal questions that make his work richer as it ages.”
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