Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Incomplete Open Cube (1968) by Sol LeWitt (1928–2007)

2010; Lippincott Williams & Wilkins; Volume: 67; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1227/01.neu.0000383388.03263.e6

1524-4040

Michael Salcman,

Medical History and Innovations

New beginnings, whether in the art world, in poetry, in academia or politics, are often not identified at their inception. This was not to be true in regard to the advent of Minimalism in the 1960s. With the triumph of Abstract Expressionism, the preceding movement, the capitol of international art, its production, its critical reception and its promulgation through the marketplace of ideas and galleries, magazines and auction houses, had clearly moved from Paris to New York, from the Old World to the New. One cannot overemphasize the air of excitement that descended upon Manhattan in the 1940s and 1950s, the brash new town of culture that Jed Perl called “New Art City.”1 For the first time in American history, young artists walked into major museums and saw their immediate predecessors on the walls: Pollock and de Kooning, Rothko and Newman, Motherwell and Kline. And those walls were covered with enormous canvases in which the bold, expressionistic paint handling seemed to give a direct and jolting connection to the psyche of the artist. The paintings pulsated in revolution against the niceties of polite composition, proper draftsmanship, and tasteful color harmonies found in Parisian art; the new style destroyed the recognizable subject matter, cubist organization and painterly cuisine of all prior Modernist painting. The young American artists who gazed upon these acres of angst-filled canvas must have wondered whether there was any of hope of a second act in American art; what could a young person do to follow a generation of genius? Most of the solutions to this conundrum, of how to respond to Abstract Expressionism without jettisoning its most important advances, were formulated in the 1960s, not only a decade of youthful rebellion and political agitation in the West, but also the most tumultuous decade in American artistic history.FIG: UR. Incomplete Open Cube. LeWitt, Sol (1928–2007) © ARS, NY, Open Cube. 1968. Painted aluminum. 105 × 105 × 105 cm. Inv. Sammlung Marzona 0341. Photo: Peter Neumann. Location: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/ Art Resource, NY Image Reference: ART329122The most effective and long-lasting responses to the question of a possible Second Act, Pop Art and Minimalism, Conceptualism and Color Field Painting, involved the ruthless excision of the autobiographical element in Abstract Expressionism, including its existential dread and focus on the cosmic, often tragic themes inherent in the autographic and expressionistic manipulation of paint. Pop Art achieved this amputation through the introduction of mass-produced mundane objects as subject matter (ie, soup cans, automobiles, comic strips) and a seemingly commercial approach to paint handling and object-making, often employing the “flat” technology of mass media (eg, magazines and newspapers). Color Field artists eliminated the last vestige of painterly cuisine and illusion, inevitable with brushed paint sitting on the surface of the canvas, by soaking their thinned paints into the canvas and by using rollers, spray guns and gravity to eliminate all evidence of the artist's hand. Minimalism took the response one step further by essentially rejecting painting and ordinary sculpture in favor of “objects” based on fundamental geometric and mathematical shapes, usually manufactured out of ready-made off-the-shelf components and farmed out to fabricators and factories for production. These often large and physically imposing objects alter the subjective experience of the space in which the viewer encounters them; the essential literalism and theatricality of the confrontation imposed by Minimalist objects were best defined in a thoroughly negative article (!) by Michael Fried, a major opponent of Minimalism and one of the major proponents of abstract expressionist and color field painting.2 Although a painter (ie, Frank Stella, a friend of Fried's at Princeton) was essential to the early formulation of the Minimalist ethos, the 5 canonical Minimalist artists were all object-makers: Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007). Of these 5, only LeWitt was also critical to the birth of Conceptual Art, the ultimate negation of everything the Abstract Expressionists believed in, a radically new type of artistic practice in which the Idea reigned supreme and paintings, sculptures and objects were eliminated altogether. Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents and received a BFA from Syracuse University. He traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master painting, then served in the Korean War and moved to New York in the 1950s where he studied at the School of Visual Arts. Initially a graphic designer at Seventeen magazine and in the office of architect I.M. Pei, LeWitt took an entry-level job at the Museum of Modern Art where his coworkers included future Minimalists Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Robert Ryman. In 1960 they were exposed to Dorothy Miller's seminal Sixteen Americans show including the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, 3 artists who blurred the line between painting and sculpture. In particular, Stella's Black Paintings, hand-made but consisting of repetitive stripes that echoed the shape and width of the paintings' thick supports (stretchers), appeared to be “objects” hung on the wall, “structures” that might have been fabricated by machine according to instructions mailed to workers at a factory. Judd, Morris, and LeWitt quickly realized the implications of Stella's work for the future of art and, together with Flavin and Carl Andre (Stella's classmate at Phillips Andover Academy), became the foundational artists of Minimalism. In 1966, the Jewish Museum included LeWitt in its famous Primary Structures show where he exhibited an untitled open modular cube of 9 units or cells. Almost from the beginning, LeWitt's work consisted of sculptures (he called them “structures”) built up from the repetition of identical, basic geometric forms, often arranged according to mathematical principles (ie, possible permutations), and usually built out of standard lengths of balsa wood or aluminum by assistants under his direction. Fried's famous attack on Minimalism first appeared in the very same issue of Art Forum as LeWitt's major artistic statement, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.”3 In this essay and others, LeWitt laid out the basic principles of his artistic practice and produced one of the most famous statements of the 20th century, averring that “The Idea Becomes a Machine That Makes the Art,” from which axiom he logically concluded that once one had the Concept, the object itself need not be built or, conversely, the object might be recreated an infinite number of times. For this reason, LeWitt considered himself (as have many others), more than just a Minimalist object-maker but the singular father of Conceptual Art. Next to his cubic and modular sculptures, LeWitt's most famous works are his surprisingly beautiful Wall Drawings, impeccably executed by assistants who work from the brief algorithms inscribed by LeWitt on index cards and note paper. Museums and collectors exchange money for the instructions (the Concept) and then pay another fee to have the piece executed; each piece can be made as large or small as the wall available and each work, if erased by accident or necessity, can be recreated on another wall at another time. The beautiful Incomplete Open Cube on our cover comes from 1968 (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museum, Berlin), the year after LeWitt's full articulation of his ideas. The complete series of works of this type demonstrate the artist's dogged pursuit of a basic serial premise: the elaboration of every variation of an open-sided cube missing between 1 and 9 of its edges. No 2 sculptures in the series have the same form. LeWitt eventually arrived at 122 such permutations, which he realized in a variety of media and formats, including wooden structures, schematic perspectival drawings, photographs, an artist s book, and forty-inch aluminum units. This large Incomplete Open Cube is made of aluminum sections or beams, welded with perfect joints and painted a flat enamel white so as to “make color or form recede” and allow the object to act only as a 3-dimensional structure. The present example is missing 5 beams. Just over 1 meter (105 cm) or 1 yard in every direction, Incomplete Open Cube takes the permeability of space within sculpture to a new level; compare, for example, the small voids cast within a typical reclining figure by Henry Moore. One of the most beautiful aspects of such work is the degree to which its effectiveness depends upon the natural tendency of the brain to “complete” or “fill in” visual objects so as to make them whole and comprehensible. I have previously commented on this aspect of the brain's physiology in an essay on the Creation of Adam panel in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel,4 a painting in which some commentators have likened the billowing draperies surrounding the figure of God to the inner surface of the brain's right hemisphere and the dangling legs of the angels to the brain stem and vertebral artery. The major purpose of all brains, not just our own, is to make sense of the sensible world, to determine whether the rushing shadows are blowing leaves or, more ominously, a charging lion. The brain continuously makes conclusions on partial information. Sometimes this is an aspect of its redundancy. Hans-Lukas Teuber (1916–1977), generally credited with inventing the term “neuropsychology”, was the first to recognize that patients made blind by virtue of occipital lobe infarcts could still detect the movement of lighted objects in their “blinded” visual field.5,6 This was one of the first clues that the brain contained more than one visual system, not just the primary system devoted to shape but others devoted to movement, color and facial recognition.7 It was later discovered that the ability of Teuber's subjects to correctly identify the position of objects with unknown shapes depended on the existence of a dorsal visual pathway from the superior colliculus to the parietal lobe, one devoted to the analysis of movement. LeWitt knew that we would try to complete his incomplete cube within the realm of mental processing. We hardly miss the 5 aluminum sections or beams, the brain feasting on the remaining 7. Exactly how this works remains to be determined but the mechanism must have something in common with the brain's susceptibility to ambiguous visual targets or visual illusions, famously including drawn and dotted cubes in which the anterior and posterior faces regularly exchange places. Similarly, most human subjects misjudge the relative length of 2 identically long arrows in which the only actual difference is the direction of the arrowheads. I have written a poem called “Ambiguity” about this phenomenon.8 The impulse to complete the cube is a strong one and a beautiful demonstration of the principle most clearly enunciated by the grandfather of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, that the completion of any art work depends upon its context and its audience. This is not such a surprising conclusion. Ever since the discovery of single point perspective in the Renaissance, all of us have been willing to see the convincing depiction of 3-dimensional space on the 2-dimensional surface of a painting, whether abstract or realist. In this respect at least, all great art, from Caravaggio to LeWitt is conceptual in nature, depending on the artist's execution of an idea in the mind of the viewer, very often achieved by manipulation of the visual system, ie, by fooling the eye which really means fooling the brain. Michael Salcman, MD Baltimore, Maryland