George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "An Artist Who Let His Ideas (and Others) Do the Work" @nytimes By A. O. SCOTT
The central action in “Sol LeWitt,” Chris Teerink’s eye-catching and informative new documentary about that great American conceptual artist, is the execution of one of his pieces — “Wall Drawing 801: Spiral” — on the interior wall of a vast, bell-shaped room at a Dutch museum.
LeWitt, who died in 2007, believed that an artist’s work was primarily done not with the hands, but with the mind. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” he wrote in his manifesto-ish “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” and a large part of his oeuvre consists of instructions, at once precise and enigmatic, for making sculptures, paintings and drawings that are geometrically complex and visually powerful in ways that surpass understanding.
Mr. Teerink’s film is attuned to the intellectual implications of LeWitt’s work and to the aesthetic effects of its realization. We spend a gratifying amount of the film’s compact running time looking at witty, building-block structures in the middle of urban parks and plazas; at rooms in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art that buzz with undulating bands of color; at walls in private houses covered in faint pencil markings.
What we do not see much of is LeWitt himself, who was averse to publicity and resisted the celebrity status many of his colleagues were more than happy to cultivate. He is present in a few old photographs, some audio snippets from an interview and the recollections of friends. These include fellow artists, gallerists and museum curators and LeWitt’s neighbors in Spoleto, Italy, where he and his family lived in the 1980s.
The on-camera absence of its subject and its overall indifference to matters of biography make “Sol LeWitt” a welcome departure from most documentaries about artists, as well as a fitting and serious tribute to his art. It is odd that people devoted to the remaking of forms and the renewal of imagination are usually subjected to the most conventional and literal-minded cinematic treatment. Mr. Teerink defies the formula, declining to speculate on the psychological or personal sources of LeWitt’s art and focusing instead on the philosophy behind it.
Continue reading the main story 3CommentsThe result is both an accessible introduction and a piece of advanced criticism. “Sol LeWitt” will help you understand the art it depicts and allow you to appreciate those aspects of it that surpass understanding. You also appreciate the labor and time that goes into turning LeWitt’s instructions into visual facts:
“Wall Drawing 801: Spiral” involves scaffolding, several layers of paint, masking tape and the meticulous care of a large crew of artisans and students. The installation of the Mass MoCA retrospective, which fills cavernous spaces in an old textile mill (and is to remain up until 2033), was an even bigger project.
But there is also something refreshingly democratic about LeWitt’s aesthetic, which was partly meant to subvert the commodification of art by making the work a series of ideas that anyone could, in principle, carry out. And there is something beautiful about the way he disappeared into it, even as he was making what proved to be an indelible mark on the world.