Order and Wobble
At Call Sol: The Enduring Legacy of Sol LeWitt at Eastern Connecticut State University Art Gallery, a long line of descendants respond to the fascinating minimalist thinking of LeWitt, underlining how order and its seeming antonym, irreverent variation, go hand in hand. Entering the exhibition, curated by the wunderkind Julia Wintner who consistently offers thoughtful and imaginative shows at the university art gallery, viewers encounter a typical LeWitt wall drawing. Student drafters echoed a wavy line in primary colors the entire width and height of a wall, according to LeWitt’s instructions. The resulting original artwork embodies the idea that the artist concept executed by others will retain the core idea but spawn an infinite series of unique variations. The 2023 piece created for the show reminds us how rich minimalism can be, testimony to the impact of individual hands, the specific space and the moment.
Wintner has assembled provocative work that demands that viewers make meaning. For example, artist Linda Hammer Lindroth works with photographic images of mysterious patterns that have shadows, making us initially suppose that there are three dimensions. Actually what she has called her trickster flatlands are squashed cardboard boxes, a sort of mammogram of a box reduced to its lining, glue, mashed corners and remnants of tape. Lindroth tips us to the powerful play of expectation/refutation during what she calls “The Encounter.” Like much of LeWitt’s oeuvre, these art works are incomplete as isolated art ideas until finished in the mind of the viewer. Her fileted boxes prompt us to inhabit the phenomenological space where art becomes real only as incarnated in its ephemeral being.
Likewise Janet Passehl, a textile artist who was the long time curator of the LeWitt collection, rethinks minimalism to engage its riches. Her spatial interventions are like architecture in as much as they shape, divide and contain. And yet, her hangings of woven fabric are a delicate space container: flexible, nodding to gravity as folds gather on the floor, free-hanging as sculptural “walls without corners.” The texture in her all white cloth helps to capture light, suggesting how insubstantial an object may be, even as it evokes architecture. The understated woven pattern makes us think of how orderly structure everywhere underlies built things, communicating subliminal experiences of form.
David Borawski suspends three flags in his ensemble called “Boredom, Vice and Need.” The red and white flags feature electric cords strung through chains, suggesting how flags so often wave to celebrate nationalism and boundaries. Hanging limply, rather than proudly, these glum rectangles are stripped of their customary bellicose symbolic weight. The title quote comes from Voltaire’s Candide observing in full that “work keeps at bay three great evils: boredom, vice and want.” Free thought in Candide was an inveterate foe to narrow fidelity to fixed traditional ideals. This piece resonates with a text-based work on the wall quoting Joseph Kossuth on the demise of the art object and rock band The Doors’ lyrics “The End.” Apocalyptic musings that might equally apply to politics, art and emotions, the message invites both social and personal interpretations, sending viewers from the wall back into their deepest fears and preoccupations.
Marina Kassianidou offers a wry reflection on the patterned language of privacy. She arranges cut rows of the linings of security envelopes, used to mask the contents of things sent by mail. These blue and black varieties of cross-hatchings, speckles and checks are cut and pasted in neat ruled lines on 8.5 by 11 paper, as though the privacy fence were itself the message. Like much work in Call Sol they are both good to look at and good to think about.
Peter Pincus, a ceramicist has created a considerable body of work responding to LeWitt which was showcased in a major show at Mass MOCA. One piece, here delightfully excerpted, interprets LeWitt’s Losing #422. The original was a series of columns in primary colors, architecture abstracted from its function and treated as form in space. Pincus has cleverly adapted the color scheme to a set of urns, patterned and arranged in a row. Each columnar form starts with a grey peeled base from which straight rods of primary color emerge in regular series marching around the vessel. Where the LeWitt inspiration arranged thick columns of color that weighted color in space as though hue were a solid, Pincus uses color to enclose an emptiness at the center of his vessel.
The challenging work in this excellent exhibition makes us tune into how artists reveal that our world is both empty and replete — the bounty and the void derived from order and the wobble.