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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I finally got to DIA Beacon last week. The place is a trip. It's great big perfect sumptuous church of modernism. Only, the era that's being celebrated is the time when modernism started to unravel around the edges - minimalism and its cousin, conceptual art.
I really love some of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings (some I hate), in particular I didn't want to stop looking at the mathematical pencil grids — Wall Drawing #1085: Drawing Series—Composite, Part I–IV, #1–24, A+B, 1968-2003. These drawings originally took the form of instructions, and it is really pretty wonderful that DIA enacted them. There are two rooms: one with combinations of A, in graphite, and the other with combinations of B.
A | B |
I bought a postcard. It looks like this.
IRL, the drawings shimmer like weird ephemeral scrims. As you get close to them, the patterns emerge and swarm in your eyes. The mathematical concept is palpable, but it's pretty hard (impossible, for me) to actually parse. Instead, the thin little lines of graphite on the white wall take on an incredibly material presence through the tiny, constrained wobbles of the disciplined hand of the brave soul who took on the task of following LeWitt's recipe. At the same time, the patterns play optical tricks, creating illusions of depth, colour and movement. It's a pretty visceral experience for something that is supposed to be conceptual. More art evidence that ideas and bodies are inseparable.
Anyhow, when it was time to leave I wasn't done yet. So I decided to make some Sol LeWitt homage animated gifs. Unfortunately these were a lot more fun to make than they are to look at. I started trying to figure out the math by trial and error. That didn't work out so well. VB helped me grasp a system, and so now I can confidently assert that the animated gifs above represent every possible combination of A, and every possible every possible combination of B.
(NOTE: LeWitt's drawings are more complicated because he's grouping his quadrants into quadrants. So there's no way the images at DIA can be complete sets.)
more LeWitt inspired gifs here and here