Conceptualism and the Single Work of Art - Reviews - Book Review

Nicholas Baume, ed. Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Essays by Baume, Jonathan Flatley, and Pamela M. Lee. 112 pp., 40 color ills., 40 b/w. $22.95 paper.

The MIT Press's catalogue of the Wadsworth Atheneum exhibition of Sol LeWitt's Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes presents a formal, historical, and critical commentary on a single work of art. From these perspectives, Nicholas Baume, the catalogue's editor, asks us to question the modernist paradigm of just what a "single work of art" is (9). For Incomplete Open Cubes is not a discrete work of art, but an amalgam of notes, doodles, working drawings, photographs, and sculptural maquettes that as a process supports the "actual" work: 122 incomplete skeletal wooden cubes generated from a paradoxical plan, as Pamela Lee puts it, to present a "complete investigation into how one might not complete the form of the cube" (51). The ambitiousness of LeWitt's endeavor notwithstanding, does a scholarly catalogue on a single work of contemporary art place an impossible burden on both artist and object? It depends on the approach. The approach taken here, one ostensibly directed from a position of scholarly "critical di stance," presents a second generation of "new art historians" who theorize, not just historicize, the material conditions of the art object's signification. As for the question of burden, let us take a closer look at the catalogue's approach.

Incompete Open Cubes could more aptly be described as a project, one that Baume asserts not only is "expansive" but constitutes a case study of conceptualism. With "the benefit of historical distance," Baume continues, it "seems possible to consider aspects of the work played down at its inception" (21), such that the discursive and formal terms of LeWitt's project can be investigated now without the art historian's undue investment in (or devotion to) the object of study. However, the return to LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes speaks as much to the period of Retrospection--our own time--as it does to the period of the 1970s from which the work returns. And this is what makes the catalogue truly intriguing. For what we find are three critical voices (Donald Kuspit, Rosalind Krauss, and--by discursive proxy-- Benjamin Buchloh) originating in LeWitt's period and echoing through three newer voices (Nicholas Baume, Pamela Lee, and Jonathan Flatley) that were intellectually engendered by the former. The result is an allegorical loop that brings us back to Kuspit's rationalist LeWitt, at odds with Krauss's Surrealist LeWitt, both of whom fall implicitly under the heel of Buchloh's anti-capitalist LeWitt. As for Buchloh's voice, I say "implicitly" because his Frankfurt-informed model of Conceptual-art-as-a-critique-of-capital, which Flatley's text invokes (perhaps unconsciously), is so generally accepted that there is no need to engage Buchloh directly. In the context of the MIT Press in particular, it is a dominant, persistent voice. In one of many gestures to the Frank furt School, Flatley has only to cite Walter Benjamin to conjure up Buchloh's model:" ... in mimicking the industrial production process, LeWitt re-creates it 'distorted in the state of resemblance'" (97). But why these voices? Or, more important, we may ask, which voices are speaking LeWitt?

Although the LeWitt catalogue is an invaluable contribution to the field of contemporary art history because it so thoroughly records, discursively and photographically, the Incomplete Open Cubes project, it is hard to avoid the symptomatic nature of this scholarly endeavor. It's especially hard to ignore when the catalogue's critical interpretation is indebted to those very 1970s voices that trained younger scholars, such as myself, to take up what Craig Owens called the "allegorical impulse" in art and criticism. So what is the symptom here? I would argue that it's the return of a formalist, intellectual interpretation of Conceptual art (the dominant interpretative strain then, as now), brilliantly taken up by Lee, in tandem with a revisionist, Marxist interpretation of the work (one that retroactively lays the groundwork for institutional critique in LeWitt's project) deferentially reiterated by Flatley. What is left out now, as it was in the 1970s, is any discussion or even recognition of why such interpr etative projections onto abstract forms were and are convincingly made for and by a given audience at any given time. Which is to say, the repressed question is not, Why LeWitt now? but, Why this LeWitt now? Moreover, what aspect of the LeWitt that we can see with both "historical distance" and psychoanalytical insight was still deeply indebted, as a reaction formation, to Greenberg's anti-illusionist painterly terms? Perhaps it was on this level that LeWitt contributed to the dominant strain of "dematerialist" Conceptual art, to the chagrin of his more theoretically inclined 1970s proponents. This would mean that LeWitt's project stands less at ground zero of the institutional/capitalist critique than ambivalently at the margins of that critique. What would such a reconsideration imply for contemporary art-historical practice? It would tear at Conceptual art's current teleological construction, one that rivals the most rigid painting teleologies devised by Greenberg himself. Unfortunately, this is a move mos t scholars are disinclined to make.