Sentences on Conceptual Art by Sol Lewitt

1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
3. Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
4. Formal art is essentially rational.
5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
6. If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
7. The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His wilfulness may only be ego.
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
9. The concept and idea are different. The former implies a general direction while the latter is the component. Ideas implement the concept.
10. Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.
11. Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions, but an idea must necessarily be completed in the mind before the next one is formed.
12. For each work of art that becomes physical there are many variations that do not.
13. A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.
14. The words of one artist to another may induce an idea chain, if they share the same concept.
15. Since no form is intrinsically superior to another, the artist may use any form, from an expression of words (written or spoken) to physical reality, equally.
16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature; numbers are not mathematics.
17. All ideas are art if they are concerned with art and fall within the conventions of art.
18. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the convention of the present, thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art.
20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.
21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas.
22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.
23. The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual.
24. Perception is subjective.
25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others.
26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.
27. The concept of a work of art may involve the matter of the piece or the process in which it is made.
28. Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist's mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works.
29. The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30. There are many elements involved in a work of art. The most important are the most obvious.
31. If an artist uses the same form in a group of works, and changes the material, one would assume the artist's concept involved the material.
32. Banal ideas cannot be rescued by beautiful execution.
33. It is difficult to bungle a good idea.
34. When an artist learns his craft too well he makes slick art.
35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.

Franz Erhard Walther

Franz Erhard Walther was born in 1939 in Fulda, Germany, where he lives and works. Walther studied at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in 1962-64, and lived in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He has exhibited extensively worldwide since 1967. He participated in documentas 5 (1972), 6 (1977), 7 (1982), and 8 (1987), and his work was included in the landmark 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern. A major retrospective of his work since 1958 is currently on view at Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Geneva. An exhibition of Walther's work from the 1960s will open at Peter Freeman, Inc. New York, on March 11 and remains on view until May 1, 2010.

Images: Franz Erhard Walther, Sockel, vier Bereiche (Keeping the Canvas Square in Shape), number 49 from 1.Werksatz, 1967 & Franz Erhard Walther, Connection (Head), number 31 from 1.Werksatz, 1967, cotton Photos: Timm Rautert. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc.

The show is devoted to the artist’s early works from the 1960s, most of which were created when Walther

lived in New York City from 1967 to 1971.

The exhibition presents four elements from Walther’s “1.Werksatz” (“First Set of Works”), a

series of fifty-eight canvas objects intended for use. Each work in the series – whether a

kilometer-long cord meant to be unrolled, a bag with pockets in which to collect objects while

walking, or a padded curtain hanging in a doorway through which the visitor must pass – draws

attention to the body as sculptural form by guiding the participants through specific actions.

When several works from the group were shown in Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition

“When Attitudes Become Form” (1968), Walther noted: “These objects are only instruments,

they have little perceptual significance. The objects are important only through the possibilities

originating from their use.”

The works presented at Peter Freeman, Inc. span the entirety of Walther’s early production,

beginning with his first participatory piece: “Two Cardboard Rolls (Piece to Overcome

Embarrassment)” (1962), which consists of tubes meant to be handled. In “Connection (Head)”

(1967), two viewers place their heads through a single piece of canvas, while facing each other.

In “Plinth, Four Areas” (1969), participants stand in the corners of a canvas block, pulling it taut.

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan All, 2007 Marble. Installation view Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2nd floor Photo: Markus Tretter © Maurizio Cattelan, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Contemporary Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) is known for his witty embrace of semantic shifts that result from imaginative plays with materials, objects, and actions. In his work, contradictions in the space between what the artist describes as softness and perversity wage a sarcastic critique on political power structures, from notions of nationalism or the authorities of organized religion to the conceit of the museum and art history. Like the traditions established by Dada and Surrealism, his uncanny juxtapositions uproot stable understandings of the world around us. For Cattelan even the banal is absurd. As he has said, “Comedians manipulate and make fun of reality. Whereas I actually think that reality is far more provocative than my art.”

The exhibition at The Menil Collection, organized by Franklin Sirmans, curator of modern and contemporary art, will be the artist’s first solo show in Texas. The exhibition will focus on recent large-scale works that premiered in Europe in 2007 and will feature sculptures that range in tone from the melancholic and politically contentious to the decidedly irreverent. It will include Ave Maria, 2007, a series of saluting arms that extend from the wall; the translated title “Hail Mary” remains intentionally ambiguous, much like the various cultural meanings conjured up by gestures of allegiance.

Cattelan will also realize additional works for the exhibition in response to site visits to The Menil Collection campus and the museum’s world-famous collection of Surrealist works. Significantly, these pieces will also mark the artist’s return to sculpture-based practice. For the last five years his work has largely centered on publishing and curating. Projects have included the founding of “The Wrong Gallery” in 2002 and its subsequent display within the collection of the Tate Modern from 2005 to 2007; collaborations on the publications Permanent Food, 1996– 2007, and Charley, 2002–present (the former an occasional journal comprising a pastiche of pages torn from other magazines, the latter a series on contemporary artists); and the curating of the Caribbean Biennial in 1999 and the Berlin Biennial in 2006.

Curated by Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

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A few months ago one of Cattelan's most significant sculptures, “Him” (pictured left), traded behind the scenes for $10m, a sum that few living artists of his generation can command. Smaller than life-size, “Him” is a spookily realistic depiction of Hitler kneeling in prayer. Among other things, it poses the question: if the Führer asked for absolution, would God forgive him? Stefan Edlis, a Viennese-born Holocaust survivor and eminent American collector, is a proud owner an edition of the work. “When people see this piece,” says Edlis, “they react with gasps, tears, disbelief. The impact is stunning. Politics aside, that is how you judge art.”

BRITISH ART SHOW - TRAMWAY

Artists I found interesting were:

karla black

varda CAIVANO

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

CULLINAN RICHARDS

LUKE FOWLER

ROGER HIORNS

DAVID NOONAN

MAAIKE SCHOOREL

EMILY WARDILL

KARLA BLACK

Formed mainly from loose materials – such as soil, plaster of Paris, powder paint, and soap powder – Karla Black’s sculptures are poised between fragility and robustness. She works with such unstable and impermanent materials ‘not because they easily change and decay but because 'I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’ Whether earth-bound or suspended in space, her works are, as she explains, ‘actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating’ and she emphasizes that she prioritises material experience over language as a way of learning and understanding. Despite their psychologically loaded titles, her sculptures are the result of ‘a need to just grab the world.’

VARDA CAIVANO

Varda Caivano’s abstract paintings are explorations into colour, texture and mark-making. Describing her works as ‘thoughts or monologues, moments that grow over time’, she points out that they also demand ‘time and interaction from the viewer to reveal and unfold. I never know what's going to happen.’ Though there are suggestions of images in her paintings, form is ultimately elusive and deceptive. ‘Painting for me is a way of questioning images, where visible objects with a secret depth appear to reveal a kind of irrational truth,’ she remarks. ‘The paintings operate as a bridge, a transitional space that evokes an inner world.’

DUNCAN CAMPBELL

Duncan Campbell’s works combine traditionally different styles of filmmaking. Documentary portraits of complex historical figures, composed of archival footage and animation in cinéma vérité style, are integrated into more abstract scenes, influenced by avant-garde writers and artists. By combining them, Campbell intends to ‘allow this difference rather than homogenise it.’

Bernadette (2006) is Campbell’s study of the turbulent relationship between the Northern Irish political campaigner Bernadette Devlin and the media during the 1970s, disclosed through the contradictory press coverage of her as a martyr, victim, and troublemaker by broadcasters who championed and later targeted her.'

CULLINAN RICHARDS

Cullinan and Jeanine Richards create mixed-media installations that foreground the aspects of art and exhibition-making that other artists might wish to conceal. Tools of the technician’s trade, such as tape, touch-up paint and plastic sheeting, feature prominently in their work, along with old newspapers spattered with accidental drips of paint in the studio.

In the grand stairwell of Nottingham Castle Museum, plastic sheeting forms a thin membrane between the walls and the canvases on display. The paintings include two images of young women on horseback performing high dives into a swimming pool, an apparently popular spectacle in Atlantic City in the 1920s.

LUKE FOWLER

Composition for Flutter screen (2008) is a collaboration with Toshiya Tsunoda, an artist and composer who works with field recordings that seek to capture the sounds of objects. The sculptural installation features a flimsy handmade screen which is subjected to a series of interventions. Fixed images - a moth, a meniscus, a candle flame - projected onto it are caused to move because the screen itself is in constant motion, blown about by electric fans. From time to time, bright light and amplified sound interrupt the choreographed flow of the work, revealing the mechanisms of its illusions.

ROGER HIORNS

Roger Hiorns investigates alchemical transformations of ideas, actions and materials. Organic matter and chemical compounds and processes – brains, fire, crystals, sperm and drugs – are introduced into man-made structures, among them buildings, engines and street furniture. His crystallisations of copper sulphate have produced encrustations of ultra-blue on car engines and, most spectacularly, invaded a council flat in South London.

In Glasgow, Hiorns places a generic municipal bench in the gallery. At unspecified intervals, a flame will flare at one end of the bench, occasionally tended by a naked young man. Elsewhere in the gallery space, a thin slit in the wall becomes a receptacle for bovine brain matter.

DAVID NOONAN

The complex imagery in David Noonan’s large-scale monochrome works is sourced from archival photographs, film stills, textiles, books, magazines and ephemera. This tapestry reproduces a densely layered collage, in which images and patterns are superimposed in a play of positive and negative, subterfuge and camouflage. The resulting tableau possesses a disquieting dream-logic of its own. For Noonan, it evokes a time he spent in an Ashram in India and the parallel reality of that experience: ‘there is a guru sitting in the middle and an arm offering her flowers. And the peacocks: there were peacocks all around the Ashram...

MAAIKE SCHOOREL

Maaike Schoorel’s atmospheric figurative paintings give up their secrets slowly. These apparently abstract, predominantly white-on-white (or, in one case, black-on-black) canvases contain elusive, barely legible images that emerge, fleetingly, the longer one looks, like forms that can only be made out once the eye has adapted to bright light or darkness. Intent on slowing down looking and intensifying the process of perception, these works also address the ephemeral nature of memory and the difficulty of fixing a person’s image in the mind. Based on photographs that Schoorel has taken of herself, each of these self-portraits – once glimpsed – recalls an archetypal pose from historical art.

EMILY WARDILL

Emily Wardill's films examine the combined force of rhetoric and melodrama in media and politics. Her work upsets the rhythm of traditional filmmaking through exaggerations or strategic diversions in script, set and editing.

Gamekeepers without Game is based on a play, La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), 1635, by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Wardill relocates this story of prodigal children and patricide to contemporary London. Here, a father tries to reintegrate his daughter into the family home, after nine years of her life in social care. The artist says she wanted to shoot the film like airline food, so you have this sense that everything is separate and nothing ever touches.

The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

To withdraw into one’s corner is undoubtedly a meager expression. But despite its meagerness, it has numerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, images that are psychologically primitive. At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dreams.

… by changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating.