tate papers issue 14 autumn 2010_ anna lovatt

2/6/12 Tate Papers Issue 14 Autumn 2010: Anna Lovatt

1/13www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/10autumn/lovatt.shtm

Tate Papers ISSN 1753-9854

On DrawingIdeas in Transmission: LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and the Question ofMedium

Anna Lovatt

Fig.1Sol LeWittA Wall Divided Vertically into Fifteen Equal Parts, Each with a Different Line Direction and Colour, and All Combinations 1970Graphite on wall surface installationInstallation view, Tate Modern, London 2000Tate© The estate of Sol LeWitt

From a distance, an evanescent mist of colour appears to hover in front of the wall (fig.1). It isdivided vertically into fifteen chromatic bands: moving from left to right, diffused primaries arefollowed by muted greens, browns, purples, greys and finally a dark umber. The intangibility of thisoptical haze recalls the ghostly etymology of the word ‘spectrum’, along with its more scientificdefinition as a series of colours organised by wavelength. Six feet from the wall, the darker colourstake on a moiré effect, appearing vertically or diagonally grained. At around three feet, a sudden shiftin register occurs: black vertical pencil lines snap into focus, followed by blue diagonal lines, reddiagonal lines and combinations of the above. Drawn directly on the wall, these marks are scuffedand broken by its uneven surface, traversing microscopic nicks and flecks of emulsion-covereddebris. Only after these circumstantial minutiae do the yellow, horizontal lines finally become visible.The dematerialised haze is abruptly replaced by an acute awareness of the wall’s surface; and thelaborious process of its inscription.

Once disregarded as an outmoded, decidedly modernist concern, the question of ‘medium’ has

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come back into focus in art history of the past decade. Most notably, the art historian RosalindKrauss – who once welcomed a critical postmodernism by charting the fragmentation of medium-based categories – has voiced her regret at the subsequent ascendency of multi-media installationart. While the practices initially associated with site-specificity and institutional critique sought toexpose and interrogate the art world’s systems of distribution and consumption, for Krauss they wererapidly assimilated by those systems and put to work in their service, as just one more form of ‘globalmarketing’. Like Krauss, T.J. Clark and Alex Potts have located the demise of medium-specificityat the end of the 1960s, when the interrogation of materiality by conceptual art coincided with therise of installation art and artistic experimentation in a plethora of unconventional materials and ‘newmedia’. A point less often noted is that many conceptual and site-specific practices of this periodinvolved the graphic inscription of the gallery’s interior surfaces, rather than the construction ofspectacular, immersive environments within those limits. The onset of what Krauss has termed the‘post-medium condition’ thus coincided, perhaps surprisingly, with a resurgence of interest in thepractice of drawing.

Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists including Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner andDorothea Rockburne turned to site-specific, drawing-based installations in order to disengageaesthetic experience from the autonomous object, foregrounding the institution as its constitutiveframework. Drawing’s unostentatious physical presence made it attractive to artists seeking toemphasise conceptual content over material form, while its affordability and provisionality made itwell suited to temporary installations. Unlike painting and sculpture, which had been theorised andpolemicised with renewed vigour in American criticism of the post-war period, drawing remainedrelatively unencumbered by the burden of recent critical discourse. Curiously, it appears to haveescaped definition in reductive, purely material terms by even the most vociferous advocates ofmedium-specificity.

Rather than positing an adherence to the ‘medium’ of drawing during this period, this article willsuggest that drawing emerged as a key strategy precisely because it problematised notions ofautonomy, materiality and medium-specificity. Concentrating on LeWitt’s early wall drawings, Ishall argue that they engaged with the question of medium in three related ways. Firstly, theypresented drawing as always already mediated by technologies of reproduction, in the face of still-prevailing assumptions regarding its immediacy or ‘primacy’. Secondly, LeWitt borrowed from theemergent discourses of information and communication theory in order to reconceptualise therelationship between artist, art work and viewer as a process of transmission, presenting the work ofart as, first and foremost, a means of communication. Finally, the wall drawings pose ontologicalquestions regarding the nature of drawing, and the concept of ‘medium’ itself.

Mediating drawing

Scratches made while on the train, in a plane, a hangover from the HighRenaissance where every telephone number and coffee stain (by the rightperson) revealed the inner or under or deeper or less disguised and more nakedcreative nerve – so many little exposed nerves; see them trembling beneath the

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neuritis and neuralgia of the cross-hatching.Robert Morris

Robert Morris’s satirical statement ‘On Drawing’ captures the frustration felt by many artists andcritics during the 1960s when faced with the ‘literature of enraptured connoisseurship’ that continuedto dominate the discourse on drawing. Traditionally assigned a preliminary role in the productionprocess, drawing had been conceived as both fundamental and subsidiary to an artist’s ‘major’ work,often withheld from public viewing in favour of the ‘finished’ painting or sculpture. Yet thepreparatory, ‘private’ aspects of drawing had also led to its fetishisation – as supposedly the mostdirect, intimate and revelatory form of artistic expression. As Morris notes, the Renaissance conceptof disegno developed in tandem with increasing public interest in the artist’s biography; and stylisticattribution remained one of the primary objectives of the modern-day connoisseur. It is unsurprising,then, that the so-called ‘minimal’ artists, who embraced industrial fabrication and anti-compositionaltechniques (such as organising their work according to serial progressions or unitary ‘gestalts’),should have evinced a concomitant scepticism towards the practice of drawing. In a now-famousinterview with Bruce Glaser, the artist Frank Stella identified drawing derogatorily with an outmodedform of art school education, remarking that it was ‘less and less necessary’ to his own practice.Convinced that ‘drawing was getting in the way of painting’, he sought to eliminate draftsmanlydevices from his work, ‘to keep the paint as good as it was in the can’. When Mel Bochnerrequested a working drawing from Donald Judd for his exhibition Working Drawings and OtherVisible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art (1966), Judd apparently repliedthat he did not ‘do’ drawing, handing Bochner a fabrication bill for inclusion in the exhibition. Asimilar response was elicited when Carl Andre was invited to participate in an exhibition ofsculptors’ drawings at the Rijksmuseum Kröller Müller in 1972. Andre replied: ‘Drawing has neverbeen a method useful to me and I do not want any drawings of mine shown’, offering the curator aselection of his typewritten ‘word-poems’ instead.

Elsewhere in New York, however, the practice of drawing was being systematically disengagedfrom its traditional associations with aesthetic composition, subjective expression and technical skill.The work of Agnes Martin – whom LeWitt admired and cited as an influence – offered one escaperoute from the clichéd assumptions that continued to dominate the discourse on drawing. Martin’smeticulously ruled grids refuted the notion of drawing as revelatory of the artist’s sensibility, whilereconfiguring it as a ‘major’ practice on a grand scale. Elsewhere, I have described Martin’s workas a kind of ‘drawing degree zero’, a concept which could also be applied to the work of LeWitt.Like Martin’s gridded canvases, LeWitt’s wall drawings drain the graphic mark of autographicflourishes and demonstrations of technique, approaching something akin to Roland Barthes’s‘writing degree zero’: a ‘style of absence which is almost an ideal absence of style’.

In addition to Martin’s example, Bochner’s Working Drawings exhibition offered a means ofmoving away from the autonomous, auratic art object towards the perfunctory documentation ofprocesses and ideas. Although his decision to exhibit Xeroxed copies of the drawings wasfamously fortuitous, Bochner had already attempted to circumvent issues of style and technique by

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isolating a notational stage of the production process, ‘where a lot of people’s work looked thesame’. The book now reads as a collection of jottings by well-known artists (interspersed withnotations by scientists, mathematicians, architects and choreographers), but the participants wererelatively obscure at the time and as far as Bochner was concerned, these documents had ‘noautographic value’. By Xeroxing the drawings, he extinguished any latent auratic potential theymay have harboured, directing the viewer to the processes documented within the drawings ratherthan their material form. Bochner’s Xerox book included four pages by LeWitt, who had alreadybegun exhibiting preparatory calculations and sketches alongside his cubic structures. In ‘Paragraphson Conceptual Art’, LeWitt suggested that ‘all intervening steps – scribbles, sketches, drawings,failed work, models, studies, thoughts, conversations – are of interest. Those that show the thoughtprocess of the artist are sometimes more interesting than the final product.’

But the lasting impact of Bochner’s Working Drawings show upon LeWitt’s practice occurredindirectly. The exhibition appears to have been the inspiration for Seth Siegelaub’s project The XeroxBook, compiled two years later in the autumn of 1968. Siegelaub invited seven artists, includingLeWitt, to develop a reproducible art work spanning twenty-five pages of 8! x 11 inch paper. Herequested that the artists incorporate the new technology of the Xerox machine as a determiningfactor in shaping the work – something LeWitt later felt he had failed to do. Yet the book’s format,which called for a self-contained, two-dimensional, cheaply reproducible artwork, did prompt afundamental shift in LeWitt’s artistic practice. It was within this context that he produced DrawingSeries I: his first work to use ‘drawing as drawing’, rather than as an adjunct to his three-dimensionalstructures.

Fig.2Sol LeWittfrom Composite Series (set of 5) 1971Lithograph on paper355 x 355 mmTate© The estate of Sol LeWitt

Drawing Series I was designed to run across the twenty-five pages allotted to LeWitt and to bereproduced by Xerography, which Siegelaub selected precisely because it was ‘such a bland, shitty

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reproduction, really just for the exchange of information’. Colour, tone and visual detail would allbe lost in the process: the technology necessitated that the work submitted by each artist be asgraphic as possible. LeWitt’s response was to isolate what he perceived to be ‘the four differentabsolute directions of line’: vertical, horizontal, diagonal left to right and diagonal right to left(fig.2). He assigned each line a number (1, 2, 3 and 4, respectively) and devised a twenty-four partseries by reconfiguring those numbers within a sixteen-squared grid. One part of the series wasshown on each page, while the twenty-fifth page was used to summarise the series. The Xeroxmachine only reinforced the work’s inherent reproducibility: Drawing Series I laid out a preordainedscheme for drawing that anybody with a pen and a ruler could follow. When colours wereintroduced in 1970, they were to be ‘yellow, red, blue and black, the colours used in printing’.Against prevailing notions regarding the immediacy, directness and primacy of drawing, LeWittdevised a drawing practice that was always already mediated by technologies of reproduction andcommunication.

Ideas in transmission

The main idea – outside of figuring out all this stuff – was how things can beperceived in different ways. It was about transmitting an idea in different waysthrough visual means, but also verbally, because there was a title … All aredifferent aspects of communication.Sol LeWitt

Shortly after completing his project for the Xerox book, LeWitt was invited by Lucy Lippard toparticipate in a benefit exhibition for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War inVietnam. Billed as ‘the first benefit exhibition of non-objective art’, the show took place at thePaula Cooper Gallery in October 1968. Eschewing overtly political art in favour of abstraction,Lippard sought to identify a ‘particular aesthetic attitude, in the conviction that a cohesive group ofimportant works makes the most forceful statement for peace’. She envisaged the show as itself ‘akind of protest against the potpourri peace shows with all those burned doll’s heads’, and itsdistinctly apolitical content was striking. Yet LeWitt’s decision to make a drawing directly on thewall of the gallery may well have been influenced by political events in the months preceding, when,as Bochner has pointed out, images of graffiti slogans on the streets of Paris were disseminatedglobally via the mass media. LeWitt simply said that he had been considering making a walldrawing for some time and had discussed the idea with Judd, eventually deciding ‘what the hell’.Enlarging the basic scheme designed for the Xerox book, he inscribed two sixteen-squared gridsdirectly onto the wall of the gallery.

In Lippard’s terminology, ‘non-objective art’ referred to abstract art devoid of anyrepresentational function, but LeWitt produced an art work that was not, itself, an object. This is notto say that it was ‘dematerialised’ – in fact, the materials used (6H graphite pencil applied to the wallwith a ruler) and their precise deployment (‘Light to merge with the surface of the wall’) wereessential to the work’s functioning. Rather than covering the wall, like paint, the graphite pencil was

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abraded by its surface, resulting in a grazed and broken line indivisible from its ground. Barelyperceptible and faintly reflective, the graphite grid problematised the act of looking, foregroundingthe body of the spectator and the light and space of the environment in structuring visual experience.The labour of the artist was also underscored: while the other works in Lippard’s exhibition hadfixed prices, LeWitt’s wall drawing was priced by the hour. The material conditions of the work’sexistence were thus used to compromise its status as autonomous entity, directing attention to thecircumstances of its production and reception.

Although LeWitt installed the first wall drawing himself, from 1969 onwards he began to enlistthe help of friends, curators and collectors to install the works according to his instructions,eventually employing a team of specialist technicians. This was in part a practical decision, as LeWittalone could not fulfil the increasing demand for such labour-intensive and time-consuming works.Yet it also reinforced the philosophy laid out two years earlier in ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, inwhich the ‘idea’ was emphasised over and above its physical execution. Speaking to Lippard duringthe early 1970s, LeWitt described conceptual art as a ‘massive reassertion of content’ in the face ofthe ‘Twentieth Century Formalism’ that continued to dominate art history and criticism. He heldthis mode of criticism responsible for the erroneous label ‘Minimalism’, ‘which was a formalist term,having to do with the appearance of the object and its simplicity’, In conceptual art, ‘the content ofthe work started to become very complex, while the form stayed very simple. The form was only theclue to the content. The dichotomy between form and content reappeared.’

LeWitt’s understanding of the work of art as ‘a conductor from the artist’s mind to theviewer’s’ran directly counter to the notion of the self-reflexive, autonomous medium propounded bymodernist critics – most notably Clement Greenberg. In ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Greenbergargued that from the late nineteenth century onwards ‘the avant-garde saw the necessity of an escapefrom ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society’. According toGreenberg, this escape was facilitated by a new emphasis on material form, and on the specificproperties of each medium. Modernism was thus predicated upon ‘the assertion of the arts asindependent vocations, disciplines and crafts, absolutely autonomous, and entitled to respect for theirown sakes, and not merely as vessels of communication’. By emphasising the opacity andautonomy of each ‘medium’, Greenberg disengaged the word from its relational and communicativeconnotations. Thus isolated, the modernist ‘medium’ was objectified and reified as a thing-in-itself,abstracted from the broader conditions of artistic production and reception.

Beyond the visual arts, however, the term ‘medium’ continued to describe an intermediary spacethat was fundamentally contingent rather than autonomous, relational rather than specific. Thelanguage LeWitt used to describe his work’s mode of address – ‘transmitting’ ‘information’ like ‘aconductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s’ – was derived, consciously or unconsciously, fromthe burgeoning fields of information and communication theory. In his foundational text TheMathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon describes ‘the fundamental problem ofcommunication [as] that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a messageselected at another point’, Shannon’s study originated in the field of cryptology; and ‘transmission’in this context can be understood as a process of encryption. The transmitter applies a code to the

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message, transforming it into a signal suitable for transmission over the channel. The receiver mustthen decode the signal in order to reconstruct the message. In the course of its transmission, however,the signal is subject to a certain amount of interference or ‘noise’: distortions of sound, static,alterations in shape or shading of a picture, or errors in transmission. According to Warren Weaver,who introduced Shannon’s theory to a wider audience: ‘However clever one is with the codingprocess, it will always be true that after the signal is received there remains some undesirable (noise)uncertainty about what the message was.’

The Mathematical Theory of Communication provides a useful model for thinking about therelationship between ‘form’ and ‘content’ – or ‘medium’ and ‘message’ – in LeWitt’s wall drawings.For LeWitt, the most important aspect of the work is the ‘idea’, which in the earlier drawings is anumerical permutation (all possible combinations of 1, 2, 3 and 4) and in the later works a verbaldescription (‘Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random, using four colors,uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall’). This message isthen translated into a visual ‘signal’ using a code devised by LeWitt (1 = vertical, 2 = horizontal, 3 =diagonal left to right, 4 = diagonal right to left). In the later drawings, this process of translation is lessprogrammatic, but still involves a kind of transposition: ‘the draftsman perceives the artist’s plan, thenreorders it to his own experience and understanding.’ If the draftsman assumes a role analogous tothe ‘transmitter’ in Shannon and Weaver’s model, the viewer takes on the role of the ‘receiver’. Thevisual signal received is ‘only a clue to the content’ of the message, which must be deciphered usingthe key provided.

In the course of its transmission, however, LeWitt’s conceptual message is subject to a certainamount of interference or ‘noise’. His textual expositions wall drawings identify a number of pointsat which disruptions and distortions to the conceptual message are likely to occur. Primarily, heacknowledges that ‘Each person draws a line differently and each person understands wordsdifferently’, suggesting that the ‘idea’ will be altered both in its interpretation by the individualdraftsperson and in the process of its execution. The plan should then be adapted to suit theconditions of a given site; with the height, length and colour of the wall and any additionalarchitectural features considered ‘a necessary part of the drawing’. Most surprisingly, LeWittsuggests that ‘imperfections of the wall surface’ such as ‘holes, cracks, bumps and grease marks’should be considered part of the work, along with errors made by the draftsperson in the course ofinstalling the work. Finally, the fact that the viewer sees (or ‘receives’) the wall drawing does notnecessarily mean that she understands it. In order to do so she must be prepared to decode it using thekey, reinforcing LeWitt’s definition of ‘perception’ as ‘the apprehension of sense data, the objectiveunderstanding of the idea, and simultaneously a subjective interpretation of both’.

Communication and noise

Stations and paths together form a system. Points and lines, beings andrelations. What is interesting might be the construction of the system, the numberand disposition of stations and paths. Or it might be the flow of messages

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passing through the lines … but one must write as well of the interceptions, of theaccidents in the flow along the way between stations – of changes andmetamorphoses. What passes might be a message but parasites (static) prevent itform being heard, and sometimes, from being sent.Michel Serres

In common usage, the word ‘noise’ refers to an unwanted disruption to communication which, in anideal situation, would be kept to a minimum or eradicated entirely. Yet in information theory thesituation is rather more complex. ‘Information’ refers to the amount of freedom available in selectinga message: first on the part of the sender constructing the message, and then on the part of thereceiver reconstructing it. The greater the information, the greater the freedom of choice; and thegreater the uncertainty that the message selected is some specific one. Noise adds to thisuncertainty, thus increasing the amount of information in the signal. If noise was completely absent,the message probabilities would be zero, except for one symbol. Uncertainty would be drasticallyreduced, but so would freedom of choice when selecting a message, severely restricting the amountof information that could be sent via the channel. In addition, Shannon recognised that whether ornot a certain effect is considered to be ‘noise’ depends on one’s position in the communicative chain.Noise is only viewed as interference by the sender, who is aware of the content of the originalmessage. The receiver might consider it to be part of the information transmitted via the channel, or auseful addition to the signal. Stephen Crocker illustrates this point well: ‘The static sound of NeilArmstrong’s voice on the moon tells us something about his physical distance from us and thenewness of space technologies in the 1960s.’ In the static of the radio, the crackle of the TVscreen, or the grey blur left by the Xerox machine, we glimpse both the means and the milieu of thecommunicative act: ‘noise is the presence of the medium’.

In his extensive work on the concept of ‘noise’, the French philosopher Michel Serres points outthat in French, the term for static or white noise is ‘parasite’, which simultaneously refers to anorganism that feeds off a host, and guest who ‘exchanges his talk, praise and flattery for food’.These three different senses of the term ‘parasite’ initially appear to be unrelated. But Serres arguesthat they all have the same basic function in a system: interfering with its order and generatingdisorder, or producing a new order. It is the first definition that makes the concept of the parasite souseful for systems and communication theory. When observing a system, Serres writes, one might beinterested in its structure, the number and nature of its points and paths, or the flow of messagespassing between them. ‘But one might write as well of the interceptions, of the accidents in the flowalong the way between stations – of changes and metamorphoses. What passes might be a messagebut parasites (static) prevent it from being heard, and sometimes, from being sent.’ Using a varietyof literary sources, Serres cites stories of dinners, hosts and guests, and the parasites that disruptcommunication. Rather than viewing the parasite as a purely negative phenomenon, he suggests thatthey constitute a productive force around which the system is structured. The parasite – whetherbiological, sociological, or informational – is a ‘thermal exciter’ that operates on the equilibrium of asystem.

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LeWitt’s interest in successive alterations to a conceptual message could be seen to evince asimilar interest in the productive potential of the parasite. More than his three-dimensional structures,his instructions for wall drawings actively invite alterations to and distortions of the initial ‘idea’,utilising such interference as a constitutive force. Not only are the wall drawings disrupted andtransformed by the conditions of a particular architectural site, they also ‘feed off’ that site,incorporating it into their very structure. While Wall Drawing #49 is adjusted to fit the size of thewall, a work like All Architectural Points Connected by Straight Lines 1970 is entirely determined bythe architectural structure of the room in which it is contained. Prior to its activation by the site, thework can only exist linguistically, in the generic form of its title. When a site is identified, lines aredrawn connecting each architectural feature of the wall to the other features on the same surface. Thedrawing is structured by the architecture but also serves to articulate it, rendering the texture, size,shape and fixtures of the wall visible to the spectator. In many ways his approach is reminiscent ofDan Graham’s magazine piece ‘Schema (March, 1966)’, a generic structure which forms aninventory of its own features – these being entirely contingent upon the journal within which thework is placed. If Graham’s work exposed how art magazines over-determine the works reproducedwithin them, LeWitt’s drawingdemonstrates the extent to which the gallery context can condition theproduction and reception of its contents.

Poised on the cusp of the ‘post-medium condition’, LeWitt’s wall drawings operatesimultaneously as a reflexive exploration of the practice of drawing, and as a radically contingentform of installation art. His early statements are characterised by an urge to isolate that which wasabsolutely ‘necessary’ in contemporary art-making, an economy of means that he identified as anessentially ethical position. LeWitt’s use of drawing was viewed as indicative of his ‘back tobasics’ approach, with Bernice Rose suggesting that he had chosen drawing as ‘the fundamentaldiscipline’. The reductivism and the non-referential nature of the drawings, prompted BarbaraReise to characterise his work in decidedly modernist, self-referential terms, as: ‘a completepattern/structure of thought about (and through) the notion of “drawing”: an activity with a particular“art” tradition’. And yet, by subtracting even the portable ‘ground’ from drawing to work directlyon the wall, LeWitt did not isolate the essence of drawing so much as open it onto the ‘noise’ of theworld. By suggesting that architectural features and ‘holes, cracks, bumps, grease marks’ should beconsidered part of the drawing, he made it impossible to distinguish the material conditions of thework from those of its site. Indeed, it was this inseparability of work and site, this irresolvable frictionbetween ‘figure’ and ‘ground’, that lay at the heart of LeWitt’s endeavour. LeWitt’s wall drawingsdramatised a figure/ground relationship characteristic of drawing – not in the name of medium-specificity, but as a means of generating a productive, parasitic relationship between a conceptualsystem and its material execution./p>

Notes

1. Krauss charted the fragmentation of the category ‘sculpture’ in her essay ‘Sculpture in theExpanded Field,’ in Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist

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Myths, Cambridge MA 1986. For her recent work on the ‘post-medium condition’ see Krauss,‘Reinventing the Medium,’ Critical Inquiry vol.25, no.2, Winter 1999, pp.289–305; Krauss, AVoyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, London 2000; and theessays collected in Krauss, Perpetual Inventory, Cambridge MA 2010.2. Krauss 2000, p.33.3. See T.J. Clark, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam’, October, vol.100, Spring 2002, pp.154–74; and Alex Potts, ‘Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s,’ Art History, vol.27no.2, 2004, pp.282–304.4. Even Clement Greenberg, the primary proponent of ‘medium-specificity,’ never attempted todefine drawing as a medium; and often spoke about painting and sculpture in terms of drawing. 5. Robert Morris, ‘On Drawing,’ in Suzi Gablik and John Russell (eds.), Pop Art Redefined,London, 1969, pp.94–56. Lawrence Alloway criticised the ‘literature of enraptured connoisseurship’ in his introduction tothe Guggenheim exhibition American Drawings, New York 1964.7. This conception of drawing’s ‘primacy’ is evident in the titles of two recent publications: TaniaKovats (ed.), The Drawing Book: A Survey of Drawing, the Primary Means of Expression, London2006; and Deanna Pethebridge, The Primacy of Drawing: Histories and Theories of Practice,London and New Haven 2010.8. Bruce Glaser, ‘Questions to Stella and Judd’ (1966), in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: ACritical Anthology, Berkeley 1995, p.157.9. Frank Stella, statement in Thomas Michelli and Robert Rindler, Stung by Splendor: WorkingDrawings and the Creative Moment, New York 1997.10. Glaser, p.157.11. Mel Bochner, interview with the author, 17 March 2010.12. Letter by Carl Andre cited in R. Oxenaar, ‘Foreword’, in Diagrams and Drawings, Otterlo,1972, p.11.13. Bernice Rose writes that ‘LeWitt himself mentions Martin’s pencil grids as an importantinfluence on his drawing, the final difference being that Martin confined herself to a format in whichthe grid hovered in a spatial surround on a canvas.’ Rose, ‘Sol LeWitt and Drawing’ in Alicia Legg(ed.), Sol LeWitt, New York 1978, p.36.14. On Martin’s puncturing of the ‘drawing cliché,’ see Douglas Crimp, ‘New York Letter,’ ArtInternational 17, April 1973, p.57–9. 15. I explored the concept of ‘drawing degree zero’ in a paper presented at the conference, AgnesMartin: Between the Lines, University of Cambridge, May 2010 to accompany the ‘Artist Rooms’exhibition Agnes Martin at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.16. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero ( 1953), trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, NewYork 1990, p.7717. On the exhibition see James Meyer, ‘The Second Degree: Working Drawings and Other VisibleThings on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art’, in Richard Field (ed.), Mel Bochner:Thought Made Visible 1966–1973, London and New Haven 1996, pp.95–106.



18. Bochner, interview with the author, 2010. Bochner turned to the Xerox machine after the directorof the School of Visual Arts refused to pay to frame or photograph the drawings.19. Bochner, interview with the author, 2010.20. Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,’ Artforum, Summer 1967, p.83.21. On the Xerox Book see chapter six, ‘The Xerox Degree of Art’ in Alexander Alberro,Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity, Cambridge MA 2004, pp.130–51.22. Sol LeWitt, unpublished interview with Lucy Lippard, Lippard Papers, Archives of AmericanArt, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., p.4.23. LeWitt, Cummings interview.24. Siegelaub cited in Alberro, p.135. Ironically, after Siegelaub failed in his bid for funding from theXerox Corporation, the book was ultimately reproduced using a regular printing press.25. Sol LeWitt, ‘Drawing Series 1968 (Fours)’, Studio International vol.177, no.910, April 1969,p.189.26. As Alberro points out, Siegelaub’s book was ‘designed for reproducibility’ in a mannerprefigured by Walter Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of MechanicalReproduction’. Alberro, pp.148–51.27. Sol LeWitt, ‘Wall Drawings’ (1970), reprinted in Legg, 1978, p.169.28. Sol LeWitt cited in Nicholas Baume, ‘The Music of Forgetting’, in Baume ed., Sol LeWitt:Incomplete Open Cubes, Cambridge MA and London 2001, p.27.29. On this and other exhibitions curated by Lippard in response to the Vietnam War see JuliaBryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, California 2009.20. Lippard, press release, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, p.1.31. Lippard, press release, p.1.32. Lucy Lippard cited in Grace Glueck, New York Times, 27 October 1968.33. Mel Bochner, ‘Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?’ October, no.130, Fall 2009,p.137.34. LeWitt, interview with Cummings.35. Price list, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art.36. Speaking to students at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, he explained: ‘If I do adrawing on a wall I do a drawing on paper as a plan because I don’t do the actual drawing on thewall. It’s just too much work and usually I have a very short time to do it. So other people do it andthey have to have a plan to work from so I do that, so that’s another kind of drawing.’ Unpublishedtranscript of a talk given to the ‘Art Now’ class, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 20 March1970. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art.37. Ibid., (capitalisation LeWitt’s).38. LeWitt, unpublished interview with Lucy Lippard, Archives of American Art, p.1, early 1970s.39. Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, in John O’Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg:The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol.1: Perceptions and Judgements 1939–1944, Chicago, 1988,p.2840. Ibid. (italics mine).



41. In ‘Serial Project #1 (ABCD)’ (1966) LeWitt wrote: ‘The aim of the artist would not be toinstruct the viewer but to give him information. Whether the viewer understands this information isincidental to the artist; one cannot foresee the understanding of all one’s viewers.’ Reprinted in Legg,1978, p.170. In ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1969), he wrote: ‘A work of art may be understoodas a conductor from the artist’s mind to the viewer’s. But it may never reach the viewer, or it maynever leave the artist’s mind.’ (Legg, p.168).42. Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication,’ The Bell System TechnicalJournal, vol.27, 1948, p.379.43. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Chicago1949, p.12.44. LeWitt, ‘Doing Wall Drawings’, (1971), reprinted in Gary Garrels (ed.), Sol LeWitt: ARetrospective, San Francisco 2000, p.376.45. LeWitt explained: ‘If I do a wall drawing, I have to have the plan written on the wall or labelbecause it aids the understanding of the idea. If I just had lines on the wall no-one would know thatthere are ten thousand lines within a certain space.’ (LeWitt, interview with Lippard, p.3).46. LeWitt, ‘Doing Wall Drawings’, p.376.47. LeWitt, ‘Wall Drawings’, p.169.48. Ibid.49. LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, p.166.50. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. by Lawrence R. Scher, Baltimore and London 1982, p.10.51. Shannon and Weaver, 1949, p.10.52. Ibid., p.11.53. Stephen Crocker, ‘Noises and Exceptions: Pure Mediality in Serres and Agamben’, CTheory.net,http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=574, March 2007, accessed October 2010.54. Drawing on the work of the French philosopher Michel Serres, Crocker points out that the word‘media’ is etymologically related to ‘means’ and ‘milieu’: indicating an intermediary space orenvironment that plays a constitutive role in communication.55. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. by Lawrence R. Scher, Baltimore and London 1982, p.x.56. Serres, 1982, p.10.57. Ibid., p.191.58. LeWitt said: ‘The reason I do things the way I do them is because I think that for me, it’s anecessary way of doing it. I can’t paint a picture of a person because to me it wouldn’t be ethical. Imean, I can draw a line on a wall because I think it’s an ethical act.’ LeWitt, interview withCummings.59. Rose, p.31.60. Barbara Reise, ‘Sol LeWitt Drawings 1968–1969’, Studio International vol.178, no.917,December 1969, p.222.

Acknowledgements



This and other articles on the theme ‘On Drawing’ in Tate Papers 14 were developed from aconference of the same name, convened by Jo Applin and Michael White and held at the History ofArt Department in the University of York in June 2009.

Jo Applin and Michael White have kindly co-ordinated the publication of these papers in this issue ofTate Papers.

Anna Lovatt is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham and an Editor of the OxfordArt Journal.

Tate Papers Autumn 2010 © Anna Lovatt

tate papers issue 14 autumn 2010_ anna lovatt

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