Last week I spent time with my colleagues in the contemporarygalleries looking at Sol LeWitt’s “Hang

Last week I spent time with my colleagues in the contemporarygalleries looking at Sol LeWitt’s “Hanging Structure,”a large construction of white open cubes descending in columns from the ceilingand tapering off above the floor at different lengths. The work is notfigurative; it isn’t allegorical; it doesn’ttell a story.For many viewers, Minimalist art can be frustrating. There is ageneral understanding that art has a meaning beyond the visible, and thatknowing the meaning allows us to see the work better. But for LeWitt and hiscontemporaries in the 1960s and 1970s, the essential point wasn’tmeaning or context. Art was about perceiving, questioning, and being presentwith material forms in space. “What you see is what you see”,said LeWitt’s peer Frank Stella.LeWitt’s palette was simple geometric figuresvarying in size, material and color. He would propose an idea, a simplearithmetic formula, a series of shapes, and without tweaking his design alongthe way, he created his seemingly simple but visually complex works.So when we stopped to simply look, what did we see? We foundtriangles zigzagging through the cubes, a dense honeycomb cluster towards thecenter, diagonal voids that seemed to topple towards us, hatch marks of shadowsacross the white beams, a rhythm of space and lines echoed in the architectureand even in some of the figurative work nearby. After an hour of looking, westill hadn’t exhausted all of our observations.LeWitt wrote “The conventions of art are altered byworks of art.” And so it follows that ourperceptions of art are also altered by works of art. I encourage visitors andASK app users to look closely at an art object, to notice its surroundings, towonder how it would change with a different material or size. If we allowourselves to linger with a work (figurative or abstract) that we don’tunderstand, or whose meaning is unclear, what would we start to see? Whatquestions would arise? What answers could we find?Posted by Alisa Besher -- source link

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