Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  In the Dance Diagrams, Warhol invites the viewer to be a point of mimetic, mediated contact. Formally, he repeats (in the paintings) the intermedial quality of learning to dance from a diagram by taking the diagram from the print medium of the book and translating it into paint on canvas. Then, he places the painting on the floor, like a sculpture, but a sculpture that is also a dance floor. From printed book to projection to (traced) painting to sculpture to dance floor, the series of metaphorical “transactions of context” creates the work’s particular aesthetic effect. Even though it is paint on canvas and is likely to be encountered among other paintings in a gallery, it does not solicit a disembodied gaze through the painting’s frame into a representation of something. Nor, although it draws our attention to the painting’s surface, does it do so in order to focus on the paint-on-canvas-ness of it (as Clement Greenberg famously argued was the value of modernist painting). Instead, the paintings seem to frame a space for mimetic bodily movement. One is directly reminded of one’s own body, especially one’s feet (a body part of considerable interest to Warhol).92 Can I learn the double twinkle step right here? To the extent that the footprints just off the floor seem to invite one to step into them, the paintings may not only ask viewers to associate Warhol with the figure of the dancer, as Gavin Butt argues, but also remind them of their own potential as dancers, or as “dancer types.”

  But if the Dance Diagram paintings are invitations to dance, they are invitations that cannot actually be answered by the viewer without stepping on the painting. They thus solicit an activity that they simultaneously discourage—they are “the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space.”93 They remind one of the degree to which the context of “art” itself, including the space of the gallery (where dancing on the paintings is definitely not allowed), polices mimetic comportment. By implication, we are encouraged to “do it yourself,” to transpose the mimetic activity solicited by the painting into some other context, or to change the art context so that different things can happen there. The painting sets up a chain of transpositions (or, to use a different vocabulary, a machinic assemblage) to which the viewer may add her or himself.94 If viewers make mistakes in managing that translation into another context by way of their own bodies and their feelings and fantasies, all the better.

  Contradiction

  The artists who succumb to ideology are precisely those who conceal this contradiction instead of assimilating it into the consciousness of their own production.

  Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry”95

  Like Warhol, Sol LeWitt borrows the affective force of his work from the fact that we live in a world in which “life is determined less and less by local contexts,” a world defined by the need for transition and translation between different systemic logics. But where Warhol is interested in creative mistranslations between systems, LeWitt’s work, as I mentioned earlier, replicates—in the serial works as well as many of the wall drawings—the more nominalistic pleasure of reducing “infinite to finite information loads” by bringing the viewer into the world of a readily graspable systemic logic. LeWitt’s work brings what Luhmann called the “unity of the imaginary space of combinatory potentials” inside the system. “Variation” and “combination” are two of LeWitt’s favorite tropes, two of his most reliable ways to build systems. However, in works as various as Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes and All Combinations of Arcs from Corners and Sides; Straight Lines, Not-Straight-Lines and Broken Lines, LeWitt brings the combinatory impulse, the generation of variations, into the work in a completely abstracted way, not directly referable to any social context. This gives the viewer a kind of abstract affective map of the combinatory experience. In this map, variation and combination always appear in relation to a total concept, a concept with which, however, variation is always also in a kind of tension. If being a machine for Warhol is about coupling with other machines, for LeWitt it is about duplicating for the viewer one element of life in a machine-like world. This element is the experience of a contradiction between the conceptual grasp of a total system and the particular perceptual experience of it.

  Where for Warhol being a machine increases our powers to affect and be affected, inasmuch as it reminds us how to like, LeWitt sees his artwork as explicitly affectless. Indeed, he sees the avoidance of emotional expression as a major advantage of the conceptual approach. “Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions… . It is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work conceptually interesting to the spectator, and therefore he would want it to become emotionally dry.”96 This does not mean that LeWitt’s work is not in some way about emotion; expression is not the only way to represent an emotion. LeWitt’s work is “about” emotion and subjectivity precisely inasmuch as it negates these things.97 As Adorno has put it, “There is no art that does not contain in itself as an element, negated, what it repulses. If it is more than mere indifference, the Kantian ‘without interest’ must be shadowed by the wildest interest, and there is much to be said for the idea that the dignity of artworks depends on the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested.”98 We can see the nature of the interest from which LeWittian disinterest is wrested by examining the specific quality of the aesthetic experience LeWitt’s work offers.

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  In 1967, relatively early in LeWitt’s career, artist and critic Mel Bochner provided an aptly prescient characterization of the aesthetic experience LeWitt’s work produces: “When one encounters a LeWitt, although an order is immediately intuited, how to apprehend or penetrate it is nowhere revealed. Instead one is overwhelmed with a mass of data—lines, joints, angles. By controlling so rigidly the conception of the work, never adjusting it to any predetermined ideas of how a work of art should look, LeWitt arrives at a unique perceptual breakdown of conceptual order into visual chaos.”99 Although Bochner was speaking of LeWitt’s early serial structures (Serial Project Set A is his primary example), I think the characterization holds true for many of the wall drawings as well. These are also often organized by a simple schema that is easily graspable conceptually—Vertical Lines, Not Straight, Not Touching, or Ten thousand Lines, One Inch Long, Evenly Spaced on Six Walls Each of Differing Area, for example—but perceptually overwhelming in their size and scope. The experience of a gap between apprehension (the sensory perception of the material object) and comprehension (the cognition of the total system organizing that material) would seem to be a recurring theme in LeWitt’s art. As Tan Lin has argued, the effect bears a family resemblance to the optical illusion, where the mind imposes an underlying order that is contradicted by visual experience, leading you to see something that is not there.100 LeWitt’s work operates like an unraveled optical illusion.101 Here, visual experience and cognitive comprehension are collapsed but then held apart. This generates the effect not of illusion (where we see something that is not there) so much as of allegory (where representation operates across a gap). As I discuss below, the overall effect is one of surprise; viewing LeWitt’s art, one is frequently surprised that such a simple concept could produce such an overwhelming visual experience.

  2.6 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 46 (Vertical Lines, not straight, not touching, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall) (detail), 1970. Black pencil. The LeWitt collection, Chester, Connecticut. © 2016 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Often, LeWitt’s art actively assists the intuition of an overall order with language: Lines Not Straight Not Touching, Five Cubes on 25 Squares, 10,000 Lines Five Inches Long, and of course Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, our primary topic here. If the title is insufficient or if one has not read it, LeWitt often provides a smaller, visually graspable version of the work. In the case of the large wall drawings, this takes the form of a smaller schematic drawing that accompanies the work. Or with the Variations, there is the
overall schematic drawing. Which is to say: while LeWitt’s work is often confusing, not to say stupefying on the local level, it generally provides easy access to the system from which this perceptual experience has been generated.

  2.7 Sol LeWitt, Schematic Drawing for Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. From printed four-page announcement for the exhibition Wall Drawings and Sculptures: The Location of Six Geometric Figures/Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes, John Weber Gallery, New York, October–November 1974. The Lewitt Collection, Chester Connecticut. © 2016 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Part of the brilliance of Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes is its achievement of a particular, and particularly maximized, tension between perception and conception. The tension can be seen in the difficulty of executing the project. LeWitt writes that “although at first I thought it was not a complex project, this piece provided more problems than anticipated.”102 The concept was straightforward: a series constituted by all the possible variations of an open cube that was not complete. “The series started with three-part pieces because a cube implies three dimensions and, of course, ends with one eleven-part piece (one bar removed).”103 The difficulty lay in the task of figuring out all of the variations without duplicating them. Rotation here is the key formal problem since the same cube rotated often appears to be a different cube. In fact, despite LeWitt’s persistent efforts, as the working drawings suggest, LeWitt discovered that rotating the incomplete cubes in one’s head or in two dimensions proved to be impossible. “You can’t construct the cubes in your mind, I find it impossible,” LeWitt said. “I can’t do it, and no one I know can do it.”104 LeWitt found that it was absolutely necessary to make models—at first from pipe cleaners and paperclips—to figure it out.

  2.8 Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974. Artist’s book, 122 pages. John Weber Gallery (New York), 1974. Author’s collection. © 2016 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  2.9 Sol LeWitt, working drawing for Incomplete Open Cubes (Alphabetical), 1973–1974. Ink and pencil on paper, 11 × 8½ inches. The LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut. © 2016 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  The perceptual difficulty of the Incomplete Open Cubes may be related to the tendency to perceive the incomplete open cube in terms of the complete cube. In other words, it is not that we complete the cube imaginatively in our head, but that a set of sometimes misleading perceptual truths about the complete open cube seems to infiltrate our perception of the incomplete ones. For example, it is surprising how difficult it is to move between two and three dimensions with the incomplete cubes. Because the complete cube looks the same from any angle, one is not prepared for the fact that, when drawn two-dimensionally or photographed, the cube looks completely different depending on the angle it is seen from. Look, for example, at 8-12 and 8-13 in the artist’s book or in the photographic composite: it is not, I think, immediately apparent that the two cubes, if presented from a different angle, are mirror images. The expectation of symmetry misguides us. Or as Nicholas Baume notes: “The difference between a mirror image, which is not identical, and a repetition rotated so that it appears to be different, is often difficult to discern.”105 In short, the complete cube is so easy to perceive and recognize immediately that one is surprised not only by the number of incomplete open cubes but by the difficulty of perceiving and distinguishing among them. The viewer intuits an order but, as Bochner wrote, it is quite difficult to apprehend: “one is overwhelmed with a mass of data.”

  The layout of the cubes in the schematic drawings and in the smaller three-dimensional version seem to increase the difficulty of perception. Although LeWitt may insist that any layout is strictly speaking correct (so long as the cubes with same number of elements are kept together) it is nonetheless instructive to notice the difference between the working drawings and the final schematic drawings. When one examines the working drawings, one can see that LeWitt usually works with a system that makes it as easy as possible to discern differences between cubes and to see where duplicates are generated. For example, in a working drawing where LeWitt is working out the four-part variations, the three-part base is oriented in the same direction from cube to cube, making it quite simple to see how the variation works. One can see easily and precisely how each cube is different from the previous one. However, in the schematic drawing and in the book, the cubes are oriented in a way that makes it more difficult to see the variation from cube to cube. The bases are rotated in different directions; mirrored pairs are sometimes established, sometimes not. In the selection of systems themselves and in the presentation of the art, LeWitt seems to have a definite preference toward emphasizing the tension between perception and conception. It should be noted that this gap is at work not only in the smallest version, where all 122 incomplete cubes (each 2⅝ × 2⅝ × 2⅝ inches) are exhibited as a single piece, but also in the book, the schematic drawings, and the largest versions (40 × 40 × 40 inches). With the larger cubes, the space between generality and particularity is held open inasmuch as you know there is a totality, but the size—and worldwide distribution—of the object prevents one from perceiving it through the object itself; one has to make a leap to the concept.

  While LeWitt’s art emphasizes the gap between the perception of the object and the comprehension of the concept that produced it, the viewer can always bridge the gap. In this sense, the LeWittian aesthetic experience echoes the Kantian sublime, where an initial moment of being overwhelmed is followed by a moment of containment and representation of that which was formerly overwhelming because of its sheer size or its unimaginable force.106 The experience of LeWitt’s work—in a work like the cube series or in a wall drawing such as Lines Not Straight Not Touching—is distinguished from the Kantian sublime by the fact that it is not the infinite and unrepresentable that overwhelms one at first (as in the sublime) but rather a large finite number. Here, we do not have the romantic experience of triumph as the power of our mind defeats the terror of being overwhelmed. Rather, we are momentarily stupefied by a mass of perceptual data that remains in tension with a relatively simple conceptual schema that organizes that data. The experience is more like what Sianne Ngai has called the “stuplime”: “in experiencing the sublime one confronts the infinite and elemental; in stuplimity, one confronts the machine or system, the taxonomy or vast combinatory, of which one is a part.”107 The sublime pretends to be universal and transcendental; the stuplime is more modest, but also more directly relevant to the social experience of modernity and modernization.

  The relation that LeWitt establishes with the processes of modernization is that of a homeopathic negation. In order to neutralize them, LeWitt incorporates elements of the industrial process into both the production and the aesthetic experience of the artwork. Like Warhol, LeWitt references and mimics the industrial work process. In LeWitt’s famous formulation, “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” The idea is a “machine” in the sense that it works automatically, without any subjective input. “To work with a plan that is preset is one way of avoiding subjectivity.’’108 The planning and execution are as rigorously divided as in a factory where the workers have neither time nor liberty to plan or think creatively about their task. The labor of producing the object itself involves technical skill but no creativity, taste, or subjective decisions. This of course is the structure of rationalized labor, which is alienating precisely to the extent that the worker’s subjectivity is unrecognized in the work process and, indeed, is destroyed as it forces the worker to become, as Marx argued, an “appendage of the machine.”

  LeWitt’s conceptual approach is designed to duplicate a similar division of labor between planning and execution. In the production of the serial structures and the wall drawings alike, LeWitt willingly embraces the moment of be
ing worked mechanistically, following an automatic course according to a preset logic. But, in mimicking the industrial production process, he recreates it, “distorted in the state of similarity.”109 Where the rationalized work process is designed to maximize efficiency and predictability, LeWitt champions the “irrational thought,” for it is the “irrational thought,” when followed “absolutely and logically,” that can produce “new experience.”110 Irrational ideas are precisely those that are unpredictable, wasteful, and “purposeless.” In LeWitt’s work the division of labor is a technique for producing surprise, in a manner, moreover, that is highly inefficient: “The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete.”111 The point of the compositional division of labor is to enable a moment of surprise, the surprise of perception unanticipated by and in tension with the conception. And as one can see in the working drawings for the Incomplete Open Cubes, when one decides in advance to follow an idea “absolutely and logically,” it can entail unexpected amounts of labor. Hence, LeWitt can say that he is “always surprised and never really surprised”: always surprised in the sense that one never can predict the nature of the perceptual experience from the concept, and never surprised in the sense that this gap or rupture between concept and perception can be adopted as a general rule.112

  In essence, LeWitt dissevers the process of rationalization from rationality. He redirects the basic principles of the Fordist factory—systematic simplification (the reduction of “infinite to finite information loads”) and the treatment of the human body as a systemic machine. Like Warhol, LeWitt reappropriates a mode of operation from the world of industrial capital and distorts it, defamiliarizes it, and puts it to a different use. His work is a kind of lesson in the way that systematicity and mechanicity—which at times seem wholly in service to means-ends rationality and the efficient production of predictable and hence profitable commodities—can be used to produce surprises. These surprises, I will now argue, are pleasurable precisely to the extent that they homeopathically neutralize elements of an everyday life defined by “functional differentiation.”