What goes up...

must come down. 

Last night I came across Sol LeWitt's Tower (Columbus) reduced to a heap of rubble. It took me a second to realize what had happened. The bricks filled a surprising number of orange bins. This sculpture was part of a nice installation in City Hall Park; I wonder what will come next.

Sol LeWitt: Structures at City Hall Park

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. 

-Sol LeWitt

The Public Art Fund has created a Sol LeWitt cubeland in the grass of busy City Hall Park, not to mention creating a very informative accompanying website to go with it. Up through December, you have plenty of time to come down and stroll among his 2-dimensional creations.

Worker touching up the aluminum sculpture with white paint

Le Witt, who died in 2007, was a prolific and influential American artist whose structures, or sculptures, demonstrate his Conceptual and Minimal roots. This outdoor installation of sculptures tracks his work from the more recent organic and colorful forms of the 00s to the white cubes of the 70s that began it all. I would have enjoyed seeing more of his later works--Splotch stands out starkly against the other white geometric structures, but certainly the earlier works are more emblematic of his oeuvre.

And so, a backwards chronology:

Splotch 15, 2005

One x Two Half Off, 1991

Tower (Colombus), 1990

Complex Forms, 1990

Stars, 1989-1990

Complex Form 6, 1987

Pyramid (Munster), 1987

Double Modular Cube, 1979

Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974

Pat Steir's Nearly Endless Line at Sue Scott Gallery

Installation Shot--does not do it justice...

As I noted above, these photographs hardly due justice to the experience of walking through Steir's installation at the Sue Scott Gallery. The Nearly Endless Line manages to create an energy that is hard to capture without being able to sense all the surfaces of the darkened rooms. There are just two rooms of average size but they seem expansive if not endless. It feels like walking through an Abstract Expressionist painting--a neat experience--and a much warmer one than works by some of her contemporaries like Sol LeWitt.

Another almost useless installation shot

Up close: thin red grid

While the dark lighting smacks a bit of stagecraft, this piece raised the bar for how I want installations to affect me. The precise red grid on the dark background shows off the choas and energy of the white line. Up at the Sue Scott Gallery through January 9th if you want a surprisingly trippy, simple yet immersible art experience.

In & Out of Amsterdam at MoMA

Amsterdam in the 1970s functioned as a hub for Conceptual artists, MoMA's thorough, enlightening new exhibition documents. Old exhibition posters lead you down the hall into rooms of slide projectors and photographs. For me, it drew connections between various familiar and unfamiliar artists. For example, this wall:

is not Sol Le Witt, but by Lawrence Weiner, or at least according to his directions. So which came first, the Weiner or the Sol?

All the art felt dated, and the exhibition felt like a collection of excavated fossils brought out for study at the Natural History Museum. Partly the concepts have been absorbed into mainstream contemporary art, so that a video of a chorus singing doesn't have the same effect it once would have and Gilbert and George's living art is remembered with nostalgia.

Personally, I found it hard to pay so much attention to artifacts that lacked real intellectual or visual interest. For all that I found certain pieces cool or neat, I never really felt engaged. That doesn't diminish the scholarly and historical value of the exhibition, and it's quite possible I'm not familiar enough with the material to get it, but I found it a challenging exhibition to really enjoy. Maybe any thorough exhibition of conceptual art is bound to be, in my case at least, in one ear--

Photograph of exhibition wall [ears mine].

--and out the other.