Word & Image

A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry

ISSN: 0266-6286 (Print) 1943-2178 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/twim20

The mechanics of writing: Sol LeWitt, Stéphane

Mallarmé and Roland Barthes

Anna Lovatt

To cite this article: Anna Lovatt (2012) The mechanics of writing: Sol LeWitt,
Stéphane Mallarmé and Roland Barthes, Word & Image, 28:4, 374-383, DOI:
10.1080/02666286.2012.740187

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Published online: 31 Jan 2013.

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 The mechanics of writing: Sol LeWitt, Stéphane
Mallarmé and Roland Barthes
ANNA LOVATT

16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, turn that occurred in conceptual art of the late 1960s.6 Artists
then they are art and not literature. such as Vito Acconci (who co-edited 0–9 with the writer
32. These sentences comment on art, but are not art. Bernadette Mayer) and the collective Art & Language (who
(Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, 1969) produced the journal Art-Language), used textual strategies in
In 1969, Sol LeWitt’s ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ were pub- order to interrogate art’s materiality; and to challenge modernist
lished in the US periodical 0–9 and the British journal Art- criticism’s emphasis on pure opticality.7 Using non-traditional
Language.1 Following the serial structure of the list, the thirty- art forms such as typewritten texts, performance and video (in
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five sentences were issued, commandment-like, one after the the case of Acconci), or the spoken and written dialogue (in that
other. They began: ‘Conceptual artists are mystics rather than of Art & Language), the diverse array of practitioners associated
rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach’; with conceptual art rejected conventional materials and modes
and concluded: ‘These sentences comment on art, but are not of encounter. Their critique of existing artistic practices coin-
art’.2 Since their publication, numerous critics have used the cided with a broader interest in linguistic and numerical systems,
‘Sentences’ as a tool for interpreting LeWitt’s artistic practice. further reflecting contemporaneous technological developments
These gnomic pronouncements seem to offer privileged access in information gathering, data management and software
to the thoughts of a distinctly private artist, who rarely gave manufacture.8
interviews and published seven short but influential texts in a Conceptual art’s deconstruction of the ‘visual’ arts prompted
career spanning almost fifty years.3 Some have commented on a concomitant questioning of traditional modes of display and
the contradictory nature of LeWitt’s writings, or their inconsis- dissemination. The work of Art & Language often circumvented
tency with elements of his visual production.4 Yet for LeWitt, the the gallery altogether, evolving instead within the pages of their
‘Sentences’ were neither a key to understanding his work, nor a journal and rendering the distinction between an artist’s ‘work’
deliberate foil to that endeavour. Instead, he described them and his or her ‘writings’ obsolete. Art journals — which had long
cryptically as: ‘an operational diagram to automate art’.5 played host to avant-garde manifestos and experiments in typo-
By describing his ‘Sentences’ in this way, LeWitt suggested that, graphy — were subject to the same contextual scrutiny as the
instead of forming a verbal supplement to his practice, or declar- gallery space. Overleaf from LeWitt’s ‘Sentences’ in the first
ing his aims in the manner of a manifesto, the text played a causal volume of Art-Language was Dan Graham’s Poem-Schema (March
role in his artistic production. The ‘Sentences’ are presented as a 1966), a work consisting entirely of data generated by its host
kind of algorithm, which makes the work available to other users, publication. The editor was required to complete the ‘Poem’
enabling it to function independently of the artist. LeWitt’s ‘opera- using the information specified by Graham’s generic ‘Schema’,
tional diagram’ functions on the one hand as a statement of detailing the page’s linguistic constitution (number of adjectives,
authorial intent, and on the other to obviate the need for his adverbs, nouns, numbers); typography (typeface, type size,
presence — having designed a conceptual apparatus, he leaves words capitalised, words italicised); layout (percentage of area
its implementation to a team of technicians. In the context of occupied by type, columns, lines); and the material properties of
LeWitt’s practice, however, the diagram rarely operates so didac- the paper (weight, thickness, dimensions, type, depression of
tically. Indeed, it is often a site of communicational breakdown: a type into surface of page). Like the dialogues published in Art-
locus of misreading, misunderstanding and mistakes. Of course, Language, Graham’s ‘Schema’ dissolves the distinction between
LeWitt’s diagrammatic account of his text is itself a rhetorical artwork and text, yet it also highlights the materiality and
device, which might function to obscure rather than reveal his visuality of language. Graham foregrounds the art magazine as
intentions. But by tracing the source of this mechanical metaphor, an object in itself, rather than a transparent medium for the
I hope to explore the ways in which his writings function — and dissemination of ideas.9
malfunction — within his broader artistic practice. Artist-edited journals like 0–9 and Art-Language responded in
part to intense activity in the field of artists’ writings throughout
Art-Language the 1960s. For LeWitt’s generation of artists (the first for whom a
The very titles of the journals within which LeWitt’s ‘Sentences’ university education was not uncommon), criticism provided
were published — Art-Language and 0–9 — attest to the linguistic a means of financial support and the opportunity to address a

374 WORD & IMAGE, VOL. 28, NO. 4, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 2012

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666286.2012.740187

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

 broader audience, via a proliferation of new art magazines. Art linking his ‘Paragraphs’ to the later ‘Sentences on Conceptual
News, Art International and Arts magazine were joined in 1962 by Art’ and the earlier ‘Serial Project #1’ (1966).18 Although these
Artforum, which quickly became the main arena for polemical texts have been frequently cited and discussed, I want now to
debate on contemporary art.10 Tensions emerged between trace LeWitt’s mechanical rhetoric to a specific source — one
Clement Greenberg’s acolytes — who in the mid-1960s included rarely acknowledged in the extensive literature available on
Michael Fried and Rosalind Krauss — and those beginning to the artist.
question the hegemony of modernist art and criticism. These
positions crystallised in the June 1967 special issue on ‘American Transposing Mallarmé
Sculpture’, which included Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’, LeWitt was reticent about his literary influences, perhaps wary
Robert Morris’s ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 3’, Robert that they might be used to interpret his artistic practice. When
Smithson’s ‘Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Andrea Miller-Keller presented him with a roll-call of structur-
Site’ and LeWitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’.11 Despite alist and poststructuralist theorists: ‘Saussure? Lévi-Strauss?
the stated theme, only Morris concerned himself directly with Barthes? Foucault? Lacan? Derrida?’ he responded: ‘No, I
‘sculpture’, the others describing a range of practices pejora- haven’t read any of those writers’.19 Yet he did acknowledge
tively or territorially labelled ‘literalism’, ‘minimal art’, ‘earth- the impact of one text he read during the mid-1960s — an article
works’ or ‘conceptual art’. The disagreements apparent in this entitled ‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought’ (1960) published in
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issue of Artforum were deep-rooted and ongoing. Fried’s infa- the German music journal Die Reihe.20 The journal (the title of
mous diatribe against minimalism responded to two earlier which translates as The Row or The Series) was edited by the
instalments of Morris’s ‘Notes’ and, in its turn, elicited reaction serialist composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the music theor-
from the artists concerned (including Smithson’s satirical ‘Letter ist Herbert Eimert. It was translated into English four years after
to the Editor’ in the October 1967 issue of Artforum).12 its original publication in German, so LeWitt read the article in
LeWitt begins his ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ by the mid-1960s, just as he was developing his serial structures. He
acknowledging this fractious milieu and implicitly distancing had a keen interest in the structural aspects of music, his taste
himself from it. Along with his editor, he rejects the notion encompassing the work of composers as diverse as Johann
that ‘the artist is a kind of ape that has to be explained by the Sebastian Bach and his friends Philip Glass and Steve Reich.21
civilized critic’, while simultaneously distinguishing his voice Discussing Bach in a talk at the Nova Scotia College of Art and
from the aggressive rhetoric of previous artist-writers: ‘To con- Design in 1970, LeWitt remarked on his fascination with the
tinue a baseball metaphor (one artist wanted to hit the ball out of complex ‘systems’ and ‘abstract possibilities’ apparent in the
the park, another to stay loose at the plate and hit the ball where composer’s scores, yet inaudible in the music. LeWitt’s own
it was pitched), I am grateful for the opportunity to strike out for work often adhered to an underlying structure that could not
myself’.13 As Mel Bochner has noted, LeWitt’s self-deprecating be fully grasped without recourse to the accompanying dia-
gratitude and speculative, rather than definitive, tone marked a grams.22 When reading ‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought’, he
sharp transition from the macho posturing that had charac- would no doubt have been highly attentive to the possibilities
terised artists’ statements of the mid-1960s.14 Nevertheless, these literary and musical models offered for the visual arts.
LeWitt wastes no time in lampooning the jargon of contempor- The author of the article, Hans Rudolf Zeller, begins by
ary art criticism as ‘part of a secret language that art critics use debating at length the legitimacy of ‘translating’ Stéphane
when communicating with each other through the medium of Mallarmé’s literary experiments into the field of music and,
art magazines’.15 He later explained that he had been prompted consequently, of identifying the poet as a precursor to contem-
to express his thoughts in writing because he was ‘aghast at what porary composers such as Pierre Boulez.23 Zeller notes the
was going on in criticism’ and wanted to find an appropriate obvious ‘language differences’ between literature and music,
language for describing his own work.16 His modest and playful but nevertheless aligns the decline of tonality in serial composi-
tion with Mallarmé’s ‘systematic nullification’ of the everyday
tone thus belies an underlying sense of urgency that becomes
function of words, which he claimed to have relocated within a
increasingly apparent as the text unfolds.
poetic system via a process of ‘transposition’.24 Zeller goes on to
The ‘Paragraphs’ continue with a famous statement that is
describe, analyse and reproduce various notations, diagrams
nevertheless worth repeating in full:
and calculations pertaining to Mallarmé’s most ambitious
I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as work, Le Livre. First conceived in 1866, the project remained
conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or concept is the unrealised when the poet died in 1898 and he requested that the
most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a relevant paperwork be destroyed. However, the copious notes
conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and and diagrams were preserved and posthumously published with
decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunc-
an introduction by Jacques Schérer in 1957.25 Zeller translated
tory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.17
passages from the notes into German for his article, which was
LeWitt’s writings are markedly different in structure and tone, subsequently translated into English. Some of the diagrams
but the operational logic described here is a recurring trope, reproduced in the English version are labelled in French, others

375
 in German — highlighting the series of translations undergone control, like defining the rules of a game without predetermining
by Mallarmé’s notes as they appear in Zeller’s essay. LeWitt’s the state of play, or the eventual outcome. In both cases, the
encounter with Mallarmé was thus twice removed: the notes for ‘rules’ are made available to the performer via a series of dia-
Le Livre translated from French into German and then into grams; and once again there are similarities between the dia-
English; and the book’s structural logic adapted from the field grams that document the various possible permutations of Le
of literature into that of music, before being utilised in the Livre and some of LeWitt’s plans for wall drawings, such as
context of his own artistic practice. Drawing Series I, II, III, IV (first disseminated in Seth Sieglaub’s
The key term for Zeller in discussing Mallarmé’s poetry is 1968 ‘Xerox Book’).31 In Mallarmé’s diagram, the letters A, B,
‘structure’, which he uses to describe a ‘syntactical system’ built C, D and E represent the five central ‘genres’ of the Book, while
upon ‘principles of arrangement called the line or sentence’.26 the roman numerals denote a series of five public performances
LeWitt also called his three-dimensional pieces ‘structures’, and (figure 1). During each performance, the genres would be sys-
discussed them in terms of ‘grammar’ and ‘syntax’.27 This analogy tematically permuted to generate twenty-four ways of structur-
(between a spatial and a linguistic structure) is also evident in ing the text. In LeWitt’s Drawing Series I, II, III, IV (figure 2), a
Zeller’s description of Le Livre as an object, a ‘geometrical body’ number is assigned to four types of line, so that twenty-four
made up of mobile sections which — instead of being conven- different configurations are produced by rotating each of the
tionally bound — could be taken apart and systematically recon- four sets in this series. While LeWitt’s interest in Mallarmé has
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figured. Like serial music, which privileged the formal structure of occasionally been noted, I want to suggest that his engagement
a composition over aural harmony, Le Livre sacrificed the conven- with the nineteenth-century poet was more direct than has
tional, linear narrative of the novel for an abstract system of previously been acknowledged.32 LeWitt appears to have trans-
permutations. Mallarmé’s notes describe a complex system of posed the structural logic of Le Livre directly onto his early wall
relationships between the book’s external measurements, the drawings, substituting types of line for the book’s literary genres.
number of lines on a page, and the size of the spaces between As I will suggest later, this is not so much an ‘appropriation’ as
the lines, calling attention to the materiality of the text in a an ‘operation’ of Mallarmé’s textual system, reactivating its
manner that prefigures Graham’s Schema. But Zeller insists methodology in another context.
that ‘this three-dimensional spatial structure, which Mallarmé LeWitt was not the only US artist with a keen interest in
called the ‘‘block’’, is only the visual model for a non-visual, multi- Mallarmé during the 1960s.33 In 1966 Dan Graham published
dimensional, poetic space which would only be accessible to the ‘The Book as Object’, in which he compared Robert Morris’s
poet in a sort of vision’.28 This tension between visual and non- Card File (1962) to Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (1934) and
visual experience, physical and conceptual space, is also operative Mallarmé’s Le Livre.34 Graham’s timing was apposite: a new
throughout LeWitt’s work and writings, as indicated in one of the collection of Duchamp’s notes, À l’infinitif (also known as the
earliest critical responses to his work, Lucy Lippard’s essay ‘Sol White Box), had been published earlier that year, a decade after
LeWitt: Non-Visual Structures’ (1967).29 the papers related to Le Livre were made public.35 In both cases, a
The language Mallarmé used to describe Le Livre, recounted Duchampian ‘delay’ meant that these documents were
in Zeller’s article, directly prefigures that adopted by LeWitt in unearthed at precisely the point when New York based artists
his writings on conceptual art. Mallarmé called Le Livre a such as Morris and Graham were beginning to utilise notation
‘mechanism’ or ‘apparatus’, which was to be to be set in motion and taxonomy in their own practices. Like Duchamp, these
by an ‘operator’ according to a predetermined plan which was artists sought to counter ‘retinal’ experience with the ‘cerebral’
mapped diagrammatically in the copious notes he produced for — a task made more urgent by the fetishisation of ‘eyesight
the project.30 Like LeWitt’s wall drawings, which are executed alone’ in Greenbergian modernism.36 While Morris’s debt to
by assistants in specified locations according to his instructions, Duchamp is clear in his work of the early 1960s, conceptual
Mallarmé intended Le Livre to be activated by a team of opera- artists such as Graham and LeWitt were more influenced by the
tors at each ‘séance’ or performance. By constructing a permutational structure of Le Livre than the esoteric argot of the
‘mechanism’ that could be activated by other people, Green Box. Since no English translation of the notes for Le Livre
Mallarmé and LeWitt were able to distance their work from a existed in 1966, it seems likely that Graham’s account of the
single, authorial presence while maintaining a certain degree of work was also drawn from Zeller’s article.37 Like LeWitt, he

Figure 1. Hans Rudolf Zeller, diagram based on notes for Mallarmé’s Le Livre, published in Die Reihe, English ed. (Pennsylvania: Theodore Presser, 1964), 5–32.

376 ANNA LOVATT

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Figure 2. Sol LeWitt, Drawing Series in ‘Xerox Book’ (New York: Siegelaub/Wender, 1968). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). N.1–4, n.p., acc. n.:
L1619. # ARS, NY and DACS, London 2012. Digital image # 2013, The Museum of Modern Art/Scala, Florence.

highlights the performative aspects of the book and the role of are thus potentially objectified’. According to ‘Bode’, the
the ‘operator’, yet he seems more concerned with the physical arrangement of these linguistic ‘objects’ forms an ‘invisible
structure of the book, and the way in which its mobile ‘section grammar [that] can be read within and between categories.
blocks’ depart from the conventional, bound manuscript. Like To identify such a grammar, to read such a language constitutes
Morris’s Card File and Duchamp’s Green Box, Le Livre was envi- a test for the reader’.41 O’Doherty’s description of meaning as a
saged as a non-linear, reconfigurable text, reliant upon the ‘system of permutations’ has clear parallels with Le Livre, and this
reader to ‘literally in-form’ its structure.38 issue of Aspen was in fact dedicated to Mallarmé. The format of
the magazine (a white box containing a booklet of three essays,
‘The magazine in a box’ four films, five records, eight cardboard pieces to be assembled
In 1967, Graham and LeWitt were included in ‘The Minimalism into a sculpture and ten booklets of ‘printed data’) presented its
Issue’ of Aspen magazine, guest edited by the artist and critic contents as reconfigurable units, rather than organising them in
Brian O’Doherty.39 A ‘magazine in a box’, Aspen was a deluxe a bound sequence of articles and pages.42 Unlike Le Livre, Aspen
periodical which included editioned artworks, phonograph was not to be read according to a predetermined system, but the
recordings and films as well as texts.40 O’Doherty introduced reader was still envisaged as a kind of ‘operator’: assembling the
his double issue with a statement written under the pseudonym sculpture, setting the records and films in play, or selecting and
‘Sigmund Bode’, from the fictional 1928 treatise Placement as processing the ‘printed data’.
Language. This fraudulent citation describes a situation in Many of the artists, writers, composers and choreographers
which ‘persons, things, abstractions, become simply nouns and included in Aspen 5 + 6 shared O’Doherty’s understanding of

377
 language as a system of relations that might be usefully deployed different means of communicating the same information. Like
in structuring works of art. The white box contained, amongst the rest of the ‘printed data’ in Aspen 5 + 6, it was published in a
other things, the earliest version of Graham’s Poem-Schema square, black-and-white booklet with little embellishment or
(March 1966), a description of O’Doherty’s performance decoration. The text is printed in a clear, generic typeface and
Structural Play #3 and Bochner’s ‘grid study in three dimensions’, packed into square blocks unbroken by paragraphs. It is illu-
Seven Translucent Tiers. Other contributors explored the impact of strated by gridded diagrams, isometric drawings and black-and-
this structural logic on the roles of author and reader, proposing white photographs of the three-dimensional structure. Overall,
the kind of active, performative readership envisaged by the booklet resembles an instruction manual, a utilitarian docu-
Mallarmé a century earlier. Parts of Tony Smith’s Maze Model ment detailing the various components of the Project before
were scattered amongst the magazine’s other components, invit- demonstrating how they operate. Unusually for LeWitt, the
ing the viewer to reconstruct in miniature a four-block sculpture text’s layout, typography and illustrations are as important as
first exhibited in 1957. One of the phonograph recordings was of its content, relating it to the experimental ‘magazine pieces’
Duchamp reading his 1957 statement ‘The Creative Act’, in produced by Graham, Bochner and Smithson the same year.45
which he famously declares that ‘the creative act is not per- ‘Serial Project #1’ is made up of concise, perfunctory sen-
formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in tences that build sequentially, each one repeating a key term in
contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting the previous phrase while accumulating new terms. These syn-
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its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the tactical units form an analogue to the three-dimensional struc-
creative act’.43 And Roland Barthes’s ‘The Death of the ture, which is itself described in terms of ‘grammar’ and
Author’ — an essay often aligned with the Parisian uprisings ‘syntax’.46 Yet what begins as a relatively straightforward
of May 1968 — was in fact first published in the American, description of the structure gradually gets caught up in a morass
minimalist context of Aspen 5 + 6.44 of measurements and calculations, forcing the reader to back-
LeWitt’s contribution to the magazine was a square booklet track and repeat key phrases, referring to the diagrams in search
entitled Serial Project #1 (1966) (figure 3). Like most of his works, of clarification:
Serial Project #1 is a concept that can be communicated by various
There is a large version and a small version. In the larger,
means: in words, diagrams, three-dimensional structures, or the basic measure is 2800 (A 2800 tube can be made in one
photographs of those structures. For LeWitt, the text entitled piece to fit through the smallest door — 3000 ). The outer
‘Serial Project #1’ was not supplementary to the three- measure was formed by multiplying 2800 by 3 and subtract-
dimensional structure of the same name, but was simply a ing the width of the material (1-1/200 — the pieces were

Figure 3. Sol LeWitt, Serial Project #1, booklet published in Brian O’Doherty, ed., Aspen 5 + 6 (New York, Roaring Fork Press, 1967). LeWitt Collection, Chester,
CT, USA. # ARS, NY and DACS, London 2012.

378 ANNA LOVATT

 constructed of 1-1/200 square aluminium tubing) 2800 · 3 = methodically in the visible units, some of the smaller boxes are
84 — (1-1/2 + 1-1/2) = 81. hidden within larger, ‘closed’ ones, making it impossible to
The spatial ‘grammar’ of LeWitt’s structure infiltrates the gram- ascertain whether they adhere to the system. LeWitt’s text
mar of the text, juxtaposing minus signs with hyphens, feet and does little to clarify the situation, stating tautologically that ‘If
inches with inverted commas, brackets used mathematically the viewer cannot see the interior form he may believe it is there
with those used grammatically. Describing the structure, or not but he knows which form he believes is there or not there’.
LeWitt writes: ‘the series would be read by the viewer in a linear Like the structure, the text is alternately revelatory and obscure,
or narrative manner even though in its final form many of these elucidating the work in the most succinct terms possible before
sets would be operating simultaneously, making comprehension unravelling into an incomprehensible babble of data. When
difficult’.47 And his text operates in a similar manner, com- LeWitt states that ‘The aim of the artist would not be to instruct
pounding syntactical units end to end, in densely packed blocks, the viewer but to give him information. Whether the viewer
until they can no longer be processed effectively. As ‘Sigmund understands this information is incidental to the artist’, he
Bode’ forewarned, the text becomes a ‘test’ — a labyrinth to be describes the operational logic of the text itself, as well as the
negotiated by the reader. three-dimensional structure it purports to explain.52
Serial Project #1 problematises the acts of looking and reading LeWitt’s deliberately obfuscatory use of language was noted
by presenting a series of visual and verbal obstacles for its by Smithson in ‘A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art’, a
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audience. By contrast, the task of art-making is downplayed, 1968 article that deals with — amongst other things — con-
with the serial artist operating ‘merely as a clerk cataloguing the temporary artists’ writings. Smithson begins by simultaneously
results of his premise’.48 This shift in emphasis from artist to describing and enacting the linguistic playfulness that charac-
audience (as maker of meaning) clearly parallels Barthes’s terises his own writing and that of several of his contemporaries:
famous pronouncement that ‘the birth of the reader must be at ‘In the illusory babels of language an artist might advance
the cost of the death of the Author’.49 Yet Barthes’s related idea specifically to get lost and to intoxicate himself in dizzying
of ‘unreadability’ — further developed in subsequent writings syntaxes, seeking odd intersections of meaning, strange corri-
including S/Z (1970) and ‘From Work to Text’ (1971) — is dors of history, unexpected echoes, unknown humours or voids
perhaps more useful when considering LeWitt’s textual produc- of knowledge’.53 He goes on to highlight a 1967 flyer for an
tion. While the essay Barthes published in Aspen launched a exhibition of Serial Project #1 at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles,
concerted attack on the authorial figure, he subsequently shifted in which LeWitt covered a printed diagram of the gridded
his attention to the altered role of the reader and the structural structure with a dense web of barely legible, handwritten anno-
characteristics of the modern text. In the introduction to S/Z — tations (figure 4). Smithson describes the experience of this
his structuralist analysis of Honoré de Balzac’s novella Sarrasine diagram as ‘like getting words caught in your eyes’, suggesting
— Barthes describes the classic work as lisible: literally ‘legible’ or that LeWitt’s words constitute a kind of interference in the visual
readerly. While ‘legibility’ is usually desirable in a text, Barthes field, clogging and obstructing the perceptual apparatus.54
uses the term negatively, to describe a kind of literary work in Instead of functioning complementarily, word and image are
which meaning is predetermined by the author and passively pitted against one another, the one rendering the other incom-
‘consumed’ by the reader. The goal of modern text, he argues, is prehensible. Smithson’s reading of LeWitt was unusual in 1968,
to make the reader an active producer of meaning — this kind of when most critics interpreted his systematic structures as evi-
text he calls scriptible or ‘writerly’.50 Unlike the classic, lisible dence of a rationalistic approach to artistic production.55 Yet his
work, the modern scriptible text resists easy consumption, interpretation of the Dwan Gallery diagram was supported by
demanding a concerted effort on the part of the reader. This LeWitt’s later work, specifically the series of Location drawings
demand may not be met: Barthes acknowledges that the modern begun in 1974. The Location of Geometric Figures: a Blue Square, Red
text provokes boredom in those unwilling to ‘set it going’, caus- Circle, Yellow Triangle, and Black Parallelogram (1976) consists of the
ing it to be dismissed as ‘unreadable’. He identifies a certain elements listed in the title, which are mapped out in relation to
productive difficulty at the heart of the modern text, which ‘asks the framing edge of the paper and to one another. The location
of the reader a practical collaboration’, in a move prefigured by of each figure is described verbally in a handwritten text inside
Mallarmé’s Le Livre.51 the corresponding shape. LeWitt’s title follows the serial struc-
ture of the drawing’s production, indicating that the blue square
Invisibility and illegibility was drawn first and the black parallelogram last. In the square,
Impediment and difficulty in comprehension are central to the the text relates only to the edges of the paper, whilst the paralle-
functioning of Serial Project #1, a fact belied by the ostensible logram’s text incorporates its relationships to all the other
rationality of the three-dimensional structure and the epony- shapes:
mous text. The structure consists of open and closed boxes- A black parallelogram whose top and bottom are the same
within-boxes, laid out on a grid according to a predetermined length as the distance between the lower right corner of the
system of permutations. While this system is followed yellow triangle and the upper left corner of the blue square and

379
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Figure 4. Sol LeWitt, flyer for an exhibition at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, 1967. LeWitt Collection, Chester, CT, USA. # ARS, NY and DACS, London
2012.

whose top side is drawn toward the upper left corner of the Although the language used is perfunctory and prosaic, the
page from a point halfway between the center of the yellow exhaustiveness of LeWitt’s descriptions — combined with the
circle and the upper left corner of the page and whose right absence of punctuation, the faintness of the pencil and his
side is drawn to a point on the right side of the blue square conjoined, slanting hand — makes reading the text a kind of
where it is crossed by a line drawn from the midpoint of the
endurance test. This fraught attempt to document space linguis-
right side of the page to a point halfway between a point
halfway between the top of the yellow triangle and the upper tically contrasts with the lucid, precise delineation of the geo-
right corner of the blue square and the center of the blue metric figures, highlighting the divergent descriptive capacities
square. of writing and drawing.

380 ANNA LOVATT

 The text in LeWitt’s Location drawings has much in common understands words differently’, indicating that his diagrams
with the literary strategies of the nouveau roman, introduced to a and instructions can be interpreted in a number of ways. Once
US audience in the late 1950s via the Evergreen Review. The they have been processed by the individual draftsperson, these
summer 1958 issue included an essay on Alain Robbe-Grillet instructions should be carried out, but then ‘each person draws a
by Barthes, which describes the author’s subordination of nar- line differently’, prompting another degree of removal from
rative, characterisation and moral judgement to an ‘exclusive LeWitt’s original idea. When drawing the piece in his or her
and tyrannical appeal to the sense of sight’.56 Barthes explains idiosyncratic style, the draftsperson may make errors in follow-
how classical literary space is destroyed in Robbe-Grillet’s ing the plan which, according to LeWitt, should remain part of
novels through the exhaustive linguistic mapping of perceptual the finished work. But while he appears to welcome free inter-
experience: ‘His multiplication of details, his obsession with pretation, or even mistakes, he maintains that ‘The wall drawing
topography, his entire demonstrative apparatus actually tend is the artist’s art, as long as the plan is not violated. If it is, then
to destroy the object’s unity by giving it an exaggeratedly precise the draftsman becomes the artist and the drawing would be his
location in space, by drowning it in a deluge of outlines, coordi- work of art, but art that is a parody of the original concept’.60
nates, and orientations’.57 In an account that prefigures The diagram or plan thus plays a pivotal role in the production
Smithson’s description of LeWitt’s Dwan Gallery diagram, lan- of LeWitt’s wall drawings, its wilful misreading establishing the
guage suffocates and annihilates the object, rather than repre- ‘operator’ as the author, albeit of a parodic work of art.
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senting it or revealing it to the reader. Interestingly, Barthes With this in mind, I would like to return, by way of conclu-
compares Robbe-Grillet to a modernist painter depositing a sion, to ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ and LeWitt’s description
layer of words on a fractured surface, which exists in space whilst of that text as ‘an operational diagram to automate art’. The
continually laying bare its flatness.58 The lateral play of the numbered sentences are presented in series, like an algorithm
text — repeating sentences in various permutations, substituting structured in stages to facilitate implementation. Yet this impres-
one word or phrase for another and shuffling the chronological sion is immediately contradicted by the first sentence, which
sequence of the story — serves to displace the author and states that ‘conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.
decentre the narrative. An excerpt from Robbe-Grillet’s novel They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach’.61 The idea of
Jealousy was included in Aspen 5 + 6, read by the author in the ‘leap’ is inherently a-serial, suggesting that some step in a
French on one of the phonograph records and transcribed in sequence has been inexplicably bypassed. From the outset then,
English amongst the ‘printed data’. The relentlessly descriptive, LeWitt’s textual ‘diagram’ works to undo its own ostensible
expressionless tone is similar to that adopted in LeWitt’s ‘Serial logic. In the sentences that follow, terms connoting rationality,
Project #1’ and the later Location pieces, but in Jealousy these logicality, seriality and understanding are juxtaposed with a
exhaustive, non-hierarchical descriptions are indicative of vocabulary of irrationality, illogicality, disruption and misunder-
Robbe-Grillet’s stubborn resistance to characterisation.59 The standing. But while the first, ‘positive’ set of terms are associated
emotion named in the title figures nowhere in the text, although with repetition and convention; the second, ‘negative’ set are
the narrator’s pathological obsession with the surface of things aligned with new experience and altered perception.62
makes its absence palpable. Whereas Robbe-Grillet demolishes ‘Understanding’ is presented not as the consumption of a fixed
conventional literary space with an unstinting barrage of per- meaning predetermined by the artist, but as a process of inter-
ceptual data, LeWitt obliterates his Location drawings with pretation by the audience.63 Importantly, the primary audience
redundant script. Resisting easy consumption, the exhaustive envisaged by LeWitt is made up of other artists, whose inter-
descriptions of ‘Serial Project #1’ and the Location Drawings test pretations and misinterpretations of the work might actively
and tax the reader, who must find a means of getting to grips inform their own production: ‘One artist may mis-perceive
with the mechanics of the text. (understand differently than the artist) a work of art by another
artist but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that
Artists’ readings misconstrual’.64
LeWitt’s exhibition announcement for Serial Project #1 and the This kind of productive misreading is humorously enacted in
later Location drawings present the diagram not as an explana- a 1972 video by John Baldessari, in which the artist sings all
tory aid, but as the site of a fraught encounter between word and thirty-five of LeWitt’s ‘Sentences’ to a series of popular tunes,
image. In the context of LeWitt’s wall drawings, the diagram including ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.65
also indicates the divergence of the ‘concept’ as outlined by the Baldessari solemnly declares that LeWitt’s words ‘have been
artist and its (mis)interpretation by a team of draftspeople, in the hidden too long in the pages of exhibition catalogues’, explain-
form of the final drawing. The short text ‘Doing Wall Drawings’, ing that he hopes to introduce them to a wider audience via this
published in 1971, highlights his interest in these kinds of trans- musical ‘tribute’.66 On one level, Baldessari’s tongue-in-cheek
formations. In addition to the factors determined by the site — attempt to bring conceptual art to a wider audience parodies
the size, shape and texture of the wall — LeWitt suggests four LeWitt’s arcane text and the erudite readership it initially
different stages at which communicational breakdown can addressed from the pages of Art-Language and 0–9. Yet the
potentially occur. Primarily, he claims that ‘each person video also activates the text, taking seriously LeWitt’s suggestion

381
 that it constitutes a kind of ‘operational diagram’ rather than a operational diagram to automate art’. LeWitt cited in Lippard, ‘The
textual product packaged for consumption in an exhibition Structures and the Wall Drawings’, 24.
19 – Andrea Miller-Keller, ‘Excerpts from a Correspondence, 1981–1983’, in
catalogue. As he stutters through LeWitt’s ‘Sentences’, forcing
Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings 1968–1984, ed. Susanna Singer (Amsterdam:
their syllables into an ever-more tortuous series of rhythms, Stedelijk Museum, 1984), 21.
Baldessari performs reading as a process of operation: reconfi- 20 – Hans Rudolf Zeller, ‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought’ (1960), Die Reihe,
guring the text, stalling it, and galvanising it once again.67 English ed. (Pennsylvania: Theodore Presser, 1964), 5–32.
21 – LeWitt cited in Lippard, ‘The Structures and the Wall Drawings’, 25.
22 – Mel Bochner wrote: ‘When one encounters a LeWitt, although an
order is immediately intuited, how to apprehend or penetrate it is
NOTES nowhere revealed’. Bochner, ‘Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism’, Arts
1 – Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, 0–9, no. 5 (January 1969): 3–5 Magazine 41, no. 8 (Summer 1967): 39–43, revised version in Gregory
and Art-Language 1, no.1 (May 1969): 11–13. Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968),
2 – Sol LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, Art-Language: 11–13. 92–102, here 101.
3 – In addition to ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual 23 – Zeller, ‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought’, 5.
Art’, ‘Serial Project #1’, and ‘Doing Wall Drawings’ (which I will discuss here), 24 – Ibid., 7.
these texts were: ‘Ziggurats’, Arts Magazine 42, no. 1 (November 1966): 24–25; 25 – Jacques Schérer, ed., Le Livre de Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
‘Wall Drawings’, Arts Magazine 44, no. 6 (April 1970): 45; and ‘Ruth Vollmer: 26 – Zeller, ‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought’, 8.
Mathematical Forms’, Studio International 180, no. 928 (December 1970): 256–57. 27 – LeWitt wrote: ‘The form itself is of relatively limited importance; it
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4 – See particularly Robert Smithson, ‘A Museum of Language in the becomes the grammar for the total work’. ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’,
Vicinity of Art’, Art International 12, no. 3 (March 1968): 21–27, reprinted in 80. He also called Serial Project No. 1 (ABCD) ‘a finite series using the square
Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley and Los and cube as its syntax’. LeWitt, ‘Serial Project # 1’, in Aspen 5 + 6, ed. Brian
Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 78–94, here 80 (discussed later O’Doherty (New York: Roaring Fork Press, 1967), unpaginated.
in this article). 28 – Zeller, ‘Mallarmé and Serialist Thought’, 15.
5 – Unpublished typescript of talk given by LeWitt at the Nova Scotia 29 – Lucy Lippard, ‘Sol LeWitt: Non-Visual Structures’, Artforum 5, no. 8
College of Art and Design in 1970, quoted in Lucy Lippard, ‘The Structures, (April 1967): 42–46. Lippard details LeWitt’s early, whimsical proposals, such
The Structures and the Wall Drawings, The Structures and the Wall as encasing the Cellini cup or the Empire State Building in a block of cement;
Drawings and the Books’, in Sol LeWitt, ed. Alicia Legg (New York: Museum and realised projects including A Work of Art in Nine Parts, Each Containing a
of Modern Art, 1978), 23–28, here 24. Work of Art by Other Artists (1964), in which the ‘contained’ works were barely
6 – Seven issues of 0-9 were published between 1967 and 1969, collected in 0- visible through LeWitt’s louvered boxes. She likens these works to the closed
9: The Complete Magazine, ed. Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer (New York: boxes of Serial Project No.1, which emphasise conceptual experience by inhi-
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006). Nineteen issues of Art-Language were published biting visual access to the smaller cubes presumably contained within them.
between 1969 and 1985, republished in a boxed facsimile edition 30 – Zeller, ‘Mallarmé l and Serialist Thought’, 19.
(Cambridge: 20th Century Art Archives, 2000). In June 1994 Art & 31 – Seth Siegleaub and John Wendler, eds. Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Douglas
Language began the ‘New Series’ of their journal. Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, Seth Siegeleaub
7 – On Art & Language see Michael Baldwin, Charles Harrison, and Mel (also known as the ‘Xerox Book’) (New York: Seth Siegleaub, 1968). On
Ramsden, Art and Language in Practice: Illustrated Handbook v. 1 (Barcelona: Siegleaub’s various curatorial projects see Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art
Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1999). On Vito Acconci see Gloria Moure, Vito and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
Acconci: Writings, Works, Projects (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2002). 32 – LeWitt mentioned Zeller’s article in his interview with Miller-Keller,
8 – See Kynaston McShine, Information (New York: Museum of Modern Art, see note 19. Bernice Rose mentions the same article briefly (and more
1970). On the relationship between conceptual art and a broader societal extensively in a footnote) in ‘Sol LeWitt and Drawing’, in Legg, Sol
drive towards bureaucratisation and systematisation see Benjamin Buchloh, LeWitt, 31–35, here 34.
‘Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the 33 – On Mallarmé’s influence on modern art, see the catalogue of the
Critique of Institutions’, October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43. exhibition curated by François Chevrier, L’Action restreinte: l’art moderne selon
9 – On Graham’s Schema see Alexander Alberro, ‘Structure as Content: Mallarmé, Nantes: Musée des beaux-arts, 2005. The exhibition included Aspen
Dan Graham’s Schema (March 1966) and the Emergence of Conceptual 5 + 6.
Art’ in Dan Graham, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1998), 34 – Dan Graham, ‘The Book as Object’, Arts Magazine (Summer 1967), 23.
21–30. I am also referring here to Mel Bochner’s 1969 installation Language is 35 – Marcel Duchamp, À l’infinitif (NewYork: Cordier and Ekstrom, 1966;
Not Transparent, which was in part a critique of the presumption that linguistic edition 150).
conceptualism constituted a ‘dematerialization of the art object’, as sug- 36 – Duchamp cited in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp
gested in Lucy Lippard’s and John Chandler’s article ‘The (London: Thames & Hudson, 1969), 18–19. For an account of Clement
Dematerialization of Art’, Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36. Greenberg’s emphasis on opticality see Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone:
10 – For a history of Artforum see Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum Clement Greenberg and the Bureaucratisation of the Senses (Chicago: University of
1962–74 (New York: Soho Press, 2004). Chicago Press, 2008).
11 – Artforum 5, no. 10, ‘American Sculpture’ (June 1967). 37 – Graham’s article is not footnoted, but the translated passage is identical
12 – Robert Smithson, ‘Letter to the Editor’, Artforum 6, no. 2 (October 1967): 4. to one that appears on page 19 of Zeller’s text.
13 – Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 38 – Graham, ‘The Book as Object’, 23.
1967): 79–83, here 79. 39 – Aspen 5 + 6 ‘The Minimalism Issue’, guest edited by Brian O’Doherty
14 – Bochner interviewed by Amy Newman, in Newman, Challenging Art, 157. (New York: Roaring Fork Press, 1967).
15 – LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 83. 40 – On Aspen 5 +6, see Alex Alberro, ‘Inside the White Box: Brian
16 – LeWitt cited in Lippard, ‘The Structures and the Wall Drawings’, 24. O’Doherty’s Aspen 5 +6’, Artforum 40, no. 1 (September 2001): 170–74.
17 – LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, 80. 41 – ‘Sigmund Bode’ (Brian O’Doherty), ‘Introduction’, Aspen 5 +6,
18 – LeWitt considered his ‘Paragraphs’ to be ‘more general and theoretical’ unpaginated.
than his ‘Sentences’, which, as previously mentioned, he viewed as ‘an 42 – The list of contents describes the booklets as ‘printed data’.

382 ANNA LOVATT

 43 – Marcel Duchamp, ‘The Creative Act’, statement made at the conven- 57 – Ibid., 121. Barthes’s account of Robbe-Grillet’s writing is strikingly
tion of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, 1957. Transcript in similar to Smithson’s later description of LeWitt’s Dwan Gallery diagram:
Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 77–78. ‘The information on his announcement for his show is an indication of a self-
44 – O’Doherty remembers: ‘Barthes was in Philadelphia at that time and he destroying logic. He submerges the ‘‘grid plan’’ of his show under a deluge of
came to New York to talk about the project. He got it immediately. My simulated handwritten data. The grid fades under the oppressive weight of
notion that art, writing etc., was produced by a kind of anti-self that had ‘‘sepia’’ handwriting. It’s like getting words caught in your eyes’. Smithson,
nothing to do with whoever ‘‘me’’ was, was an excellent preparation for our ‘Museum of Language’, 80.
conversation. He said ‘‘I think I may have something for you’’. When ‘‘The 58 – Barthes, ‘Alain Robbe-Grillet’, 114.
Death of the Author’’ arrived, I knew it was revolutionary’. Brian O’Doherty 59 – Compare, for example, this paragraph from Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy
in conversation with Phong Bui, The Brooklyn Rail, June 2007. Archived with the text in LeWitt’s Location drawings: ‘Instead of being rectangular
online at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2007/6/art/doughtery (accessed 16 like the one above it, this patch is trapezoidal, for the stream bank that
January 2013). constitutes its edge is not perpendicular to its two sides — running up the
45 – I am referring to Graham’s ‘Homes for America’, Arts Magazine 41, no. 3 slope — which are parallel to each other. The row on the right has no more
(December 1966–January 1967): 20–21; Smithson’s ‘Quasi-Infinities and the than thirteen banana trees instead of twenty-three. And finally the lower
Waning of Space’, Arts Magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 28–31, and the edge of this patch is not straight, since the little stream is not: a slight bulge
Bochner/Smithson collaboration ‘The Domain of the Great Bear’, Art Voices narrows the patch toward the middle of its width. The central row, which
5, no. 4 (Fall 1966): 44–51. should have eighteen trees if it were to be a true trapezoid, has, in fact, only
46 – LeWitt, ‘Serial Project #1’ (unpaginated). sixteen. . .’. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy, trans. Richard Howard (London:
47 – Ibid. John Calder, 1959), 19.
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48 – Ibid. 60 – Sol LeWitt, ‘Doing Wall Drawings’, Art Now 3, no. 2 (June 1971),
49 – Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), reprinted in Image reprinted in Legg, Sol LeWitt, 169.
Music Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 142–48, here 148. 61 – LeWitt, ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’, 11.
50 – Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Blackwell, 1990), 4. 62 – ‘2. Rational judgements repeat rational judgements. 3. Irrational
51 – Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ (1971), reprinted in Image Music judgements lead to new experience’, 11.
Text, 155–64, here 163. 63 – ‘25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His per-
52 – LeWitt, ‘Serial Project #1’ (unpaginated). ception is neither better nor worse than that of others’, 12.
53 – Smithson, ‘Museum of Language’, 78. 64 – LeWitt, Sentence no. 23, 12.
54 – Ibid., 80. 65 – The idea of a ‘productive misreading’ had been explored most exten-
55 – For an account and critique of this interpretation of LeWitt see Rosalind sively in the work of literary critic Harold Bloom: see A Map of Misreading
Krauss, ‘LeWitt in Progress’ (1978), in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and (1975) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 244–58. 66 – John Baldessari, John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt (1972).
56 – Roland Barthes, ‘Alain Robbe-Grillet’, Evergreen Review 2, no. 5 (Summer 67 – On Baldessari, see Jessica Morgan and Leslie Jones, John Baldessari: Pure
1958): 113–26, here 117. Beauty (Munich, Berlin, London and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2009).

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