Sol Le Witt’s Rational Mysticism
By Mark Daniel Cohen
This statement is quoted as if it were a ticket to comprehension. It is used by art critics, teachers, historians, and press releases writers. Many students memorize it. Even the catalogue essay for the current exhibitions begins with it. Nevertheless, the quotation is no explanation. It presents, quite deliberately, a conundrum: it does not elucidate so much as strategically mystify. If Conceptual Art is built on the idea—and it is, by several of LeWitt’s own assertions—then how does it engage the vision of a "mystic"? Where is the mysticism in the working through of an idea by means of a deliberate and impersonal process? (It is LeWitt who has insisted that art—at least art such as his—should be created as a direct execution of the beginning idea, that the idea should be the machine that generates the work of art.) For Le Witt, whose art is rooted in basic geometry, the starting idea is specifically logical, for logic is mathematical. In what way is such rigorously mathematical work mystical?
The question at hand does not concern LeWitt or his work but rather focuses on the standard reception both have received. Typically, mystification is confused with mystical insight, which is then confessed and traded as if it were a comprehension that constitutes the foundation for authentic discussion. In short, virtually no one seems to notice that nothing has been acquired in the way of knowledge. It all bespeaks a sort of ocular occlusion, an opacity of notice that appears to confuse enthusiasm with thought – the very mark of artspeak.
The current paired exhibitions at PaceWildenstein on 57th Street and in Chelsea compel the questions as well as an improve respect for Le Witt. The shows create a forum for inquiry rather than merely smile and believe in a knowledge that no one seems to be able to articulate. Together, the exhibitions offer over 50 of Le Witt’s structures made between 1962 and 2003. Although restricted to one area of LeWitt’s artistic labors—none of the wall drawings or works on paper are included—they beg the question, why do we respect Le Witt’s work? What precisely is Le Witt’s work trying to convey to us?
The mystery at the heart of Le Witt’s art is as clear as air, as clear as the space adumbrated by his minimal structures exploring the permutations of outline. The mysteries between the purely rational and the purportedly mystical, between the crudely and bluntly mathematical and the piquant elusiveness of purpose are caught in the spaces of his grids. His work requires the viewer to construct the bridge between the rational and non-rational. Dave Hickey, in the catalogue essay, tries by aligning the Le Witt project with Thomas Jefferson’s regular gridding of the land surface of the United States. The grid took no account of local land configurations. Instead, it was relentlessly regular and intellectually imposed. For Hickey, there is something mystical in the grid’s infinite expandability. It regulates an idea and provides knowledge without recourse to history. The grid lies beyond the realm "of proof or logic"—it is pure idea, beyond the realm of the reasoned.
The grid represents the very nature of mathematics and the very nature of logic: all its attributes are the characteristics of the rational and not of the non-rational. Logic is self-sufficient, independent of experience and the particulars of history. It is purely of the mind.
But to get to the reason behind these attributes, to the essence that is responsible for the qualities that emanate from it like rays of light from a filament, is profoundly difficult. In fact, to identify and understand the essential nature of mathematics, and of logic, is the greatest mystery we have, and it introduced itself at the very beginning of our intellectual tradition. The Western lineage of thought—and in certain ways, that of the entire world—is initiated with Pythagoras, the discoverer of the laws of geometry. From mathematics, taken as a fundamental insight, extends all our philosophical and scientific thought, as well as a specific philosophical orientation: the Pythagorean, or the Neo-Platonic. (For Plato was a good Pythagorean: "Let no one destitute of geometry enter my doors" was on a sign over the door of his academy.) Within this lineage, thought is pure, it is derived exclusively from prior thought, and experience must be contrived to accord with it. In the Modern World, the line has resolved into that of Kant, who began with geometry, and that makes the aesthetics that underlies Modernism, which clearly derives from Kant, a Neo-Platonic, or Pythagorean, enterprise. To put it differently, abstraction—of any kind, geometric and gestural—is a pursuit of the source of geometry, an attempt to delve the place from which it comes.
And that source, that essence of the geometric, constitutes the profound mystery, for we know nothing else of its kind. It is neither a fact—for it cannot be localized in a world of facts, any more than gravity can be—nor is it an idea. Geometry, mathematics, logic, can of course generate ideas—that is what they do—but they themselves are not ideas. For an idea is a very specific commodity. There are many things it resembles but is not: an idea is different from an opinion, an attitude, a bias, a point of view. One of its distinguishing characteristics is its intellectual genealogy: ideas necessarily come of other and prior ideas, which means that some idea must have come from something that is not an idea, or the regress would go on forever and there would have been no beginning to any line of thought.
That source is the start from which ideas come, and that is what mathematics and logic are. They are something on the order of a natural law, but to say that is to say little enough. They are the principles of form by which all things are commanded, both of fact and of thought, for mathematics rules in both realms. (Someone once said that not even God can break the laws of geometry.) But to be more precise seems beyond conception. This is the great mystery.
And this is what LeWitt is about. His works are clearly explorations of the intrinsic structures and dynamics of geometry—the simple laws of geometry—and geometry, all of mathematics, is the law of everything else. When LeWitt works through the variations of his Incomplete Open Cubes from 1974, or compounds the iterations of his Open Geometric Structures from 1990, or phases together the elements of his Serial Projects of the late 1960s, or develops portions and variations of the Platonic Solids in his Four-Part Open Geometric Structures, 1978-79, he is running through the possibilities of three-dimensional geometric progressions. And those progressions are Illuminations of the laws behind all that is.
They are also further instances of a line of development in Modern Art that has gone largely unremarked. Our inheritance from the twentieth century includes three well-observed manners of art: abstraction, Surrealism, and Expressionism. What has not been isolated for study, but is clearly one of the principal modes of exploration and imaginative inquiry, is mathematical art. The line of descent includes Malevich, Mondrian, Gabo, Rothko, Snelson, and an enormous number of others, and—although all strains of abstraction are essentially geometric—there is a strong difference of intent, and of accomplishment. For maintaining clarity of purpose in our analyses, Malevich should be distinguished from Kandinsky, Rothko should be distinguished from Pollock. There is something else going on here than occurs in much of abstraction, and it appends a new entry to the oldest of intellectual traditions.
The approach and achievement of mathematical art is not always the same, and Hickey is right in maintaining that there is something Classical in LeWitt, for there is also a Romantic version of the enterprise. There is a distinct and easily observed difference in import between LeWitt and, to take another contemporary example of the mode, Kenneth Snelson. Snelson’s works are lavish and inventive, and they are far more knowledgeable about the possibilities and intricacies of geometric structure. In their intricacy, they take on a quality that LeWitt’s works deliberately lack: they seem to come alive. There is a quality of inner animation that appears to arrive from the complex interrelationships of the modular geometric elements.
This is precisely what is not to be found in LeWitt. As Hickey has noticed: "LeWitt, Flavin, and Judd are occasional classicists. Their work comes from nowhere and goes nowhere." In the matter of LeWitt, something other than implicit animation is to be found in his simple and progressing exercises of geometry. These works are blunt and direct presentations of the thing itself; they are contemplations of the simple fact—not of geometry, which is not a fact—but of the fact that it is there, the fact that it controls the structure of space, the structure of events, the structure of time: the structure of our fate. They are demonstrations of what essentially is—and you can say there is something mystical in that.
There remains the question of what LeWitt reveals, what is shown us through our confrontation with the fact of the structure of our fate. In a sense, what is revealed is nothing. There is an idea that results from this work, and the idea we come away with is nullity. This is a known quantity—it is the blandness of origins, the hollow at the core. Reach down to your own beginnings and all you come up with is a handful of dust. This has long been known, it is the essence of the most profound tragedies, and it is the essence of what we find in LeWitt. In our heart of heart, we are void, as void as the volume in the center of an Incomplete Open Cube.
