Sol Lewitt at MassMoCA

This week I'm not writing about a specific painting but an artist's collective work. Recently deceased artist Sol Lewitt currently had an exhibit showing at Massachusettes Museum of Contemporary Art, or MassMoCA. It was a collection of work from the beginning of his career, all the way to the last pieces he made before he died.

First, Sol Lewitt is a very respectable artist. He worked with graphic designers and architects and it reflects in his work. He's very simplistic, most of his art is made up of lines and basic geometric shapes.

I, personally found it very boring. The work was without much concept and didn't require much interpretation or thought. Each piece was like an experiment, he did a lot of combining lines and layering different directions. One piece was a wall where he connected every point on the wall (like the corner of a door fram or window) to every other point on the wall. I did stuff like that in grade school when I was bored in class, just not on a wall.

There are exceptions, of course. The work he did towards the middle of his career was a little more interesting. He started experimenting with color and shape. The work I was assigned to interpret was a long, horizontal wall. The top half was painted a matte black and the bottom half was painted glossy black and the two were divided by a wavy line. It was very simple and very boring. What could I have interpretted in this? What concept was there to discover? I thought hard and forced it. It could be interpretted as dark, maybe depressed. The two halves could represent being torn over something. If that's what he was aiming for I guess I have to give him credit, but I think it's a stretch.

If you're interested you could find Lewitt's work at MassMoCa, or on the MassMoCA website. It is worth checking out, if you're artsy, you should at least know who he is, whether you enjoy it or not.