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Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #118

Sol Lewitt was one of the founders of art movements in the 1960’s known as minimal and conceptual.[1] Prolific as sculptor, printmaker, and creator of artist books, he became known also for the large series of drawings made directly on walls of museums and private residences. The actual drawings were most often drawn by others—commissioned draftpersons, students, designers, or even random museum visitors—according to LeWitt’s very simple written instructions. For instance, in 1971 students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who had come to hear LeWitt lecture were instead enlisted to create Wall Drawing #118 according to the following directions.

On a wall surface, any continuous stretch of wall, using a hard pencil, place fifty points at random. The points should be evenly distributed over the area of the wall. All of the points should be connected by straight lines.[2]

For LeWitt, the creative act in the work of art was realized in the conception. The physical construction of the work was secondary, and not even necessary in all cases. The process of making the physical artifact could result in a thing of beauty or intellectual interest. But it did not constitute the creative act.

Sol LeWitt did not use a computer. He did not think in terms of algorthims, now associated with the way we think about the involvement and control that computers exert upon our lives. Instead, LeWitt’s simple intstructions allowed for individual human interpretation, and the resulting variations were part of what interested him.

Now in the high tech era, when millions of people write code professionally, as students, or as artists, LeWitt‘s ideas and artifacts seem especially relevant and accomodating to the generative nature of the computer’s capabilities.

I ran across an image of Mitchell Chan's version of Wall Drawing #118[3] in Matilde Marcolli’s book titled Lumen Naturae: Visions of the Abstract in Art and Mathematics. Marcolli uses the drawing as an example of an artist’s work depicting a version of what mathematicians call vectors—the lines and points in a vector space representing numbers, magnitude, velocity, or location. Marcolli, however, understands that in the artist’s way of working intuitively, the lines represent form in its abstract purity. I was immediately inspired to see if I could basically replicate the drawing as an experiment to include in Unreachable Objects. I was not aware, at first, that there existed any instruction for how to go about it. But I could pretty much tell what was going on by looking at the example in Marcolli's book. I chose to use forty points (vertices), not knowing that LeWitt’s instruction required fifty. After learning this I decided to stay with forty, liking the slightly more sparse feel. It appears to me that other computer-based versions of Drawing #118, like mine, implement a randomized placement of vertices across the field of the drawing space. I might knitpick a little and say that random placement is not the same as being "evenly distributed" as mandated by LeWitt's instructions. But I think random placement does create more interesting visual variations.

I also did a bit of online research to learn that Wall Drawing #118 was, without intention, a representation of what in graph theory is propery called a "complete graph"; that is, a graph where every vertex, or node, is connected by a unique edge (path, or line) to every other vertex.[4] Such a structure might be comparable to a company directory listing the email addresses of every employee.

After I had achieved replicating a facsimili of Chan's version of LeWitt's instruction, I was not surprised to find out that there exists several other examples of Wall Drawing #118 online. True to LeWitt’s conception, each version has its own variation on the model, including what I might call “enhancements” afforded by the computer, such as movement, color, and interactivity.

I think LeWitt would appreciate that his conceptions continue to inspire exploration and expression of the simple beauty of in conception and complexity in his ideas.

See the following links for more implementations of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #118.

Drawing 1, Drawing 2, Drawing 3