In a piece for the New Yorker in 2000, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl asked: “Why does everybody love Sol LeWitt?” It’s a question that’s also at the heart of a new documentary about the artist that’s opening at Film Forum on May 7. LeWitt may be the chilliest member of a group of ice-cold artists associated with the male dominated first wave of minimalism, who rejected strict interpretation of their work and whose contradictions were expertly critiqued in Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, “The Flamethrowers”:
“Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself,” the main character says of her boyfriend’s work. “I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse […] and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.”
In the film, LeWitt himself has much the same feeling: “They’ve referred to me as a minimal artist but no one has ever defined what it means or put any limits to where it began or ended, or what it is and what it isn’t.”
This impenetrability or confusion makes the prospect of sitting through a documentary about LeWitt’s life a daunting one, especially since even among his peers he was the most protective of his identity. But filmmaker Chris Teerink manages — through a host of intimate conversations with loved ones, collaborators, and the most ardent supporters of his art, interspersed with sequences featuring teams putting together LeWitt’s intricate wall drawings — to bring out the populist elements in his work.
This dedication of making art for people outside the traditional art world audience, combined with his unsociable personality — he rarely went to openings, for example — is the contradiction that drives through the film and ultimately might be the most interesting thing about LeWitt, or at least what sets him apart from his contemporaries. “You can’t call him a social animal or say he thought in terms of networking,” says Alexander van Grevenstein, former curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and current director of the Bonnefanten Museum, at one point in the film. “I think that’s wonderful.”
The film’s intention to demystify the persona LeWitt has carried with him beyond death results in a largely uncritical portrait. All we see is how generous LeWitt was to his friends, to strangers, to loved ones; how his art was for people, not collectors; and how his perceived attitude was a rejection of the phoniness of the world that surrounded him. And I have no reason to believe this isn’t completely true. But the problem is it smoothens out a crinkly, and more complicated, picture of an artist who was battling with these contradictions in his life and work. We only have one side, one view. It’s the type of piece that LeWitt, who famously published a negative review in the catalogue for his first major show, might have disapproved.
