LeWitt in Progress

Abstract

Consider the following three documents: first is an article entitled Sol LeWitt-The Look of by the critic Donald Kuspit. second is a book-length essay called Progress in Art by the artist and writer Suzi Gablik. third is the critic Lucy Lippard's contribution to the catalogue for the LeWitt retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Taken together these essays put forward a set of claims, addressed initially to the work of a specific artist, but extended to the larger context of abstract art in general, or at least to the abstract art of LeWitt's generation. What these claims amount to is a declaration of the mission and achievement of this abstraction. It is, they collectively assert, to serve as triumphant illustration of the powers of human reason. And, we might ask, what else could Conceptual Art be? Kuspit signals this grand theme with the title of his essay. The Look of Thought is what stares back at us from the modular structures, the openwork lattices, the serial progressions of LeWitt's sculputure. Thought, in Kuspit's terms, is deductive, inferential, axiomatic. It is a process of finding within the manifold of experience a central, organizing principle; it is the activity of a transcendental ego. In LeWitt, Kuspit writes, is no optical induction; there is only deduction by rules, which have an axiomatic validity however much the work created by their execution has a tentative, inconsequential look. And, he continues, rationalistic, deterministic abstract art links up with a larger Western tradition, apparent in both classical antiquity and the Renaissance, viz., the