Instructions as Art

What a LeWitt wall drawing is

When a collector buys one of Sol LeWitt's (1928–2007) wall drawings, no object changes hands. The sale transfers a certificate of authenticity, a diagram, and a set of written instructions. Drafters follow the instructions to draw directly on a wall, and when the show comes down, the wall gets painted over. The same certificate can be used to draw it again somewhere else, on a different wall, by different hands.

Under this arrangement the instructions are the artwork, and each wall holds one execution of them, much as a program's source file stays the same however many times it is run. That is also why LeWitt's work continued after his death. The MASS MoCA retrospective opened in 2008, the year after he died, and was planned to run for twenty-five years, its walls repainted and redrawn from the same certificates.

The 1967 essay and the first wall drawing

LeWitt argued for this in print a year before he drew on a gallery wall. In Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (Artforum, June 1967) he wrote:

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

— Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Artforum, June 1967

The machine in that sentence is the plan, and the finished picture is what it produces. The same essay describes what that leaves for the execution:

When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.

— Sol LeWitt, "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," Artforum, June 1967

Writing a program and running it divides the work the same way.

LeWitt made his first wall drawing in October 1968, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, for the gallery's inaugural benefit exhibition. Wall Drawing #1 now belongs to SFMOMA, which is to say the museum owns the certificate and redraws the work on its own wall whenever it is shown.

Why executions differ

Give the same page of words to two drafters and you get two different drawings, and LeWitt wrote his instructions to allow for that. He is often quoted as saying that each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently; whether or not he put it that way, the wall drawings bear it out.

Wall Drawing #797 (1995) is built on that variation. A first drafter draws an irregular horizontal line near the top of the wall. The next copies that line as closely as they can without touching it, the next copies that copy, and so on to the bottom of the wall. Because each line copies the one above it rather than the first, small errors accumulate, and the lines drift further from the original the lower they sit on the wall.

Music is a closer comparison than painting. A LeWitt instruction works like a score, and each execution like a performance that follows the notes but differs in its details, the way two pianists play the same sheet music differently.

LeWitt's palette

LeWitt worked in a narrow set of colors: black, gray, red, yellow, and blue, on white walls. In the ink-wash work of the 1980s he built up depth by layering transparent washes of those same colors. The tool's color list sticks to the same set.

Writing instructions in the tool

The tool has a wall and an editor for plain-language instructions. You write the instructions, and the program draws them, taking the place of LeWitt's drafters. The presets load real wall drawings, lightly adapted to the tool's grammar; Wall Drawing #273 in particular is simplified from a seven-wall piece to a single wall of edge-to-edge lines. Run one unchanged, then change a single number and press Execute again. Then clear the editor and write three lines of your own.

If the parser can't read a line, it skips it, lists it under Draftsperson notes, and draws the rest, much as a human drafter would interpret an unclear instruction instead of refusing to draw.

LeWitt rejected the view, common among his critics, that this was a cold, mechanical practice. Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969) begins:

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

— Sol LeWitt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," 1969

LeWitt and Vera Molnár

Vera Molnár began her machine imaginaire method in 1959. She wrote out a set of rules and carried them out herself, by hand, as if she were the computer. That was nine years before LeWitt's first wall drawing. She got access to an actual computer in 1968, the year LeWitt drew on his first wall.

Both were writing a plan and handing its execution to someone or something else. LeWitt handed his to a person with a marker, Molnár hers to a machine, and the art world of the time took his version far more seriously than hers and the other computer artists'. The Vera Molnár lesson covers the same years from her side.