Sol Lewitt: An Interview

Although Sol Lewitt began working primarily in painting, he has also worked in sculpture and photography. Best known for his cubes, he used the grid as a foundation for many artworks. Seeing himself in the role of architect or composer, Lewitt is most concerned with the concept behind the piece rather than the final product. He strips away extraneous information and presents the bare essentials, usually in a serial nature. In this 1977 interview, conceptual artist Sol Lewitt burrows through his thoughts and work, describing breakthrough encounters with the work of Edweard Muybridge and Jasper Johns that facilitated his transition from painterly practice to serial sculptures and wall drawings. Lewitt’s process comes through as one of exploring the flexibility of methods, possibilities, and concepts; and expanding a logical language through simple transformations and expansions, incorporating new swaths of content with each move. His art has attracted a variety of interpretations, many of which Lewitt dismisses as missing the point. In his words, Conceptual art is against formalism and against Duchamp; it is not Minimal, nor is the relation between visual and conceptual a paradoxical one. But although his project is systematic and thus communicative, Lewitt emphasizes that “everyone should have the art that they want, that they need.” “The big problem today which many artists are concerned with is not if the art is made or not made, but what happens to it after it’s made and the fact that it becomes an object and a piece of commerce and is traded. The artist is seen like a producer of commodities, like a factory that turns our refrigerators. I believe that the artist’s involvement in the capitalist structure is disadvantageous to the artist and forces him to produce objects in order to live,” Lewitt says in this interview with Kate Horsfield. A historical interview originally recorded in 1977 and re-edited in 2003.