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My Summer with Sol
City Hall Park just happens to be in the neighborhood where I spend the majority of my time on a daily basis during the week. Most days, when weather permits, I like to take a break by sitting in the park unmanacled (mostly) from electronic communication to simply sit and observe the swirl of the world around me. Part of the landscape over the summer and continuing through early December includes an installation of Sol Lewitt’s Structures from 1965 to 2006. Given the particular proximity in the park where I take my daily rest there is one piece in particular that has captured my attention – the Three Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes 3 3 2 (1967 – 1974, painted steel). This piece dominates the main walkway just north of the fountain toward City Hall.
Now I’ve never really been a fan of Sol or of conceptual / idea-driven art per se. However, if not finding myself in love with their work visually I’ve at least come to appreciate artists like Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd over the years. But this open air show presented me a unique opportunity to spend some significant time with the work. More importantly was to see these structures in a very different context then where one would normally encounter them. After all, a huge component of this work is the persistence of order where any randomness and disorder is tightly controlled by the artist. I’m thinking in particular about the lighting which is consistently maintained and managed in a gallery or museum context and never changes. But in the great outdoors the play of light within the environment renders a significant effect on the content of the work. The Three Part Variations piece was especially important to me because it seemed most affected by the constant change of light. Because some of the cubes are open on one or two sides the location and intensity of light and shadow throughout the piece is always in flux.
This fascinates me for two reasons. The first is that a whole other dimension of arbitrariness is explicitly introduced visually so that at any given time of the day this piece always looks different. Structurally nothing changes but visually the piece is never the same. Add to this the shadows cast by the surrounding trees or alternatively the intensity of bright sunlight and those pristine and evenly painted steel surfaces are severely altered. The second thing capturing my interest butts up against the artist’s original intention to create a conceptual serial piece with nuanced variation. With the work now placed outside of a controlled environment the underlying concept is entirely compromised. In short, I wonder what Sol would have thought about the intrusion of environmental changes imposed on his art and its underlying concepts. For me at least it provides a new dimension of meaning and only serves to heighten my appreciation.
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