“The arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective”: A Brief History of the LeWitt Collection
Béatrice Gross
In a dazzling sequence of 124 grids of nine black-and-white snapshots taken in 1979 and published a year later as an artist’s book, Sol LeWitt wittingly offered his Autobiography in the guise of a virtually comprehensive inventory of the contents of the New York Lower East Side studio-loft in which he had lived and worked since 1960 [PL. 73, Front/Back Matter]. An artist’s self-portrait of some sort— arguably the only, indirect, oblique sort possible for LeWitt, who notoriously shied away from personal publicity and cameras (he appears there in one single image, barely recognizable, sitting on the floor in a corner, face down)—the taxonomic account seems to celebrate what the conceptual artist aimed to exclude as much as possible from his art: “the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective,” to quote from his 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.”1 1
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Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in Artforum, Vol. 5, No. 10 (June 1967): 80.