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CONTENTS Page 6

FOREWORD

Christiane Berndes

Page 10

SUPERFLEX/FREE SOL LEWITT

Page 36

FREE SOL LEWITT: SUPERFLEX’S COPY MACHINE

Daniel McClean

Page 48

Discussion between Christiane Berndes,

Charles Esche, Daniel McClean AND SUPERFLEX

Page 68

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS

Collection Vanabbemuseum

Page 102

SYSTEMS THINKING

Charles Esche

Page 108

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS

List of works

Page 111

COLOPHONE

CONTENTS

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FOREWORD Christiane Berndes

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The Van Abbemuseum invited the Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX to develop a project for Play Van Abbe, an 18-month programme in four parts, consisting of exhibitions, projects, performances, lectures and publications around the question of the function of the museum in the 21st century. In Part 1: The Game and the Players the emphasis lay in the way directors, curators and artists tell their story in a museum and thereby determine the rules of the game. Part 2: Time Machines is the result of exploring several display models from the past and looking at their possible significance for the future. This has been the chapter that SUPERFLEX was invited to take part in.

SUPERFLEX began researching the collection of the museum and was especially interested in the Minimal and Conceptual art of the sixties and seventies. Here, artists stressed the idea for a work as being the 'engine' behind the creating of a product. In tandem with the way in which the industrial commodification worked at that time, emerged the possible notion of executing an idea by third parties. As proof of authenticity, the purchaser of such an artwork received a certificate, sometimes with an accompanying diagram on how to execute the work.

For Play Van Abbe Part 2: Time Machines SUPERFLEX proposed to curate an exhibition with specifically these art works from the collection that focus on seriality, repetition, recipes, instructions, production and action. This became the exhibition In-between Minimalisms. Minimal and Conceptual art works by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Ian Wilson, Robert Morris, Ulrich Rückriem and Robert Ryman have been combined with ‘actions’ on video by John Baldessari, Martha Rosler and Bruce Nauman in order to emphasize the presence of the body action. In the centre of this collection display, SUPERFLEX has created a metal workshop in order to reproduce a work from the museum collection on site, and suggested sharing the copies among the general public for free. The choice fell on the work Untitled (Wall Structure) from 1972 by American artist Sol LeWitt. On four tables set up on a platform, a couple of welders work daily on reproducing LeWitt’s Untitled (Wall Structure). They cut the aluminium, weld it into the correct shape, sand the form and then paint it white. The already made copies lie stacked in a corner waiting for their new destinations. Visitors can apply for a copy and pick up a FREE SOL LEWITT replica if selected by a random selection process. The counterpart to this metal workshop is the ‘Information Room’, a space for the immaterial, for mental labour, where original certificates and installation instructions are displayed, and where visitors can refer to leading publications on Minimal and Conceptual art.

Asked for the reason behind their choice for Sol LeWitt, SUPERFLEX indicated as one of the main reasons was the fact that LeWitt is regarded as the founding father of Conceptual art, an art form, which considers the idea more important than the physical manifestation of an artwork as object. FREE SOL LEWITT is a homage to Sol LeWitt and the concepts that form the core of his work. Herewith SUPERFLEX moves our attention from the material object to production, presentation and distribution of an artwork and describes LeWitt’s work as a series of instructions and resources with which the museum can replicate this specific work from its collection

CHRISTIANE BERNDES / FOREWORD

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and donate the replicas to its visitors. In this way SUPERFLEX shifts the emphasis from the artwork as an object of investment to the artwork as the result of a process and the underlying idea behind this.

But what does that mean for the value of the original artwork and its position in the museum collection? The museum has the duty to collect and document cultural property, and to make this accessible so that critical reflection is possible, fresh perspectives may be presented and new developments in the cultural and social fields are made possible. The aim of the project FREE SOL LEWITT is, in an aesthetic manner, to raise the issue of the functioning of a museum as owner of a public collection in a modern democratic society.

What are the obstacles a museum encounters along the way? What are the tensions that arise between an exponential increase in the free exchange of information (i.e. the Internet) on the one hand and copyright, specifically for art works, which in fact restricts this exchange, on the other?

At the same time the FREE SOL LEWITT installation poses the question of what it means for a museum to ‘own’ an artwork. What value is attached to the status of a copy and the original?

What status does the object have as a material possession? What do you actually own if you own the material object, but not the copyright? How can you as a museum give people access to the artwork if you do not hold the copyright?

With FREE SOL LEWITT, SUPERFLEX is playfully asking the museum to ‘set free’ Sol LeWitt’s work and by so doing labels the museum as a prison in which the artwork is locked away like a criminal. By taking the freedom to reproduce Sol LeWitt’s work, the artists raise questions about authorship, copyright and ownership, as well as the rights and duties of the museum as owner of the object and as a public institution. It examines the manner in which, and the degree to which, the museum gives the public access to its collections, mediates knowledge about the artwork and its reception.

FREE SOL LEWITT presents the museum as a place of production. Literally – in the form of an installation in which a work by Sol LeWitt is reproduced. Figuratively – since this reproduction may be seen as a reinterpretation of Sol Lewitt’s work – something that one can debate always occurs whenever an observer encounters an artwork. The museum is the quintessential place where these encounters take place, where the artwork stimulates the visitor’s imagination and prompts him or her to imagine the world differently. FREE SOL LEWITT can thus be seen as a reflection on the current model of museums of contemporary art. In making the codes of conduct evident and the acceptance as the norms, which are embedded in our legal system and which restrict our freedom of action; the work wants to introduce the opportunity for change and innovation. In this context FREE SOL LEWITT functions like a time machine, challenging us to present our new uses and possibilities for the museum: a space for the production of new ideas and of new representations for the future.

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On the other hand, SUPERFLEX also raises the issue of the ”aura” of the artwork “as a one-off object found in a specific place”. In his essay from 1936, 'The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Walter Benjamin suggests that reproduction strikes at the core of an artwork.

With Sol LeWitt you can ask yourself whether that is the case, or whether the work is not more about the idea, a concept, or an execution that can be repeated again and again. Thus, the work refers to the ‘inspired moment’ out of which it arose, and not necessarily to the ‘production time’. This angle is reflected in the way the FREE SOL LEWITT installation is set up. Here, too, the inspired moment lies with the idea rather than that it lies in its physical manifestation. Thus SUPERFLEX's approach introduces the museum as a platform for the exchange of ideas, where we can relate in an entirely different manner other than only looking. This is a challenging engagement, which will create plenty of new possibilities for the future.

CHRISTIANE BERNDES / FOREWORD

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SUPERFLEX/ FREE SOL LEWITT 10 | FREE SOL LEWITT

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FREE SOL LEWITT is constructed from 18 pieces of aluminium profiles.

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In the FREE SOL LEWITT workshop the aluminium profiles are measured and cut before welded together. A team of workmen work daily in the exhibition space of the museum making exact copies of Sol LeWitt’s Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972.

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The aluminium pieces are tig welded into a lattice structure.

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The edges are sanded down and polished to a smooth surface.

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In its final stage of reproduction, each copy is coated with 3 layers of white enamel.

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All stages of the production process take place in a single gallery room in the Van Abbemuseum. Four tables, machinery and tools have been set-up in the workshop space.

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Visitor to the museum fills out an application form to collect a FREE SOL LEWITT copy.

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Multiple copies of FREE SOL LEWITT stacked in the workshop space awaiting their new destinations.

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Visitors to the Van Abbemuseum pick up the first copy of FREE SOL LEWITT. The original Sol LeWitt piece is displayed in the background in room A1-09.

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FREE SOL LEWITT: SUPERFLEX’s Copy Machine Daniel McClean

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“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art”, Sol LeWitt, 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,' 1967.1

SUPERFLEX’s FREE SOL LEWITT is a machine for producing copies. The machine is activated by the Van Abbemuseum. The machine is not a literal machine. Instead, it is a set of instructions (like many Conceptual art works) through which the Van Abbemuseum is to produce exact replicas of an artwork in its collection, Untitled (Wall Structure) from 1972 by Sol LeWitt, and distribute these copies free of charge to members of the public.

Sol LeWitt’s structure is an open lattice structure (measuring almost two metres high and three and a half metres wide) consisting of interlocking squares, which is affixed to the wall. It is fabricated out of welded aluminium and painted white. When installed, LeWitt’s structure zigzags across the museum’s wall protruding into a shallow space. LeWitt preferred to use the term ‘structure’ to describe these works rather than ‘sculpture’ or ‘painting’ because he considered these latter categories of artistic media to be obsolete when describing the primary, geometric forms and permutations which were generated from his ideas like a ’machine’.

With SUPERFLEX’s machine, the process of replicating LeWitt’s structure is made visible and audible inside the museum. On a raised workshop-platform across four tables, workers perform the separate and noisy tasks of cutting sheets of metal, welding the resulting squares together to form replica structures and painting them. Everyday during the exhibition, piles of copies of LeWitt’s structure accumulate on the museum’s floor, their number determined by the rhythm of the workers’ production. These copies (which are not attributed to Sol LeWitt) are to be distributed to members of the public randomly through a lottery system, which museum visitors can sign up for. They are given to the public without any restrictions as to how they may be used. By simultaneously making visible the processes of artistic production, exhibition and distribution, SUPERFLEX’s machine disrupts their conventional chronology by bringing these normally differentiated moments together inside the museum’s walls.

As is reflected playfully in its title, SUPERFLEX’s machine asks the Van Abbemuseum to ‘free’ Sol LeWitt’s structure. On the one hand, SUPERFLEX’s challenge is to extend the distribution of LeWitt’s artwork beyond the confines of the museum in which it is locked – to allow the work’s content to be shared by a wider public. Accordingly, the machine calls into question the museum’s relationship to the outside public sphere and demands the need for a wider engagement by the museum with this sphere. On the other hand, SUPERFLEX’s machine asks the museum to free the content of LeWitt’s work by providing the public with replicas of LeWitt’s structure, literally free of charge.

1

Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, re-printed from Artforum, vol.5, no.10, New York, [June 1967], in Sol LeWitt, 'Critical Texts', Zevi, Adachiara (ed.), I Libri di Aeluo: Rome, 1994, pp.78-82.

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Copying Sol LeWitt SUPERFLEX is a collective of radical Danish artists. This artist collective is interested in how cultural information (including art works) is created and valued. Its position and practice is inspired by the free culture and free software movements which advocate copying as a residual elemental process in the sharing and building of language and knowledge, and should not be constrained by intellectual property laws, and, if so, only to a minimum degree. Referring to socially progressive information models derived from the digital environment, in particular to open source software, SUPERFLEX’s aim in its practice is to create free and open social models or ‘tools’2 for the creation and sharing of information. Participants in its projects are invited to use and adapt these tools. Its projects have included the construction of tools for collectively producing and distributing biogas technology (SUPERGAS), internet television channels (SUPERCHANNEL), food products (FREE BEER), and design objects (COPY LIGHT).

Why did SUPERFLEX choose to copy this particular artwork from the Van Abbemuseum’s collection and to copy it in this way? Like other works of Minimalist and Conceptual art, LeWitt’s structure is relatively easy to copy and implies the possibility of infinite repetition and reproduction. For SUPERFLEX, its machine is a homage to Sol LeWitt’s machine, yet it also questions its status as an icon. It extends the possibilities inherent in LeWitt’s machine, whilst reflecting upon the failure of such works (like those of other Minimalist and Conceptual artists) in their promise to overcome the fetish of the original, auratic art object and connect the production of art to its wider social distribution.

FREE SOL LEWITT was inspired by an invitation to SUPERFLEX from the Van Abbemuseum to work with its collection leading to the exhibition In-between Minimalisms, within which FREE SOL LEWITT is a core element or an interruption. SUPERFLEX was attracted to the Minimalists and in this respect, to Sol LeWitt, because of their ideas about how art can be modelled after mass industrial production. It also wanted to question the way in which Minimalist art works have become transformed into precious icons. The Minimalists were the first artist generation to utilize a language of prefabricated industrial forms and materials made by workers rather than by artists, including Dan Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes and Donald Judd’s Plexiglas boxes, which were distributed throughout the capitalist Western world in the 1950s and 1960s. They were also the first generation of artists to structurally incorporate the logic of industrial production into the construction of their works, as reflected in the serial repetitive use of identical materials and geometric elements and the reliance on industrial labour processes, such as Carl Andre’s rectangular floor arrangements of concrete bricks or Donald Judd’s floor installations of wooden and metal cubes. Like the works of many of the Minimalist artists in the Van Abbemuseum’s collection, a factory fabricated LeWitt’s structure.

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SUPERFLEX/TOOLS, Walter König, Cologne, 2003.

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As SUPERFLEX reminds us, Minimalist artworks are copy machines (like Pop art works in their relation to photographic images), which implicitly pose the question of where reproduction might begin and end, while challenging the economy of aesthetic originals. “Almost from the very beginning, Minimalism”, Rosalind Krauss noted3, “located itself, as one of its radical acts, within the technology of industrial production. That objects were fabricated from plans meant that these plans came to have a conceptual status within Minimalism, allowing for the possibility of replication of a given work that could cross the boundaries of what had always been considered the unreproducibility of the aesthetic original”.

This quality of implied extension or infinite reproducibility, underscored by Minimalism’s industrial methods of fabrication and repetitive structures was praised by its artists, (Carl Andre famously declared his ideal form of sculpture to be a road) but was decried by its critics. According to the Modernist art critic, Michael Fried the Minimalist spectator’s awareness of “the endlessness not just of objecthood, but of time” amounted to an aesthetic ‘theatricality’ and a failure (in contrast to Modernist artworks) to create an experience of the artwork which is “located strictly within it” 4.

SUPERFLEX was also drawn to LeWitt’s work because of his dematerialized notion of art, shared with Conceptual artists, that ideas can be works of art in their own right, existing in priority over and separation from the artwork’s physical form and material execution. In Paragraphs on Conceptual Art published in 1967 and one of the first formulations of Conceptual art as an artistic movement, LeWitt stated: “I will refer to the kind of art in which I am involved as conceptual art. In conceptual art the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work. 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. The idea is a machine that makes the art”.

Accordingly, for LeWitt, it is the idea that is of primary importance in art and like a machine, it generates the results that follow. The idea need not be of great significance and the result can be absurd or even irrational (“Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach”, he stated in his 'Sentences on Conceptual Art', 1969).

However, the idea must be followed, akin to a clerk cataloguing, to its logical conclusion. LeWitt’s variations on incomplete open cubes and other geometrical structures are examples of this.

As SUPERFLEX’s project articulates, LeWitt’s work lies at a critical juncture between Minimal3

Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum’, 1990 reprinted in 'Minimalism', James Meyer, (ed.), Phaidon, 2000, p.285.

4

Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ [1967] reprinted in ibid, p.235.

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ism and Conceptual art, between art as objecthood and art as idea. In one sense, it is tied to the object, to the permutations of geometric structures and the serial repetition of primary forms in contrast to the linguistic grammar of Conceptual art. In another sense, the object has become a phantom (LeWitt’s structures are typically executed in white), its materiality and three-dimensionality all but drained, in its emphasis upon the underlying idea. Indeed, the logic of LeWitt’s practice would lead him to exploit the wall (a crucial site for Conceptual artists) in his wall drawings, as a space where his ideas could be presented in a two-dimensional form devoid of illusionism.

Conceptual artworks whether defined as linguistic statements or instructions are also copy machines. Dispensing with the object, Conceptual artworks open up the utopian possibility that the artwork as an idea can be communicated and distributed in the form of information to a wide public who do not have to buy the work in order to share it (the idea is the artwork – ‘primary information’) or who can partake in the artwork through its mass reproduction (as in printed information – ‘secondary information’). Conceptual art might finally dismantle the artwork as a commodity fetish and overcome the separation between art and life that was advocated by many of its leading exponents, including the New York based art critic, Lucy Lippard. It was Lippard who established with Sol LeWitt in 1976 the publishing organ, Printed Matter, dedicated to the publishing of artists’ books (regarded as artworks in themselves) at affordable prices. Alexander Alberro5 reveals how this optimism was influenced by an idealized model of technology and information (inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s new theories laid out in Understanding Media about the information society) and that art, like information, could be communicated universally, instantaneously and globally.

It is no accident that just as the Minimalists aligned themselves with the industrial factory and its methods of production, the Conceptual artists aligned themselves with the corporate office and its tools of communication of the time: the typewriter, telephone and photocopier. The photocopier was the copy machine par excellence of the Conceptual movement. This is exemplified in Seth Siegelaub’s 'The Xerox Book' project in 1968. Siegelaub was a pioneer of the early Conceptual movement in New York in the 1960s, producing a series of groundbreaking exhibitions and publications. In 'The Xerox Book', Siegelaub proposed that the seven artists in his gallery (including Sol LeWitt) create works to be exhibited in the form of a book that would be photocopied and widely distributed, thereby collapsing for the first time, the site of the exhibition with the publication (in the end, Xerox refused to sponsor the exhibition). Directing that each artist must present their work within an allotted twenty-five pages in the book, Siegelaub later said that 'The Xerox Book' “was an attempt to consciously standardize, in terms of an exhibition, book, or project, the conditions of production underlying the exhibition process” 6. In 1966, Mel Bochner had also aligned the Conceptual artwork with its reproduction via the photocopier in his gallery exhibition, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As 5

Alexander Alberro, ‘Conceptual Art and The Politics of Publicity’, MIT Press, 2003, esp. pp.133-135.

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Seth Siegelaub and Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation, published in 'TRANS #6', 1999, pp.51-63.

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Art. Here, he presented four identical ring binders of photocopied documents on four pedestals including a copy of a diagram that came with the Xerox copy machine on how to use it.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that LeWitt’s statements regarding his own use of other artists’ works and the use made by other artists of his work, have strong affinities with this model of art as information which can be collectively shared and built upon. Writing in Flash Art in 1973, in response to the accusation that he had copied other artists (primarily, Jan Schoonhoven and Francois Morellet), LeWitt iterates: “I believe that ideas, once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they can only be given away and cannot be stolen…. My art is not of formal inventions; the forms I use are only the carrier of the content. I am influenced by all art that I admire (and even art I don’t admire)” 7.

In regards to how his own work could be used by others, LeWitt continues and states: “[M]y own work of the past ten years is about only one thing: logical statements must be made using formal elements as grammar. I am neither the first artist nor the last to be involved with this idea. If there are ideas in my work that interest other artists, I hope they make use of them.

If someone borrows from me, it makes me richer, not poorer. We artists, I believe, are part of a single community sharing the same language”.

SUPERFLEX’s copy machine allows us to return to the radical potential of LeWitt’s artistic language, a language that other artists with and without LeWitt’s knowledge have built upon. These artists include Jonathan Monk who has made numerous artworks in homage to LeWitt, reusing LeWitt’s work and most famously, John Baldessari’s parodic singing of LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art in 1972 (although LeWitt emphasized in these sentences that these statements did not constitute an artwork itself). In his private life, LeWitt was equally renowned for being generous with his work - my own recollection as a young curator was watching LeWitt cut a work on paper of painted, coloured stripes into parts and give these signed parts to the workers who had assisted him in his exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in appreciation of their work.

At the same time, however, SUPERFLEX’s machine reminds us of the shortcomings of both artistic movements in truly democraticizing the artwork. Despite their radical potential, neither movement led to a break with the aesthetic of the original or to the artwork’s wider social distribution.

Just as Minimalist artworks were defined by their plans and drawings and Conceptual artworks by their statements and instructions (both of which imply mass reproducibility), their construction

7

Sol LeWitt, ‘Comments on an Advertisement Published in Flash Art, April 1973’, re-printed from Flash Art, no.41, Milan, [June, 1973], in ibid, pp.97-99.

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and ownership as rare aesthetic originals would be made through the artist’s certification. Certificates of authenticity authorize which artworks can be sanctioned as originals and importantly, which reproductions cannot. They, therefore, along with the artwork’s provenance, structure a regime of authorial originality in art which has parallels with how copyright law restricts acts of copying and distribution within culture (including art) generally.

The Minimalists were far from resistant in limiting the number of artworks produced and sold as unique, original artefacts and were assisted by the use of artists’ certificates, which became of vital significance in the sale and distribution of art. In some cases, they even sold their works in the form of plans and certificates to collectors (for example, to the important European collector, Count Panza di Biumo) and allowing the collector to fabricate the work from the plan8. As Alberro9 reveals, Conceptual artists continued this trajectory. As the artwork became increasingly dematerialized (and reproducible), often executed as a text or a drawing directly onto the wall, the work’s certificate became the prime site for reconstructing the artwork’s materiality and uniqueness as a luxury commodity. By the end of 1972, Lucy Lippard had noted with despair how Conceptual art had become integrated into the capitalist commodity system and how these artworks were now bought and sold and speculated on by collectors in the same way as other artworks: “It seemed in 1969… that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money or much of it for a Xerox sheet referring to an event … it seemed that these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of a commodity status and market orientation. Clearly whatever minor revolutions in communication have been achieved by the process of de-materializing the object… art and artist in a capitalist society remain luxuries” 10.

In contrast to these earlier movements, SUPERFLEX has created a machine, which invokes the potential of the Minimalist and Conceptual art machines to produce multiple copies for distribution, breaking the hallowed silence normally surrounding the Minimalist art object inside the museum. Many of these copies will find their way into the homes of the local people of Eindhoven, extending the Van Abbemuseum into the community, while others will circulate across the world.

The only limit to the number of copies made derives from the museum’s decision as to when to switch the machine on or off and the finite number of copies produced each day by its operators.

Yet SUPERFLEX does not intend to provide a machine, which extends the artistic original, or to

8

Martha Buskirk, ‘The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art’, MIT Press, 2003, pp.34-48.

9

Alexander Alberro, ibid, pp.150-151.

10

Lucy Lippard, ‘Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object’ (New York: Praeger, 1973) re-printed in Art in Theory, Harrison, Charles & Wood, Paul (ed.), London, Blackwell, 1993, p.895.

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produce an unlimited edition of an artwork (although it does not rule out the possibility that the copies produced by its machine may be one day recouped and valued as artworks). Nor does it intend to disperse fragments of Sol LeWitt’s work; in this respect their strategy (though there are parallels) differs from that of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ who transformed Minimalistic forms into cyclically replenished stacks of paper sheets and corner piles of candy to be taken by gallery visitors.

Instead, despite its analogue form, SUPERFLEX proposes that Sol LeWitt’s structure is distributed as information: information which can be used and adapted by the public.

For SUPERFLEX, the model of information embodied in its FREE SOL LEWITT machine can be compared to source code found in computer software. Source code is a collection of statements or declarations written in human readable computer programming language and stored in computer files. It is also the mechanism used by programmers to specify the actions to be performed by computers. By drawing this analogy between source code and Conceptual art’s formulas of instructions (LeWitt’s own unfolding geometric permutations seem strangely prophetic of the virtual forms generated by computer programs), SUPERFLEX updates the fundamental notions of Conceptual art and links the movement to a contemporary copy machine: the computer. Having drawn the link with source code, the question for SUPERFLEX becomes: how can this form of information be shared and valued in a wider network socially?

The Copy Machine and the Public Domain Brian Holmes writes: “[T]he backdrop against which art now stands out is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated image can do is to mark out a possible or real shift with respect to the laws, the models, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we may relate to each other at a given time or place"11.

Holmes is identifying a type of art that can be described as having a propositional social value in that it proposes new models of social and cultural (rather than a primarily aesthetic) engagement.

In presenting a different model for distributing cultural content (in this instance, original artworks owned by the museum but whose copyright is often controlled by artists’ estates), FREE SOL LEWITT has a propositional social value which fits within this shift that Holmes describes. Yet

11

Brian Holmes, ‘Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society’, Van Abbemuseum Public Research #02, 2009, pp.13-14.

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in doing so, it differs from earlier models of social engagement and participatory aesthetics, in particular from the model of ‘relational aesthetics’ theorized by Nicolas Bourriaud12. If relational aesthetics posits an idealized, micro-community of audience interactions characterized by conviviality produced through the relational art installation, SUPERFLEX’s project reminds us that a domain of audience interaction around the artwork cannot be simply and neutrally taken for granted but must be produced and fought for. Above all, it reminds us that any domain (including within the museum) is defined by rules and constraints, in this instance, by the rules and constraints of the art system (as embodied in the museum) and by legal rules and constraints that can limit communication and must be challenged if the public domain is to remain ‘free’.

The legal constraint identified in SUPERFLEX’s project lies in its potential breach of copyright law. Copyright regulates the reproduction, distribution and public performance of cultural media including artworks, texts, music and images in both analogue and digital form. It does this by granting monopoly style property rights to copyright owners (in most instances, the authors of works) who are entitled to authorize and restrict the acts referred to above in relation to cultural works. This constraint is at issue here because ownership of copyright in artworks, as in other cultural works, is passed by law to the author’s estate after the author’s death (copyright generally lasts for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years). The copyright of Sol LeWitt’s artworks is accordingly owned and controlled by the artist’s estate even though it belongs to the Van Abbemuseum’s collection.

It is not the purpose of SUPERFLEX’s project to challenge the specific authority of the Sol LeWitt Estate or to suggest that this estate would not be in favour (as Sol LeWitt almost certainly would have been) of the machine, as FREE SOL LEWITT is an act of homage. Rather, the point is to challenge the generic authority (which unfortunately, too often can become real) of any artist’s estate or any other copyright owner to veto such uses of an artist’s work. SUPERFLEX’s machine functions as a constructive process of inquiry, which implicates the Van Abbemuseum, and the recipients of the machine’s copies in questioning the constraints imposed upon cultural communication and the public domain by copyright law. The Van Abbemuseum acquires for its collection not just an artwork but also a set of relations: a set of relations that asks how artworks and the copyright linked to them might be used by the museum in the future. The beauty of SUPERFLEX’s machine is that by entering the Van Abbemuseum’s collection, it will function as a tool for the museum to use, posing questions each time the museum wishes to reactivate it.

It is worth considering for a moment the different manifestations of the public domain that are at stake here. In one sense, the public domain is the social realm outside of the museum, many of whose inhabitants are often indifferent to the museum’s activities. By distributing free copies of LeWitt’s structure outside the Van Abbemuseum, including to local people, SUPERFLEX seeks to connect the museum with this sphere thereby dissolving, so to speak, its walls. While seeking 12

Nicolas Bourriad, ‘Relational Aesthetics’, Le Presse Du Reel, France , 1998.

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to enfranchise members of the public such as members of the local community, by giving them free copies of Sol LeWitt’ to place in their private homes, SUPERFLEX deploys a random lottery system when distributing these copies. The lottery system utilised by SUPERFLEX removes the social hierarchies that often accompany the distribution of art (the ‘art world’ versus the ‘public’) ensuring that a wide range of visitors to the museum will receive copies. SUPERFLEX’s machine refers back to earlier idealistic models of the museum, including the model proposed by the visionary museum director and founder of the Newark Museum in the early 20th century, John Cotton Dana13 that originals and copies of artworks from the museum could be loaned like books from a library to members of the public in order to broaden the museum’s connection with the community. SUPERFLEX extends this model through its machine, distributing replicas to the public, not merely lending them out.

In another sense, the public domain is the artistic community represented, however problematically, by the museum. SUPERFLEX asks the Van Abbemuseum to intervene on its behalf as an artist collective and on behalf of an artistic community whose images, forms and ideas are collectively copied, shared and built upon by other artists in what might be termed an ‘artistic commonwealth’. The artistic commonwealth has, historically, supported a myriad of artistic practices predicated upon copying, including acts of homage, parody and critique (as reflected most recently in Appropriation art). These ideas are encapsulated in Sol LeWitt’s statements referred to that “ideas once expressed become the common property of all” and that “[w]e artists, I believe, are part of a single community sharing the same language”14. It is, furthermore, a shared norm of the artistic commonwealth that artists do not exercise their copyright in relation to acts of copying by one another, although this position changes when the commercial exploitation exists outside of the boundaries of the artistic commonwealth, thus putting it at stake.

Finally, SUPERFLEX posits another public domain that is unencumbered by intellectual property laws. In 'Free Culture' (2003) Lawrence Lessig15 illustrates how global copyright laws in their 21st century incarnation ‘lock down’ cultural content to limit free expression, cultural creativity and free markets and to thereby limit the scope of the public domain. Lessig locates the exponential expansion of copyright law in the last decade and the lock down of content in the threat caused to corporate capitalist media interests by the Internet, the ultimate copy machine. The Internet allows for the unprecedented communication and sharing of information and content as a result of copyright’s expansion; as Lessig argues, “the rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased. The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and controlled by big

13

The New Museum, ‘Selected Writings by John Cotton Dana’, Penniston, William A. (ed.) American Associations of Museums, 1999, pp.41-52.

14

Sol LeWitt, ibid, pp.97-99.

15

Lawrence Lessig, ‘Free Culture: How Big Media Uses the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity’, The Penguin Press, 2004 also published on the Internet under a Creative Commons License www.freeculture.cc/freeculture.pdf, p.8.

DANIEL MCCLEAN / FREE SOL LEWITT: SUPERFLEX'S COPY MACHINE

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media, the law has now affected it”. “The consequence is”, he writes, “that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture”.

For Lessig, the over expansion of copyright law is reflected in multiple forms, including in its scope (copying is now directly applied to control technology which facilitates copying, for example, peer to peer file sharing), its extended duration (a copyright term had the duration of fifteen years in the 18th century) and the limited nature of its defences (copyright fails to accommodate shared cultural practices of sampling and mixing). Whilst a minimal level of copyright protection may be justified (as Lessig acknowledges) in order to act as an incentive in the creation of cultural works, copyright in its current manifestation needs to be radically reduced and is inconsistent with the digital environment of mass copying and sharing of information.

Conclusion SUPERFLEX’s machine provides a platform for preserving a public domain in both analogue and digital environments through shared social practices of copying that is resistant to the encroachment of intellectual property laws. However, for SUPERFLEX, the interest in constructing its machine is not only to question the way in which cultural information is distributed and shared, but to also look at how value is generated through acts of copying. This is because contrary to the assumptions of intellectual property laws, copying can and does create greater economic and cultural value for the original images, signs, products and ideas that are copied. Thus, rather than being undermined by SUPERFLEX’s copy machine, the value of LeWitt’s structure and his work generally benefit from reproduction thereby accruing greater economic and cultural value in the process.

In returning to the radical potential of the copy machines of Minimalist and Conceptual art, SUPERFLEX’s machine bypasses the legacy and limits of 1980s Appropriation art and its muchvaunted critique of authorship. Appropriation art failed to challenge the economy of the art object, participating, just as it produced copies of originals, in the same traditional and closed structures of artistic production and distribution, which it allegedly critiqued.

Where does SUPERFLEX’s copy machine go from here? One can imagine further encounters this machine might have with other artworks and perhaps with entire collections of museums.

The copy machine has only just been activated.

46 | FREE SOL LEWITT

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Discussion between Christiane Berndes, Charles Esche, Daniel McClean AND SUPERFLEX

48 | FREE SOL LEWITT

INTERVIEW

This discussion took place at the Van Abbemuseum on the 2nd of April 2010 between: Christiane Berndes (CB)

Curator and head of collections Van Abbemuseum, co-curator In-between Minimalisms

Superflex, Charles Esche, Director Van Abbemuseum Christiane Berndes and Daniel McClean (DM) Art lawyer and co-curator In-between Minimalisms Daniel McClean Charles Esche (CE)

SUPERFLEX/Bjørnstjerne Christiansen (BC) Co-curator In-between Minimalisms

DM: Shall we begin by discussing the FREE SOL LEWITT project and its relationship to the exhibition, In-between Minimalisms?

BC: FREE SOL LEWITT started some years ago out of a discussion between SUPERFLEX and Charles Esche on how to challenge the way art is made accessible to the public and how to question the position of the museum today. If the museum’s role is to collect and preserve artworks then maybe the next step is for it to distribute artworks, to open up new levels of use, access and ownership. So it began with a discussion, to see if one could look at models found elsewhere in society about cultural production and the value system created around this production.

Then as part of the exhibition series Play Van Abbe, Part 2: Time Machines, SUPERFLEX was invited to work with the Van Abbe’s collection. We decided to make a model, using a specific work from the collection; this model could work as a ‘tool’ for the public to discuss and use. This approach became the basis for researching the Van Abbe’s collection and we chose Sol LeWitt’s work, Untitled (Wall Structure) (1972), which is a large zigzagging, lattice metal structure painted white.

DM: Can you describe briefly how FREE SOL LEWITT works?

BC: We have created a kind of machine, a metal workshop inside the museum, where copies of Sol LeWitt’s wall structure are made and distributed to the public. This machine shows step by step DISCUSSION BETWEEN...

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the different stages of an artwork starting from the idea to its production, display and distribution.

DM: The metal workshop fabricates exact copies or replicas of this specific Sol LeWitt work?

BC: Yes. The welders work during the exhibition for four hours each day and produce exact copies.

These copies are made available to the public. During the exhibition, members of the audience can submit an application form to receive a FREE SOL LEWITT. The form describes the project and the conditions for receiving a copy. They have to fill in their name, contact details, signature, and then they place it in a box. Via a random lottery system one name is drawn and the museum calls that person. This lucky person comes to the museum and picks up the work, takes it home, into another context. In our understanding, the value system is hereby challenged and value is added to the work, to the artists and our cultural heritage.

DM: Why are you interested in this particular Sol LeWitt work? What happens to it in this new context?

BC: We used this Sol LeWitt work for various reasons. First, because it’s an artwork that is formulated as a concept, an idea and an instruction, yet would have a physical representation in the collection - in the form of an object. Second, because it is relatively easy to copy and reproduce, so that we could use that object and its related information in a production setting. Third, because the work was not executed by the artist. We liked the work and could easily imagine that the production machine of this specific work would work well for the discourse we are interested in. Sol LeWitt´s conceptual thinking and approach is inspiring, his iconic status and value today was also important for us. In a new context anything can happen, the information or the work can be used in new ways that we do not want to determine or formulate. It is up to the new user.

DM: Your project is a kind of photocopier then, a type of production machine for Sol LeWitt’s work?

BC: Yes, it is a photocopier. The work is easily reproducible; it uses mass produced or easily accessible raw materials, i.e. aluminium, with a certain diameter and painted white. It follows a standard process for making this kind of object or product.

CE: Can you explain a bit about the relationship between FREE SOL LEWITT and the In-Between Minimalisms exhibition?

50 | FREE SOL LEWITT

BC: The raw material for our project is actually the whole exhibition, In-between Minimalisms. By looking into the collection of the Van Abbemuseum and its archive, we focused on the period of the 1960s and 1970s and in particular Minimalism and Conceptual art. First of all, we looked into the idea and concept behind the artworks at that time. I think most of the artists from that period talk of the idea as the key action. The way the idea is executed is another issue, maybe less important, but in the end it is the object that is there and valued, more than the idea and concept that is almost forgotten. This is, of course, one aspect to discuss. The iconic valuation or the sensation of this object as well as the construction and the whole system around this object becomes more and more important.

CB: Maybe we should talk a little bit about the rooms in the exhibition?

BC: In the first room we tried to give a direction as to how we want to use the materials in the exhibition and how we can guide the visitor in that direction. One example is the use of Sol LeWitt’s instructions and certificate for a wall drawing which we presented on the wall in place of the executed drawing; you can imagine this work unfolding as if you took part in the action. And there is an Yves Klein IKB (International Klein Blue) monochrome1, which is perhaps quite a strange step to add to a Minimalist and Conceptual art exhibition, even though he is one of the really dedicated conceptual artists. Klein is very important for us; he wouldn’t usually be in a show like this.

Placing Klein up there high on a wall and also without a ‘filter’ - we removed the acrylic sheet that is normally placed in front of the work to prevent visitors from damaging the work - to show just the pure raw material of his work which I think is quite important. And then there are the two big guys, the two Minimalist icons, Judd and Flavin who also give the exhibition a good balance and introduction. Both of them use very simple mass produced materials, like Flavin’s fluorescent light tubes2, in almost each household anyone can achieve or has the skills for making and hanging it. It looks quite beautiful and it gives an impression of space and illusion. And you have the long Judd metal progression piece3, which is a little more complicated. It uses repetition, which is one of our key selection critera as it deals with space and its relation to architecture.

Then you enter the next room; here Martha Rosler4 is speaking to the grey man (Alan Charlton’s monochrome Untitled (1979)) through the wooden blocks Palisade (1976) of Carl Andre. Right after that we have added the Andy Warhol’s print Campbell’s Soup (1968) as a playful element.

We call this room ‘the Kitchen’. Warhol is also not usually considered in the canon of Minimal 1

Yves Klein, Monochrome bleu, sans titre (IKB 63) (1959)

2

Dan Flavin, Monument on Mrs. Reppin’s survival (1968)

3

Donald Judd, Untitled (Progression) (1969)

4

Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)

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art, he is more marked as a Pop artist, but I think he is also hardcore conceptual. And now he is more of an icon and a monument and we all know his images and so on, but repetition, seriality, replication, reuse, and sampling was a huge part of his practice. Warhol was asking how do you create culture by reproducing an image and taking it out of its context and reproducing it again and again and again, like the Campbell’s soup can. That created a new value.

The exhibition is organised so that you go through different steps and combinations of artist interruptions, which challenge the classical understanding of Minimal and Conceptual art. For example, we have included Ian Wilson’s Circle on the floor (1968); Wilson would normally not be included in this context either, but he is an important Conceptual artist. Wilson’s circle is in the same room as an iconic floor piece by Carl Andre, Twenty-fifth steel Cardinal (1974), being linked with a very funny video by John Baldessari5 singing Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art. Baldessari almost makes it into a karaoke version - something we have tried to highlight in the installation. In another room there is an iconic plywood box by Donald Judd6 and next to this there are sixteen performance videos by Bruce Nauman where he makes repeated actions, he interacts with a square, etc. It is about time; it is about how many repetitions you can make with the body and that all fills the box with a visual language in a way.

CB: But it is also about sound, because all of the sixteen Nauman videos are very noisy when activated together.

BC: I think this is also something you are quite surprised by when you experience the exhibition. Normally, Minimal art is represented as a very silent experience. There is no noise, no disturbance whatsoever only visual and spatial impressions. In our show, sound is quite dominant: Martha Rosler speaking to the grey man and Baldessari singing LeWitt’s sentences and then there is a Ulrich Rückriem video, Kreise (1971), the Nauman videos as well as, of course, the FREE SOL LEWITT factory – generating noise like a real factory through the welding, sanding and cutting of aluminium inside the museum. Interrupting the norm, one could say.

DM: You make unexpected connections between Minimalist, Pop, and Conceptual art, showing how they belong somehow to the same world and to the same time.

BC: Yes. There are different links between different artists and we are trying to open Minimalism up; but it is also a very beautiful Minimalist show. One can also experience it that way.

5

John Baldessari, Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972)

6

Donald Judd, Untitled (1974-1976)

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The FREE SOL LEWITT Model DM: Lets talk about FREE SOL LEWITT as a model, what kind of social model are you articulating in FREE SOL LEWITT? BC: If you want to change a society or a kind of thinking, you need to have examples or models, something to talk from and speak about. The Minimalist artists also worked with this idea. Their ideas allowed for another way of thinking and then they made objects that somehow represented this way of thinking. In our work, we want to integrate these two elements, the thinking and the process of making the object, and make these visible.

In the process, actual labour is a valuable step. It is not the author producing the object, it is someone else and that’s fine. The end result is not less of an artwork because it is someone else who is producing it. We are taking that step maybe even further when we show all the elements of this production together - the production of the idea and the making of the object. So I think what we are doing is displaying a production machine, which is at the same time, a fabrication of a machine that is producing value or at least encouraging a discussion of the creation of value.

We could also call it a ‘value machine’. Each time we make a copy it is not the original, it is a replica, which is being made. Whenever that copy enters into another structure, it enters into another value system depending on who is the receiver or user. For us it is important to start a discussion about the role of (a person) owning a work as well as the role of the museum within that value system.

DM: Your project reactivates certain democratic possibilities in Conceptual and Minimalist art, particularly, that the idea can be the work and this can be universally shared which is a kind of notion of democratic enfranchisement. It is in line with Sol LeWitt’s work, where you are trying to reactivate the potentiality of the work as an idea, system and structure. We view these artworks now as objects, which are treated as icons, almost imprisoned in their meaning in the numerous public and private collections’ representations of Minimalist and Conceptual art. We should also remember that these artists, including LeWitt, often held contradictory views on the dematerialisation of the artwork and the status of their works as objects too.

BC: Yes. This is all part of the project; it is the raw material we discovered in the process of researching the collection. Our challenge is to look at these iconic works and the enormous value they have now as icons more than as information and ideas. We could have taken more or less any of the works in the show to be copied and any of them would have been interesting. Some require very small steps, like Dan Flavin just bought neon tubes and attached them to the box that came

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with the neon tubes. It was not so much the actual work of Sol LeWitt but his thinking and ideas as well as his approach that is valuable for us. When he said, “the idea becomes the machine that makes the art”7, this is an important statement that we cherish.

DM: Sol LeWitt also talked about collective ownership and how he was happy for people to copy his work.

BC: That also. But I think that in our specific project it is very much the display of the machine that is important. A machine is already old school terminology that relates to industrial production. But it works well for our thinking; one can talk about the value machine, the information machine or the distribution machine being as important as the production machine. You have some sort of distribution machine that generates the use of the idea; ”an idea is not valuable before it is used”8.

I think Sol LeWitt said that. I don’t remember the exact quote now, but it is something like that.

You have to take the idea and bring it into something, like some action, before it has value, which is one way of looking at it. This can be viewed in relation to the museum. The museum has different roles, not only selecting and collecting and reconfiguring information from the past. Maybe you can even push the borders of the museum so far that it starts taking an active and progressive part in how history and culture evolves.

CB: I have one question regarding the machine: why is the notion of the machine so important to you?

BC: The notion of the machine is attractive to understand social processes and progress. In practical terms, when you display a machine you can also dismantle it and take its pieces apart. You can look at each of the parts and create others. A machine is also what we call a ‘tool’ for production and distribution. It can be used on many levels, playfully, but also for something a little more aggressive. When we refer to the ‘system of rights’, including intellectual property rights, such as copyright, we refer to a machine that you cannot stop. It is such a big machine it just rolls away and we just stand there and say, “We cannot do anything against it anyway”, because, for example, the economic system around it has evolved over time into such a strong rights machine.

7

Sol Lewitt states in 'Paragraphs on Conceptual Art' published in 1967: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work[…] all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.”

8

Sol LeWitt expresses in ‘Comments on an Advertisement' published in Flash Art, April 1973: “I believe that ideas, once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they only can be given away and cannot be stolen. Ideas of art become the vocabulary of art and are used by other artists to form their own ideas (even if unconsciously).”

54 | FREE SOL LEWITT

CB: You could see the machine as a metaphor for some processes in society?

BC: Sure. They reach a certain level where they are so strong and so big that they are ideologies or big machines that are unstoppable. But I think for us, SUPERFLEX, and I think for any citizen, we should actually question that. But it is not enough just to question or criticise; you need to make models, provide examples to challenge, create reactions and then you can also be criticised. It is too easy just to criticise.

CB: And that is why you are talking about the machine as a tool that can be taken apart and reassembled again?

BC: The beauty of this is that the Minimalist and Conceptual artists started out like this. What they tried to do in the sixties and seventies, in my opinion, was somehow to understand what was happening within society at this point: mass production, consumerism, and tonnes of products with the same kind of content but labelled in different ways. It seemed that they found a way of understanding this by making systems, which they disseminated at the same time. Sol LeWitt makes all these lines, cubes and structures; Carl Andre takes something that is normally used to make railroads or streets. He takes it, cuts it up and puts it into another structure. It refers to what we are very interested in about today: access to information, open source movements and so on. The raw materials or the idea is one thing, but the way you make it accessible and distribute it is then the value that can be used.

CB: When you look, for instance, at Carl Andre’s works, because I think they are very good examples for it, do you see them as elements that you can use to assemble something else?

BC: Sure.

CB: Yet in the museum they become a fixed object.

BC: The problem with the value machine surrounding art is that all of a sudden these works, which started out as being very open minded, as idea based and indifferent to whoever executed them, all of a sudden became iconic objects which hold an enormous value. This is so heavy or thick now that you cannot look past it, or it is difficult to look past. Today we have created many layers

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of value around these iconic artworks. You need to break down those layers again to reach that point where it originated. And that, I think, is what FREE SOL LEWITT tries to do. It takes it a step further whilst challenging the museum, the understanding of what a museum is and what a museum can do with their value of the collection or information.

CB: The museum has contributed in establishing these glass walls. And in creating this iconic position, but not only the museum, the art market has contributed to it too.

Exhibiting Minimalist/Conceptual Art BC: We are not art historians or represent the art market, but we are deeply involved, if I could put it that way. We are being used and use the system.

CE: One thing that makes me laugh a little bit is when you say, “Well, I’m not an art historian”. Very few artists and art historians would be able to get to where you have. So it is significant to recognise it as a process, which comes out of your own questions as an artist. You asked questions, which wouldn’t really be raised in the art historical systems that we are thinking in.

But I think you are right. The Minimalist artists were first trying to understand what they were doing with this work in relation to the environment around them and particularly in New York, Soho, old factories – they were all closing down, but at the same time the production was still going on around them, to some extent. That had to be a huge influence on them, being brought up or living in a city based on a grid. So, it comes out of the very provincial, if you like, context of New York at a particular moment and it seems to me that such a practice could only exist in that moment in the United States, which was moving towards a post-industrial society. It hadn’t yet arrived, so their environment still had the values of the old industrial society of the 19th century, which was still very much present in people’s thinking and understanding. The amazing step they made was to take their actual conditions of life and produce something with them?

They were not like William Morris trying to go back to some archaic ideas of art production, but rather to think, “This is what we have; this is the world around us. This is the city; this is what it looks like. These are the factories, which are closing down, which used to make the clothes that we wore and things like that. How do we deal with this environment?”

This is not part of a regular question asked in art history, not at all. So it is exceptional that you had been able to get to that point where you can see the context and then articulate it in a work.

BC: Indeed we made combinations to display some of these ways of thinking. In the exhibition in re56 | FREE SOL LEWITT

gards to Sol LeWitt, we have included his instructions of how to make a wall drawing. Normally you would not do that; you would want to see the results. You want to see what the artist had thought or had wanted it to look like, but by including instructions, you already guide people into a way of thinking. That is also why we have created an ‘Information Room’ in the gallery’s spaces which contains research material, including artists’ certificates, instructions and contracts from this period.

CB: Yes. The Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing is not executed; it is presented in the form of framed instructions, which raises the question of where the work begins and ends.

BC: In this way we value his instructions in the same way as we value all the other objects in the show and that, I think, is important because the idea comes first for us. Sol LeWitt invites someone else to use the instructions - students or whoever it might be, they could execute the instructions. The execution naturally allows alterations and so on.

CB: You also look for actions not only in the form of instructions, but also in the videos containing artists’ actions.

BC: Yes. We were trying to be playful, but with such valuable raw material, such loaded material, that is quite a challenge. But Christiane you also said that, “As an artist you can do this, but I could not do it as an art historian or as someone from the museum.” You couldn’t handle things in this way or make these combinations of artists’ positions, because there is a whole art history that surrounds these works. There is also the matter of how to break this down. Even though at times FREE SOL LEWITT may seem formal in the installation, but we are trying to break down quite a few value layers to dig into the core of the work.

CB: That is why I liked very much working with you and Daniel on the exhibition, because it made it possible to rethink how to show these works. For me, it would not have been possible as the curator of this museum – and I have been working here for a while with these works. One needs, and the museum needs, this input from outside. It needs this dialogue with external people to come to another way of dealing with making an exhibition from the collection.

BC: I would say that with FREE SOL LEWITT we are taking this even further. We are asking you to also deal with the reception of the work in another context, including the private home. This could lead to another kind of use that one cannot imagine. A museum or the owner uses an artwork

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in one way, but if you allow others to use it as well, then maybe you will have hundreds of new types of use. And you may experience that this person over there has a new or better idea in relation to your understanding of the artwork and then you include that in your way of thinking, in your value system.

DM: Are you implicitly referring to an open source model for sharing information?

BC: By passing on an idea I think you do already have an open source model. The challenge for the museum is how it uses that information or that knowledge that someone else creates from having this object. Here we are providing two challenges: we are challenging the normal system of preservation and presentation of an artist’s work within that value system that has been created over time, and the copyright system, by releasing the work out of the museum and into another person’s property sphere. And then we are asking how do we use that knowledge, which is then produced from the accessibility to that material. In the end, that is the core of the project.

In other words, how do people use these objects and how does the usage change the relation to the object and its environment and the society.

DM: You have placed no restrictions on people as far as the usage of FREE SOL LEWITT is concerned – except it is acknowledged that the replicas are not works by Sol LeWitt.

BC: There is no restriction on how one can use them. It would be wrong to place any restrictions.

Someone can use it differently from how I would have. We could gather hundreds of people in the museum who would agree on a specific way on how to use it and then one person next door would have a brilliant alternative way of thinking. This relates to the problem that limitations create for sharing information. You end up maybe stopping a process that was very important for the progress of our society. This process, action, alteration or new invention is much more valuable than thinking about how one could protect this person’s or company’s or whoever’s idea. In the end, it is about access to create within the value machine. This is more important than closing down or protecting the original idea.

CB: Now I am thinking of the way we have shown these works in the past and the way we showed them was related to the exhibitions we made with the artists. Carl Andre and Donald Judd - they all came to the Van Abbe and made solo exhibitions with their work. You need to know ideally how the artist intended his work to be displayed. When that is clear, this moment comes when you should be allowed to reinterpret and re-evaluate the work, it should not just be treated in a narrow way as an icon.

58 | FREE SOL LEWITT

BC: The Van Abbe is a fantastic resource because you have worked with all these artists. Many other museums and collectors have just bought one piece from these artists and then they are just icons. But the fact that the artists have been here in the Van Abbemuseum, they have worked here, sweated and engaged with you, that is the power of the history of the Van Abbe. That is valuable.

But you are right that most of these works have been represented so many times now not only within the Van Abbe, but in catalogues, in magazines, etc. Everyone knows them, at least in the Contemporary art field. I don’t think it is wrong to move on to another way of using them. The value and the history will remain, you cannot remove that. As soon as it is printed in a book and in the archives, it is there. You can always go back and look at it. That is why it was also fine for us to respond to your concept of Time Machines.

In the exhibition, you can look at the original Sol LeWitt in the context of how he and the work would normally be presented. Then you go to another room, the FREE SOL LEWITT room, and there is another way of expressing and working with his idea.

It is important for people to understand that there is no harm done to the original here. On the contrary, there is so much new value added to Sol LeWitt and the structure. For the audience who love to experience the value around the original, it is here and we respect that also. The general perception is to look at artworks in a museum, not to touch them, not to move them or interact with them in any way. This fetishism leads back to the whole discussion about the copyright machine and the economic machine that is wrapped around the protection of works and artists’ rights and estates, which of course is one part of our project. We are not so interested in a battle with an artist’s estate. In some way the estates are just representing the artists, but the problem is that today they are also representing an artist who produced objects that have a huge value and they have to relate all of sudden to the auction houses, the galleries and the private collectors who deal with the artworks - the representation on all levels within the economic value machine.

DM: You say that it is not so interesting for you to battle against the artist’s estate, but at the same time it becomes an important part of the project in the sense that the estate controls the copyright in the artist’s work and can potentially prevent your project from occurring by exercising its legal rights.

BC: If necessary, we will engage in a battle because you need to challenge that understanding. The estate should understand that there is no harm in making copies, the artist is represented and respected, and so is his value.

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CE: Actually it seems to me by doing this project you come to a much closer understanding of what this work might once have been and what it might be proposing. You do this more effectively than through those techniques traditionally associated with ‘looking’ in the museum ever did, and it is this approach that causes the question of the market and value to fall by the wayside. We can look at the work again, in fact, even as we have to deal with market at the same time. But from our point of view in the museum, we want to understand our collection in a variety of ways, not just permit one dominant interpretation. We want to come closer to the collection to know more about it, to gain knowledge from it. We even want to allow it to produce new knowledge.

During that process we need different tools for different works; and different tools for different moments in time; and in some cases these tools need to be generated.

This is one of the strong points about the fact that your FREE SOL LEWITT work is not provocative in attacking the market or some special interests or whatever. For me, it is simply trying to understand what this thing is and to take the artist’s proposition at face value. In those terms, perhaps one of the easiest ways of understanding it is to make the work again.

CB: Ironically enough, it is a very old way of trying to understand the work because you see a lot of people copying paintings. In art schools, copying has traditionally been a technique in order to understand what the work is about.

Artistic Commonwealth DM: One of the interesting questions raised by FREE SO LEWITT is the ’artistic commonwealth’.

Artists historically work within a whole inherited practice, with traditions of copying, where open copying between artists and the distribution of knowledge and ideas has been key. This might be described as an artistic commonwealth. The artistic commonwealth is potentially undermined by copyright law, which regulates the reproduction and distribution of cultural works, including artistic works.

BC: You can take the quote from Sol LeWitt, he says: “If someone borrows from me, it makes me richer not poorer, We artists I believe, are part of a single community, sharing the same language”9.

9

'Comments on an Advertisement' published in Flash Art, (April 1973) in 'Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts', reprinted from Flash Art, no. 41, Milan, June 1973, pp.97-99.

60 | FREE SOL LEWITT

DM: Your project in the Van Abbemuseum is important, because it is entrenching a cultural practice, if you like. The artistic commonwealth must not be undermined through the use of copyright law by artists’ estates and copyright collection societies.10 CE: That is an incredibly important point especially for how we work in the museum, because it is often a question about what we actually own. For paintings or sculptures, it comes down to the fact that we own the canvas and the wooden frame; or we own the metal or the paint, but we don’t own anything more than that. The ownership of what, in a sense, is meaningful about the work and the image lies elsewhere.

There is this huge investment of public capital into works that are subsequently stripped out of the work and basically (re)privatised, in some cases, by aggressive artists’ estates or copyright organisations. The sad fact is that sometimes the original public investment barely got to the artist in his or her lifetime.

I like very much this idea of an artistic commonwealth because it extends into the idea of the well-being of society and the possibility for artists to exercise their potential in society. These works then need to have some sort of status as being commonly held property. The fact that we have it, does not give us the right to exploit it, but I think it could give everybody else the right to exploit it, so that it becomes common, and I think that is something for public museums to work on. This would make a distinction between private collections and public collections, because we need to understand that public collections have a certain interest and commitment to making things common.

BC: That goes back to giving the idea the full possibility of unfolding on many levels when we talk about the potential of an artist’s work. We need to make the best models, forms and systems, so that it can be developed to its full potential. And you do not do that with blocking off every step you want to make with that work. This applies both to living and dead artists.

We are interested to relate to the system of rights that is so dominant in our culture today. You think about ownership before you even think about the idea. You just want to own something.

You have a little bit of an idea, and when you see someone else having an idea, you just take parts of that and then you already call someone to protect your rights.

10

After a discussion and argumentation from the side of the museum as well as SUPERFLEX the Sol LeWitt Estate has consented to the project.

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CE: There has always been an acceptance of this idea of inspiration or influence. But if we imagine that our society historically had been dominated by copyright, then actually where would we be as a creative community today? Without being able to use our heritage, the heritage is cut from us.

This is an extreme example, but I think it is quite relevant in a way to what the copyright world does. A classic moment in Turkish history was when the writing system changed in two weeks from Arabic script to Latin script. Experts said it needed years to adapt, but the Turks only got two weeks from Mustafa Kemal. For two weeks newspaper appeared in both scripts, then only in Latin. That radically modernized Turkey, but it completely cut contemporary Turks from their Ottoman heritage and connection to that past. Now that still has radical effects for the Turkish public.

This is the kind of radical break that belongs to modernity, and in an odd way the rights machine might have the same effect.

DM: Absolutely. Although copyright law does not provide absolute rights (there are for example, exemptions or defences available for users of protected material), copyright law can lead to a lockdown of culture. One of the prominent aspects of recent copyright law has been not just the proliferation of rights, but their perpetual extension and duration. If you look at copyright law in the 18th century, under the Statute of Queen Anne of 1710, for example, copyright lasted for fifteen years. This was for literary authors only, and now it applies to every cultural medium and it lasts for the lifetime of the author plus seventy years. Copyright was originally a tool of free expression against state censorship but has developed to protect the interests of corporate owners that require a perpetual monopoly, for which it wasn’t intended.

CE: And the monopoly extends?

DM: Yes, continuously.

BC: So we need to understand the system to be able to benefit from it.

DM: The machine is out of control. You can argue that there is some legitimacy to the machine in a minimal form that it acts as a system of incentives to authors to produce cultural works, provided it is kept within very clear boundaries, including temporal boundaries, which recognise the public domain and freedom of expression. But the whole thing has now become this monster, which is out of control.

62 | FREE SOL LEWITT

CE: One thing that strikes me about the 21st century is that geographically the spotlights of creative renewal are shifting away from Western Europe, and possibly even more radically away from the United States. It would be interesting to think whether this enforcement of copyright, which happens of course much more in Western Europe and North America, than it does in China or India, has a lot to do with it. The collective passivity that we tend to have in the West - the lack of a kind of real desire to think about the future might be connected to this increasing immobility of the past. We can’t really use our heritage in an effective way at the moment. Societies that do use both their heritage and ours much more effectively are those where the copyright laws and the intellectual property are much less locked down and controlled.

BC: Yes, the size and strength of the machine is leading to a poor progression in culture and we, the West, are not able to move or take another path because of this machine.

The role and responsibility of the museum CE: When I came to the Van Abbe, it was the first time that I had a collection to run. And initially I didn’t really realise what was here, and what was the basis of this institution. Gradually I came to realise that this is an incredible resource but that it was mainly used for its symbolic or perhaps representative power and not for its content. In other words, just showing people the treasury so that you can say, “Look, isn’t that beautiful?” and assure yourself and them of your importance and the stability of cultural values. Once you get in there and start looking at all the things in the treasury you realise it has much greater and amazing potential.

What SUPERFLEX discovered in the work of Sol LeWitt can be discovered in other works in the Van Abbe’s collection. It just needs to be presented or framed in ways that do not damage that treasury, but release something of the energy or power that is already in there. The collection then becomes the raw material that we need to invite artists, curators and even visitors to work with. The museum then ceases to be a treasure chest and becomes a kind of generating station.

BC: A proactive machine!

CE: Yes. You have this material, which can generate energy that can be put to use in other ways. This is what I hope we are beginning to develop. The selection of SUPERFLEX has maybe released something in the works. It has made them alive again and introduces a new history also for the future.

DISCUSSION BETWEEN...

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If you want to release that energy in the collection, it is obvious that you need to get out of the museum. While you also need the building in order to transmit it. Transmitting the ideas of the works and their energy is something that this project does very well. It is also what we want to try to do in general, to become a transmitter rather than a receiver of visitors, which is how the museum has traditionally been imagined and is now reflected in the spectacular architecture of the late 20th century museum.

BC: We discussed the point that the museum is not only there to entertain. This perception has to be challenged. One has to think that there is no wall between the museum and society. The museum is part of it, completely. People come to the museum and take a work out, literally and then they bring something else back. Another use, another way of thinking.

CE: Our job as an institution is to allow that flow out to produce flows back that we do not control.

What is important is to get the flow going in two directions. I think at the moment the main flow out of the museum is propaganda and the flow into it is people. The propaganda is designed to encourage an already determined result. That is the model now. Once you change those flows into more complex and different kinds of information exchange then new modes of viewership emerge. It is probably always going to be for a relatively small number of people, but I am not even sure of that. It is certainly worth trying to speak to a mass audience like this.

BC: I think it is fine to have contemporary art museums that have different ideologies about the access and distribution of information.

CE: We all are limited by our geographical location. However, I think that the museum should not attempt to be universal. I hope that we are getting away from the idea of a universal ambition for a museum.

DM: I think an important question is: how far can a museum go in protecting the rights of one artist against those of another?

CE: As an artist in this project, Bjørn you mentioned that there is no actual damage done to the original work. The only damage that could be done to the work is conceptual, that is important to recall. I think what we must always do is to maintain and conserve the work, so that people after us are able to go back to what we now know as the classic position of presentation of the artwork; or do something else entirely with it and take it in a different direction. I think you have to keep 64 | FREE SOL LEWITT

the potential for that work to always be interpreted radically and be open to understanding that our position belongs to our time. I think that is one of our responsibilities. If you had said that SUPERFLEX wants to cut the Sol LeWitt in pieces, then that would have been unacceptable, because then that possibility of going back to the situation before this exhibition had happened would not be there anymore. And that is something I could not allow. It always has to be able to be reversibly engineered.

CB: That is a very nice notion because reversibility is also an important criterion in conservation. It is a very important principle to conservators. Everything that you do in or with an artwork needs to be reversible.

BC: We are coming back to the dissemination of a work. We have donated FREE SOL LEWITT to the Van Abbe, so it is part of the collection and there is continuation. There are two positions now in the collection, the Sol LeWitt work and the FREE SOL LEWITT, maybe there will be another position about the same work in the future.

DM: In a sense, the museum is acquiring a set of relations more than a conventional object. Each time FREE SOL LEWITT is reactivated, it is in relation to a configuration of aesthetic, economic, political and legal relations, which surround it at that time.

CE: When you buy or receive a work like this you also try to set up a possibility that narratives can start to extend out to it into the future. There are narratives of people and activities that are done which are as relevant to the work as the object itself. What surrounds the work? The possibility of narratives should already be thought about in the production of the work and its acquisition.

You can set up the conditions, if you like, in which relations can emerge, because you have the curator, the institution and the artist speaking to each other and then somebody comes in and uses that as the basis to develop the work further or to take it in a particular direction, given that there is permission. For us, a work very seldom stops, it can continue on many levels and for many people. That is quite a different relation to a work than the artist him/herself. If we in the museum have a confrontation or discover relevant information or relationships to a work we need to react to it and maybe with that we rethink the installation or the work, or ask the artist to do so.

If, for example, the estate of Sol LeWitt would have rejected the productions of the copies we might have come back to the question of “How can we change it, so that we can still produce something?�, but something that is no longer threatening in the same way.

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DM: Bjørn, as an artist, how do you think about the ongoing relationship between artists and museums in the future?

BC: I think that maybe this is the time when the institution can make a different approach in stating that we as a museum will not acquire a work unless you as an artist agrees that we (the Van Abbe) can reproduce the work that we now have acquired in any format because we are not here to harm your work; we are here to represent you in the best possible way to achieve the full potential of your work, and that means full access to your work. The artist is our partner in this ambition.

It is a political statement to the rest of the museum world saying that this is how we want to organise our collection. We are a public collection; we are responsible to the public; we use its money, and therefore we cannot accept the current copyright limitations. What we own or have the right for now due to the copyright system is just a canvas and a wooden frame but not the actual image. This does not enable us to represent the artist and the public. This should be your approach.

CE: I think that is right. Our obligation to you is to represent you in the best way possible and if you feel at some point that this is not being done then you would have certain rights to withdraw the work from public display. For me, artists should have agreements with museums rather than rely upon copyright.

There should be some mutual responsibilities that go from the museum to the artist. Artists must have some sort of legal power to say, “Well, this is clearly not in my interest”, if asked. Not that they should sign away all rights, but they should not fall into the commodification trap.

DM: I think this is the case particularly if the artists die as well where there is the shift between copyright being exercised by authors and by owners. And that is one of the problems if ownership changes, particularly in art.

CE: Yes. That is true. But this is where agreements between museums and living artists could make a real difference. Often the artists themselves are much more aware.

DM: Like Sol LeWitt.

66 | FREE SOL LEWITT

The interview between Christiane Berndes, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Charles Esche and Daniel McClean was held at the Van Abbemuseum just before the opening of the In-between Minimalisms exhibition. The interview originally lasted for two and a half hours and was edited for this publication to focus on a series of issues that reflect the interests and concerns of the various participants in the project.

DISCUSSION BETWEEN...

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IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS Collection Van Abbemuseum

68 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Floor plan

A1-04

A1-05

A1-07

A1-03

A1-06

A1-08

A1-02

A1-09

A1-01

A1-10

A1-01: Dan Flavin, Donald Judd,

Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt A1-02: Carl Andre, Alan Charlton,

Martha Rosler, Andy Warhol A1-03: Carl Andre, John Baldessari,

Ian Wilson A1-04: Robert Morris, Niele Toroni,

Lawrence Weiner A1-05: SUPERFLEX / FREE SOL LEWITT

A1-06: Information Room A1-07: Daniel Buren, Ulrick R端ckriem,

Lawrence Weiner

A1-08: Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman A1-09: Jo Baer, stanley brouwn,

Hanne Darboven, Ad Dekkers,

Sol LeWitt, Royden Rabinowitch,

Robert Ryman A1-10: Carl Andre, stanley brouwn,

Dan Flavin

| 69

Yves Klein, Sol LeWitt 70 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Sol LeWitt

Donald Judd, Dan Flavin IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-01 | 71

Andy Warhol, Carl Andre, Alan Charlton 72 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-02 | 73

Alan Charlton, Carl Andre 74 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Martha Rosler, Carl Andre

Martha Rosler IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-02 | 75

Ian Wilson, John Baldassari, Carl Andre 76 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-03 | 77

John Baldassari, Carl Andre

John Baldassari 78 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Ian Wilson IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-03 | 79

Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner 80 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-04 | 81

Lawrence Weiner, Robert Morris, Niele Toroni 82 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-04 | 83

“I believe that ideas, once expressed, become the common property of all. They are invalid if not used, they can only be given away and cannot be stolen.

Ideas of art become the vocabulary of art and are used by other artists to form their own ideas (even if unconsciously)�.

Sol LeWitt, 1973*

*

'Comments on an Advertisement' published in Flash Art, (April 1973) in 'Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts', reprinted from Flash Art, no. 41, Milan, June 1973, pp.97-99.

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-06 | 85

Certificates and instructions by various artists 86 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Display of artist' books IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-06 | 87

Ulrich R端ckriem, Lawrence Weiner 88 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Ulrich R端ckriem, Daniel Buren

Lawrence Weiner

Daniel Buren IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-07 | 89

Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd 90 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-08 | 91

Bruce Nauman.

Bruce Nauman.

92 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Bruce Nauman.

Bruce Nauman.

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-08 | 93

Ad Dekkers, Jo Baer, Robert Ryman, Royden Rabinowitch 94 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-09 | 95

Robert Ryman, Sol LeWitt, Royden Rabinowitch 96 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-09 | 97

Sol LeWitt 98 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-09 | 99

Dan Flavin, Carl Andre 100 | FREE SOL LEWITT

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / ROOM A1-10 | 101

Systems Thinking Charles Esche

102 | FREE SOL LEWITT

SUPERFLEX is in the proposition business. As an artist collective it develops its work out of systems that it finds pre-existing in the world and suggests how they might be turned to different use or effect. In this sense, the practice of SUPERFLEX is not a classically imaginative one alone, though it requires the imagination to set the process in motion. Rather, it is more often concrete, down to earth, and practical in its aspirations and effects. Behaviours and perceptions can change in measurable ways after SUPERFLEX has carried out its work, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for good.

This is also why what they do is so obviously not autonomous, in the sense that it relies on playing with the rules established by others rather than seeking to make up their own, as autonomy might seem to demand. Within the western world’s fine art traditions, this lack of autonomy at the core of the project might seem to be a weakness. If artists are dependent on structures outwith their control then the extent in which they are able to express themselves might be challenged. But this tradition, though still strangely resilient to all the cultural and economic changes of the past fifty years, is itself part of the structural questioning that SUPERFLEX’s work seeks to provoke. It wants to propose that the field of art can be a platform on which surrounding social, cultural and especially economic expectations can be analysed. In this they build on the traditions of North American institutional critique from the 1970s onwards, but they do so with less introspection towards the art world. Its recent project FREE SOL LEWITT, which this publication is centred on, is not only dealing with an issue within art’s internal discourse. The question of ownership, patents and the whole ‘system of rights’ as SUPERFLEX calls it, is broadly the same for art as for all other ‘products’, there being no clear legal definition or exemption for art in terms of rights and copyright. Indeed, the fact that the machinery of rights does not recognise art, while limiting and controlling huge parts of our creative activity as human beings, is one of the core problematic that this project throws up.

The central claim behind FREE SOL LEWITT and indeed much of the copy product artworks that SUPERFLEX has produced in the last years is one of its rights, partly as artists and partly as citizens, to comment on the surrounding environment through directly quoting the humanmade objects that shape and define it. Now, it should be clear to most of us under the influence of the media that the processes of commodification are more or less complete in ‘advanced’ societies. In other words, most things, save perhaps the air, have been translated into monetary value and become part of the circulation of global exchange of goods and services that drives our economy. These objects, having become commodities now, are subjected to the ownership of individuals and corporations who gain rights over them, including the right to deny anyone else the use of them without permission. Thus we have the tragic sight of farmers being unable to keep their own seeds because different species of plant (as abstract concepts not physical kernels) have been patented and planting them would breach a corporation’s patent rights. Being sued for such violations has resulted in bankruptcy and even suicide in certain countries. The extent of commodification and the machinery of rights enforced by nation states that permits it to happen is now greater than it has ever been, effecting more objects, products and more areas of

CHARLES ESCHE / SYSTEMS THINKING

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the globe than ever before. Now, while artists could in all probability depict patented life-forms without any consequence, the extension of art into the fields of performance, action and ‘life’ means that at some point such patent laws are likely to come into conflict with the artistic freedom to work with the materials artists feel influenced by or through which they would make their position visible. Such potential conflicts are even more probable under copyright law that lasts for a considerably longer period, continuing after the death of the author. Indeed, while under the terms of an imagined artistic commonwealth, quotation is often allowed during an artist’s lifetime; it is artist estates, as well as photography agencies, that pose the greatest threat to the free use of material for artistic purposes.

One perhaps unintended consequence of the enforcement of copyright and patent legislation has been that now, two or three post-1945 generations have grown up and formed themselves within a branded environment that is already owned and protected by corporations and individuals. That means that the memories of childhood, the reactions to certain sights, sounds or flavours and their subsequent use to make art could potentially become loaded with legal difficulties if an artist would choose to do more than simply depict it in a classical manner. As a comparison, we can imagine the Impressionists, who reached out towards the natural environment and their immediate surroundings for inspiration, nowadays would be stopped from painting hay fields or lily ponds because the owners of these natural phenomena had previously patented the use of the image. One could indeed ask why Matisse’s gardener was not compensated from the profits of his water lily paintings, or why the ancestors of poor, potato-eating Brabant farmers are not rich through the value bestowed on early Van Gogh’s. This might sound absurd perhaps, but if your environment is made up not of plants but of branded designer light fittings; not by gardens but by films on DVD, then what is the qualitative difference when you use them as an artist to start to make new work? It is this question that SUPERFLEX has precisely and consistently explored in its work. The simple act of copying a Guarana drink product’s labelling led to a ban of the work at the 2006 São Paulo Biennial, while making copies of Poul Henningsen lighting powered by biogas1, or opening a copyshop where products could be made from scratch and taken away for free have challenged commercial companies who, though actually losing very little cash in the process, feel threatened by the precedent that may be set by allowing such a project to go ahead. Thus SUPERFLEX has had, at times, lawsuits and cease and desist orders issued against some of its projects.

It must be added in fairness that there is much more sympathy and laxity in the application of copyright and patent law against artists than against farmers or copy product factories. This is partly the result of an unofficial artistic commonwealth in which imitation can still be understood as flattery. For instance, when it came to Douglas Gordon’s use of Hitchcock’s films2 or Pierre 1

SUPERFLEX. ‘BIOGAS PH 5 LAMP.’ http://www.superflex.net/tools

2

Medien Kunst Netz. ‘Gordon, Douglas: 24 Hour Psycho.’ http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/24-hourpsycho/

104 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Huyghe’s use of a number of classic 1930s films, the original studios did not take out litigation.

Yet, the actual legal situation is that artists and more significantly their estates have the right to deny the reuse of their material by other artists. For instance, Damien Hirst recently took out legal action against a sixteen-year-old graffiti and collage artist for using images of his work via the rights enforcement body in the United Kingdom called DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society).3 This might have also been the case with the project FREE SOL LEWITT but fortunately the LeWitt Estate has been very co-operative for which much thanks. Their willingness to honour some of Sol LeWitt’s own remarks about the commonwealth of artists and that ideas are “the common property of all” is really exceptional at a time when the enforcers are becoming more and more strict in their application of what room for interpretation there might be. Elsewhere in this publication, Daniel McClean, who has been instrumental in realising this project with SUPERFLEX, talks more fully about Sol LeWitt’s radical legacy, but it is worth stressing once again that without such clear and generous statements about his own artistic process, this work and the production it involved would have been much more difficult. So, in one sense at least, SUPERFLEX is in this gesture ‘freeing’ the intentions of LeWitt from their subsequent and inevitable commodifications.

Thinking about LeWitt’s legacy leads us to the role of the museum in all this, the Van Abbemuseum in particular as well as museums in general. State or locally funded and owned art museums occupy a crucial role as public institutions dedicated to care for collective cultural memory.

One might go so far as to say that they have a democratic role in as much as democracy needs informed and thoughtful citizens in order to function well. To carry out these tasks properly, it clearly involves more than simply the care and conservation of objects in their care. Their public role demands an interpretative and active production of meaning and an awareness that the original context of an artwork is constantly being lost and replaced with new social and economic environments which also changes the potential of the artwork. The issue then becomes how to balance the desire to restore both material and contextual originality with the equally strong desire to interpret the original intentions of the artist in the light of the current moment. While one requires the probably impossible task of freezing what is inevitably dynamic, the other is constantly frustrated by its inability to keep up with times that are running away from it. Nevertheless, it is in recognising and accepting this tension and the inevitable failures that it represents, that art museums can perform their crucial public function. This is certainly the approach we have taken at the Van Abbemuseum in the course of both the Plug In series and the Play Van Abbe programme of which SUPERFLEX’s FREE SOL LEWITT forms a crucial part. By focusing on a single work in the collection and reproducing it inside the museum, they naturally give much added weight and attention to the work. They also add the stories that can be told about it in the future. More than that however, I understand this gesture as an attempt to ‘repristinate’ the work.

3

Akbar, Afria. ‘Hirst demands share of artist’s £65 copies.’ In ‘The Independent’. 6 December 2008. http:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/hirst-demands-share-of-artists-16365-copies1054424.html

CHARLES ESCHE / SYSTEMS THINKING

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The term repristinisation used by Sarat Maharaj, is the making completely new of something existing. This is not only literally done through the production of the copies but also through reprising the imagined conditions of their original context.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, many artists from the United States and elsewhere began to congregate in New York’s factory district south of Houston Street. This neighbourhood of SoHo was emptying out as many of the warehouses used by local manufacturing businesses were being outsourced or giving up, unable to compete with the economies of scale of larger corporations and the beginnings of global production. Thus, while artists were inventing loft living in their studios, they must also have been conscious of their immediate predecessors in the buildings and the functions of the spaces into which they were moving. As an early adopter of the trend, Sol LeWitt would have most likely seen the transformation in progress and thus the idea of putting a functioning small-scale metal workshop next to a display of Minimal and Conceptual art would hardly have seemed unusual to him.

An essential element then of FREE SOL LEWITT is this recognition or even recapturing of a particular past and a moment of economic change. It speculates that this moment might have had a critical influence on the work that was produced in SoHo at that time, an influence that was more experiential than theoretical, more in the body than in the mind – even as the artists were constructing what came to be known as American Conceptual art. For our purposes today, at least in the museum, this reference to a time and place is very helpful in steering the discussion away from the universal, eternal nature of form and concept that is also a necessary element to understand the ambition of the artists of that age. Necessary in the sense that it was part of their own discourse and the way they saw themselves – as producers of primary forms that were not tainted by kitsch or provincialism. However, more than forty years later, we can suggest that provincialism, in the sense of being tied to a particular culture and place rather than in any derogatory sense, did play a role. Recognising this, gives us space today. Space to permit the contributions of many provinces to a globalised art discourse and space to see the quality of American art of the 1960s and 1970s without succumbing either to hegemonic rapture or to insolent disagreement. It was a crucial story, but it was one of a number of possible narratives occurring around the world at the time, connected through aesthetics and sensibility but also divided by their provincial outlooks. In this sense, SUPERFLEX adds significantly to the possible ways in which Minimalism, and specifically the Minimal and Conceptual collection in the Van Abbemuseum, can be looked at in the future. This is truly of benefit for the museum in its self-understanding of how to deploy the material evidence of its collective cultural memory. It demonstrates how one generation of artists is both inspired by and thoughtful of another and how the systems of display and ownership are, just as in the 1960s and 1970s, a topic that occupies artistic thinking today.

106 | FREE SOL LEWITT

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IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS List of works Room A1-01 pages 70-71

Room A1-03 pages 76-79

Room A1-06 pages 84-87

Dan Flavin Monument on Mrs. Reppin’s survival, 1966. Fluorescent light tubes.

Carl Andre Twenty-fifth steel Cardinal, 1974.

Steel.

Information Room Certificates, instructions, contracts of artworks in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum as well as artists’ books and texts on Minimal and Conceptual art were presented in three display cases in the Information Room.

Donald Judd Untitled (Progression), 1969.

Aluminium.

John Baldessari Baldessari Sings Lewitt, 1972.

Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Yves Klein Monochrome Blue, Untitled (IKB 63), 1959. Pigment, synthetic resin on wood.

Ian Wilson Circle on the Floor, 1968. Chalk.

Sol LeWitt Certificate of: Wall Drawing No. 256. 1975. Graphite, chalk, latex on wall. Certificate: Ink on paper, wood frame.

Room A1-04 pages 80-82

Room A1-02 pages 72-75 Carl Andre Palisade, 1976. Wood.

Robert Morris 9 H-shapes, 1968. Aluminium.

Niele Toroni Imprints of a Brush No. 50, Repeated at regular Intervals, 1975.

Synthetic paint on oilcloth.

Alan Charlton Untitled,1979. Acrylic on canvas.

Lawrence Weiner SMALL STONES SCATTERED ON THE GROUND, 1986. Language and materials referred to, adhesive foil.

Martha Rosler Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975.

Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Room A1-05 pages 10-35

Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup, 1968. Silkscreen on paper.

108 | FREE SOL LEWITT

SUPERFLEX FREE SOL LEWITT Workshop producing copies of Sol LeWitt's Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972. Mixed media.

Texts on Minimal and Conceptual Art Yves Klein, ‘Formula for International Klein Blue’, 1960 in Didier Semin ‘Le Peintre et son Modèle Déposé’, Mamco, Géneve, 2001.

Martha Buskirk, ‘The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art’, MIT Press, 2003.

James Meyer ‘Thought made Visible 1966-1973: Mel Bochner’, Yale University, 1995.

Alexander Alberro ‘Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity’, MIT, 2003.

Alexander Alberro ‘At the Threshold of Art as Information’ in ‘Recording Conceptual Art’, Alexander Alberro & Patricia Norvell (ed.), University of California Press, 2001.

Donald Judd ‘Specific Objects’ (1959) in ‘Complete Writings’, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1986.

Lucy R. Lippard ‘Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object’, Studio Vista, 1973.

Sol LeWitt ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967) in ‘Conceptual Art: a critical anthology’, Alexander Alberro & Blake Stimson, MIT, 1999.

Exhibition Catalogue, ‘Live in Your Head’ (curator Harald Szeemann), Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969.

Exhibition Catalogue, ‘Information’ (curator Kynaston L. McShine), Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970.

Mel Bochner ed., Xerox-page from ‘Working drawings and other visible things on paper not necessarily meant to be viewed as art’, New York, 1966.

Sol LeWitt ‘Work Completed 1969’, Sperone/Fischer, Torino, 1974.

Martha Rosler ‘Service; A Trilogy on Colonization’, Printed Matter, Inc., New York, 1978.

Carl Andre, ‘144 Blocks & Stones’, Portland Ore, 1973.

Room A1-08 pages 90-93 Donald Judd Untitled, 1974-1976. Wood.

Bruce Nauman Bouncing in the Corner No. 1, 1968. Video, PAL, black-andwhite, sound.

Flesh to White to Black to Flesh, 1968. Video, PAL, black and white, sound.

Robert Barry, Sperone Editore, Torino, 1971.

Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), 1968. Video, PAL, black and white, sound.

Sol LeWitt ‘Interview Flash Art’ (1973) in ‘Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts’, AEIUO, 1994.

stanley brouwn, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and MACBA, Barcelona, 2005.

Stamping in the Studio, 1968.

Video, PAL, black and white, sound.

Carl Andre ‘Cuts: texts 19592004’, James Meyer ed., MIT, 2005.

stanley brouwn ‘1 m, 1 step’, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1976.

Walk with Contrapposto, 1968.

Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Artists' books Sol LeWitt ‘Modular Drawings’, Salle Simon I. Patino, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Genève, 1976.

On Kawara ‘I Got Up (19681979)’, mfc – Michèle Didier, Brussels, 2008.

Lawrence Weiner ‘Works’, Anatol, Hamburg, 1977.

Manipulating a Fluorescent Tube, 1969. Video, PAL, black-andwhite, sound.

Room A1-07 pages 88-89

On Kawara ‘I Met (1968-1979)’, mfc – Michèle Didier, Brussels, 2004.

Daniel Buren Angular painting Both extreme white stripes are covered with white paint, 1975. Acrylic on canvas.

On Kawara ‘I Went (1968-1979)’, mfc – Michèle Didier, Brussels, 2007.

Ulrich Rückriem Circles, 1971. Video, PAL, blackand-white, sound.

‘Untitled, Carl Andre’, in ‘Xerox Book’, curated and published by Seth Siegelaub, 1968.

Wall-Floor Positions, 1968. Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Untitled, 1972. Steel.

Lawrence Weiner Declaration of Intent, 1969.

Reprint of poster exhibition Van Abbemuseum, March 12 – April 26, 1976.

Pacing Upside Down, 1969.

Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Revolving Upside Down, 1969.

Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling with Changing Rhythms, 1967-1968. Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Violin Tuned D.E.A.D., 1969.

Video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

IN-BETWEEN MINIMALISMS / LIST OF WORKS

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Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (SquareDance), 1967-1968. Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, black-and-white, sound.

Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-1968. Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, black-and-white, without sound.

Black Balls, 1969. Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, black-and-white, without sound.

Bouncing Balls, 1969. Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, black-and-white, without sound.

Pulling Mouth, 1969. Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, black-and-white, no sound.

Violin Film # 1 (Playing The Violin As Fast As I Can), 1967-1968.

Video projection, 16 mm film transferred to video, PAL, blackand-white, sound.

Room A1-09 pages 94-99 Jo Baer White Wraparound Triptych (blue, green, lavender), 1970-1974. Oil on canvas.

Ad Dekkers Relief met middelijnen, 1965.

Synthetic paint, acrylic paint on panels.

Robert Ryman Untitled (Brussels), 1974. Acrylic on synthetic material.

110 | FREE SOL LEWITT

Hanne Darboven Construction: 21 x 21 - Numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, (+5) = 21, 1968. Ink on paper.

1/16 x 1/16 x 1/16 ell, 1994.

Metal.

Sol LeWitt Untitled (Wall Structure), 1972.

Painted aluminium.

1 step, 1 ell, 1 foot on 1 m² 1 ell, 1 foot op 1 step², 1989.

Aluminium.

1/4 x 1/4 x 1/4 voet, 1994. Metal.

Royden Rabinowitch Manifold, without year. Steel. stanley brouwn one step (4x), 1971. Ink, pencil on paper.

Room A1-10 pages 100-101 Carl Andre ALMOLE, 2002. Aluminium.

1000 mm, 1974. Ink on paper. one step (11x), 1971. Ink, pencil on paper.

4 squares with ancient measures of length buenos aires st petersburg bordeaux havana on a sheet of paper 1,50 x 1,50m, 2004. Pencil on paper. a 100 m 1 : 500 b 100 m 1 : 1000 c 100 m 1 : 1500 d 100 m 1 : 2500, 1976. Ink, pencil on paper. a) 1 m 1 : 1 6/19 b) 1 m 1 : 8 1/3, 1976. Ink, pencil, offset on paper. a 34 steps b 25 m c 1 distance, 1980. Ink and pencil on paper.

1/32 x 1/32 x 1/32 foot, 1994.

Metal.

1/16 x 1/16 x 1/16 foot, 1994.

Metal.

Dan Flavin Untitled (to a man, George McGovern), 1972. Fluorescent light tubes. stanley brouwn proposal for an architectural intervention, 1986. Pencil on wall.

COLOPHONE Editors:

Christiane Berndes, SUPERFLEX, Daniel McClean,

Kerstin Niemann

Copy editor:

Christina Li

Authors:

Christiane Berndes, Charles Esche, Daniel McClean

Production:

Kerstin Niemann

Design:

Copenhagen Brains

Photography:

Peter Cox, Eindhoven (cover, pp.11-31, 70-101),

Bram Saeys, Eindhoven (pp.32-33, 35),

Antoine Derksen, Eindhoven (pp.98-99)

SUPERFLEX (pp.28, 34)

Printed in the EU:

Lecturis, Eindhoven

Typeface:

Akzidenz-Grotesk

Publisher:

Van Abbemuseum

Postbus 235 - 5600 AE Eindhoven

Netherlands

Tel: +31 (0)40 2381000

www.vanabbemuseum.nl

Distribution Europe:

Revolver Publishing

by Vice Versa

Immanuelkirchstr. 12 - D-10405 Berlin

Tel: +49-30-616 092 26 - Fax: +49-30-616 092 38

info@revolver-publishing.com

www.revolver-publishing.com

Distribution North America: Half Letter Press

P.O. Box 12588 - Chicago, IL 60612

www.halfletterpress.com

ISBN 978-3-86895-086-1 No copyright. No license. 2010.

All forms of copying and reproduction are encouraged. Please credit the authors.

Funders:

We would like to extend our gratitude to those who helped to bring this project to life.

We especially thank the artists, the staff of the Van Abbemuseum and its volunteers. Special thanks to: Peter van Beers, Rene Bondy, Fien Broekstra, the Sol LeWitt Estate, Lynn George, Peter van Gompel, Rene Heijnen, Jac Hoppenbrouwers, Maarten Knippenberg, Michiel Martens, Eric van Meer, Candice Monsanto, Jona Mooren, Mitchell Oleana, Jurgen Pessy, Ras Scherjon, Jan Schoenmakers, Seth Siegelaub and Sascia Vos.

What does it mean for a museum to possess a work of art: what is actually owned? The Van Abbemuseum has invited the Danish artist collective, SUPERFLEX to work with the museum’s collection. They have responded with the exhibition In-between Minimalisms and a new work, FREE SOL LEWITT - an installation made specifically for Play Van Abbe, a programme of exhibitions and projects focussing on the museum of the 21st century.

This publication gives an insight into SUPERFLEX’s concept of FREE SOL LEWITT, discusses some of the key issues arising out of the project and includes essays by Charles Esche, Christiane Berndes and Daniel McClean.

No copright. No license. 2010.

ISBN 978-3-86895-086-1

114 | FREE SOL LEWITT