WALL DRAWING #1144, BROKEN BANDS OF COLOR IN FOUR DIRECTIONS
SOL LEWITT, 2004
A man walks into a brand-new gallery carrying a pencil. That's it. No canvas. No crate coming in behind him. He walks up to a bare white wall and starts drawing directly on the building. October 1968. Prince Street, before SoHo was really SoHo. The gallery's first show. The whole thing is a benefit. The money goes to a committee trying to end the war in Vietnam. And on the price list, every other artwork has a number. Sol LeWitt's says: by the hour. Which is, uh, a pretty strange way to sell a drawing. You're paying a man with a pencil to make an idea show up. That first drawing is gone. And, okay, this one can go the same way. Thirty-seven feet of color. Broken bands heading off in four directions. Bright. Orderly. Almost stupidly cheerful. LeWitt didn't draw it. He wrote down the decisions. Colors. Directions. What goes where. Then other people climbed the ladders and made it happen. Instructions go in. Something like stained glass comes out. And when the museum is finished with it, they can just paint the whole thing white. No storage crate. Just a roller. Gone. And, somehow, MoMA still owns the artwork. Because the wall is only where the work is visiting. The plan survives. Take it to another wall and, you know, the whole thing comes back. Different wall. Different hands. Same work. That was the trick. LeWitt kept removing things people thought an artist had to do. Touch the work. Be in the room. Eventually, be alive. LeWitt died in 2007. The next year, more than sixty artists and students spent six months covering nearly an acre of wall in Massachusetts with a hundred and five of his drawings. He wasn't there.