Sol LeWitt at MoMA

One of three walls of the installation

I haven't yet driven up to the big Sol LeWitt show at Mass MoCA, but there's plenty of time for that. It's on for another 24.5 years. Instead, I popped into the LeWitt installation at MoMA, which continues only until June 1.

Wall Drawing #260 is in an open space on the fourth floor, a big modernist box with wall-to-wall windows overlooking the sculpture garden. The other three walls, all broken by doorways, nevertheless offer high and broad expanses for the work, which is in the museum's collection.

I like this chalk-on-painted-wall piece, all arcs and curvy lines bisected or otherwise divided by angles and staccato lines. There's a logical progression to how the lines intersect, but I'm an artist, not a mathemetician, so I'm less concerned with the precise peregrination of the line, only that it moves and morphs as your eyes travel from wall to wall. The linear geometric composition suggests nothing so much as choreographic notation--a formal expression of the human activity in the enclosed space as people pass into, around and through it.

With your back to the window, you turn to the left wall, which contains a legend for the visual logic of the work

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Below: Turning slightly, you see part of the other two walls

Below that: The full expanse of the wall at right

A full expanse of wall
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Below: a detail of the chalk line


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