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François Morellet/Sol Lewitt: a Case Study Revisited

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François Morellet/Sol Lewitt: a Case Study Revisited François Morellet/Sol LeWitt: A Case Study Revisited yvE-ALAIN BOIS In an essay on pseudomorphism (published in the Fall 2015 issue of this jour- nal), I discussed at some length the stunning resemblance between François Morellet’s 4 Double Grids (0°, 22.5°, 67.5°), dating from 1958, and the 195th page of Sol LeWitt’s book Arcs, from corners & sides, circles, & grids and all their combinations, published in 1972, as well as the rather sad polemic that this resemblance elicited.1 In summary: the director of Galerie m, in Bochum, placed a full-page, illus- trated advertisement in the February 1973 issue of the Milan-based journal Flash Art, implying that LeWitt had plagiarized Morellet and two other artists represent- ed by his gallery, Jan Schoonhoven and Oskar Holweck. In the June issue of the journal, LeWitt responded by pointing out what radically differentiates his piece from Morellet’s painting, despite their morphological similarity, and by lambast- ing the pseudomorphic argument as superficial, ignorant, and ahistorical. He added that until the summer of 1972, he had never seen a work by Morellet. This, it turned out, was probably false: LeWitt had obviously forgotten that he must have seen 4 Double Grids (0°, 22.5°, 67.5°) in the Responsive Eye exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965—he was reminded of this occurrence by one of the many people, mostly artists, who joined the polemic that filled the “letters to 1. See “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes,” October 154 (Fall 2015), pp. 127–49. The por- tion dedicated to the LeWitt/Morellet case in that essay was “cut and pasted” from a lecture solely dedi- cated to the issue, given in 1992 at the 28th International Congress of Art History, held in Berlin, and published in the proceedings of this symposium. Due to the “confidential” nature of that publication, it had gone utterly unnoticed. A scholar as scrupulous as Lynn Zelevansky, for example, obviously did not know about it when she tackled the same topic in her excellent “4 Grids: François Morellet at the Crossroads,” published in the bilingual catalogue of the exhibition François Morellet, 1926–2006 etc. Recent Novelties (Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, 2006), pp. 14–25. The present essay is also partly the result of a cut-and-paste operation, as portions of it are lifted from my Berlin talk, though these are updated, as I benefitted from the publication of an anthology of Morellet’s writings and interviews, whose first edition appeared in 1999 (Mais comment taire mes commentaires [Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts]). But for a few exceptions specifically signaled, the quotations used hence- forth are from the third (revised) edition published in 2011. Among the many surprises this corpus of texts provides, one in particular struck me: In a short article from 1987 entitled “Courants alternatifs et lumières clignotantes” (pp. 135–37), Morellet muses about the cyclical nature of taste and specifically refers to the study by A. L. Kroeber on recurrences in the morphology of female dresses during three centuries of European history, a study to which I had paid particular attention in my piece on look- alikes mentioned above. OCTOBER 157, Summer 2016, pp. 161–180. © 2016 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00263 by guest on 30 September 2021 162 OCTOBER the editor” section of Flash Art until its October–November 1973 issue.2 Several years later, in the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at MoMA (1978), LeWitt conceded that this was indeed quite possible.3 Rather than assuming that he had been lying by omission in his response to the ad, only to finally admit his debt five years later, in the face of evidence, I proposed that he was right both times: he had both seen and not seen some of Morellet’s works prior to the sum- mer of 1972—it all depends on what one means by “seeing.” That is, he had most likely “seen” the very work by Morellet illustrated in the Flash Art ad at the Responsive Eye exhibition (or at least in its catalogue), but it would have barely reg- istered, if at all. In the context of that busy, eye-needling show, entirely devoted to Op and Kinetic art (and derided by American art critics as a climax of kitsch), he could not but have missed the systematicity of the work in question, which would have appeared as yet another highly forgettable example of the moiré effect so favored by Op artists such as Bridget Riley, whose 1964 Current was reproduced opposite it in the catalogue. Let us first unpack the Op art issue, before turning to the notion of systems that is so crucial to Morellet’s endeavor. Though a founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art visuel, or GRAv, which began its activities in Paris in 1960 and quickly became (before its dissolution in 1968) a major force behind the short-lived success of Kineticism, Morellet never considered optical effects to be anything but side effects of his systems: This Op art thing has really bothered me. Personally I don’t regard myself as an Op artist. Of course, if, for example, I come up with a whole program involving superpositions of two grids, it may well hap- pen that these two grids will form a moiré effect (if they are very tight, and with just a slight offsetting). This is a very Op art result. It doesn’t interest me. But I don’t give a damn about my own taste, and since I want to respect the system, no matter how it develops, I have to show this result. What annoys me is that I’m quoted much more often in books on Op art, for example, than I am in books on Minimal art, or on Conceptual art. This is partly due to a geographical division that is commonly made: Europe = Op art and Kineticism; USA = Minimal and Conceptual art. In Op art I obviously appreciate the cold side, the anti- 2. The polemic was extremely harsh, beginning with an incoherent rant by Alexander von Berswordt-Wallrabe, the director of the Galerie m, and the mention by the Flash Art editor, Giancarlo Politi, that he had received a postcard from Lucy Lippard accusing the journal of being “fascist” for having carried the ad (this was the only defense LeWitt received, besides Politi’s own reply to the Galerie m director; the least one can say is that Lippard’s word choice was particularly inappropriate, addressed to an audience who had a pretty clear notion of what fascism actually was). Most of the venom was directed at American cultural imperialism, at the behavior of American artists when installing exhibitions of their works in Italy, at their utter disregard for their European colleagues, at the market for being biased in their favor, etc. The angry reader who specifically referred to the inclu- sion of Morellet’s piece in the Responsive Eye exhibition was a man named Rolf Breger. 3. LeWitt, untitled statement, in Sol LeWitt (New york: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 120. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00263 by guest on 30 September 2021 François Morellet/Sol LeWitt 163 message. But it’s pretty obvious, I think, that if I’d really wanted to pester people’s eyes, I would hopefully have come up with things that are more effective than my little parallel lines.4 Of course, this is a postfactum declaration (made in 1975), and it cannot be denied that Morellet had also been interested in, among other things, “pestering people’s eyes,” notably with his flashing neon works that harnessed retinal after - effects, developed from 1963 on. But the fact is, the kinetic aspect of his production during the 1960s (almost entirely abandoned by the time of the ad in Flash Art) determined the public reading of his entire oeuvre and prevented it from being taken seriously in America: occasional Op effects garnered all the attention and hid the systematic nature of the work. Morellet’s mention of Minimal and Conceptual art brings us back to the polemic, for there we are clearly on LeWitt’s turf. On the one hand, I cannot agree with what Morellet seems to imply (that he should be considered a “precursor” of Minimal or Conceptual art—as I have often repeated, quoting verbatim the great his- torian and philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré, “to envisage someone as a precursor is the best way to preclude the possibility of understanding their work”)5; on the other hand, it is true that Minimal and Conceptual artists entirely overlooked a whole range of European artistic practices, like that of Morellet, in which they could have found quite a few things worth reflecting upon. It is fair to say that the New york artistic climate that led to Minimal and Conceptual art, in the early ’60s, was extremely chauvinistic. The extraordinary arrogance of Donald Judd’s famous state- ment in his interview with Frank Stella and Bruce Glaser, for example—“I’m totally uninterested in European art and I think it’s over with”—was largely based on igno- rance.6 Judd, as is well known, was referring to what Stella called the “relational aesthetic” of most postwar European abstraction, the traditional post-Cubist mode of composition on which a great majority of the European production was then based (“you do something in one corner and you balance it with something in the other corner.”)7 In doing so, Judd was overlooking the rich European tradition of non-com- positionality, to which Morellet never tired of paying homage: Russian Constructivism (particularly Rodchenko); the “Art Concret” launched by Theo van Doesburg in 1930 and developed by the Swiss Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse; Strzeminski’s Unism; the monochromes not just of yves Klein but also of Piero Manzoni and of the whole 4.
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