Incomplete Open Cubes: Sol Lewitt

What has art got to do with fashion or graphic design? That is to say, apart from the bonus brownie points of cool in branishing how "art informed" you can be (and I'm fully aware of the superficiality of that). My faith is that great art , in so far as it testifies to a tremendously sophisticated system of image making can provoke you into being a better designer, whether you are making a page or a jacket. It can provoke you into being a better writer and it can inspire you to think with greater discipline and clarity. The perfect example of this is a series of work that has been a huge influence on my visual coding system. The work in question is Sol Lewitt's "Incomplete Open Cubes",a series initiated in 1974 when the New York art world was passionately invested in making art that defiantly moved away from being strictly object driven (drawings, sculptures and paintings.)
The ambition was to create an art of pure ideas. It was an idealistic time and the big irony is the capitalistic context that ultimately renders even the most radical art forms a saleable "commodity" has warped the work of that period so thoroughly that we still live with the by product of that exploration today. Much of that by product is shit. But that's OK too. Shit, as Manzoni so clearly expressed in our decadent art culture, can be its very own form of fetish object.

The original intent of "Incomplete Open Cubes" spoke to me in the early 00's with great profoundity as those were the waning days of the fashion niche driven by "minimalism" . To be superficial about it, Lewitt's cube diagrams could have been perfect Helmut Lang ads. Sol Lewitt's exploration was to take the cube , an object he describes as "the most unemotional form that only referred to itself" and then set about constructing as many variations of this one form as was mathematically possible. A Phillips de Pury & Company catalog further described that investigation in this way, "Lewitt opting for the cube as the rubric for his visual system was also due in part to his wish to exclude any emotions in the works or hierarchical order, uniform equality for the whole as well as its parts".

There was a time I'd read a sentence like that and put the catalog back down in frustration at this tangled verbiage. But now that I've come to know quite a few young artists struggling with their own formal obsessions, the compulsive need to stay within the limitations of that "idee fixe" now impacts on me with heightened clarity. Those friends of mine who are obsessive minimalists face a great problem because within the internal machine of their subjective minds they are very happy to take a basic form and then reduce it, remix it, reposition, and rephrase it, ad infinitum . At no time are they worried that this willful repetition tends to bore most people, especially in this ADD age when no one has the patience for a redundancy, no matter how artfully rendered.

Of course I'm referring to the work of my friend Rad Hourani, whose clothes a devoted cult gets and another sector of the fashion population finds tedious. But I'm not here to be an apologist for Rad. For me, my friendship with him is an interesting experience because whether you find the work good, bad or indifferent, you might want to ask yourself, what kind of mind is it that needs to stay in one format to find creative resolution? It was a conversation with this designer last night that brought back Lewitt's cubes to my mind. Much like the music of Phillip Glass, some forms of expression choose to speak in the language of simplicity and repetition, endeavoring to find whole universes of details in little shifts of nuances and phrase.

I found another quote while revisiting this Lewitt conundrum that reinforced the great achievement forged by the artist 35 years ago.

Lewitt was at the forefront of a movement that marked an almost unprecedented break with the past, transforming the definitions and boundaries of aesthetic experience in his rejection of the gestural , anti-intellectual art of the abstract impressionists. Action ground to a halt. An inert monumental, cerebral , non-referential , non-relational sculpture to place..
C. Iles in S. Lewitt, ed., SOL LEWITT STRUCTURES 1962-1993, OXFORD, 1993, p.10

A completed "incomplete" open cube by Lewitt

I found that these words gave me a great comfort and a greater respect for people who stick to what they believe in.