COVER ESSAY
Incomplete Open Cube (1968) by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)
N
ew beginnings, whether in the art world, in poetry, in
academia or politics, are often not identified at their
inception. This was not to be true in regard to the advent
of Minimalism in the 1960s. With the triumph of Abstract
Expressionism, the preceding movement, the capitol of international art, its production, its critical reception and its promulgation through the marketplace of ideas and galleries, magazines
and auction houses, had clearly moved from Paris to New York,
from the Old World to the New. One cannot overemphasize the
air of excitement that descended upon Manhattan in the 1940s
and 1950s, the brash new town of culture that Jed Perl called
“New Art City.”1 For the first time in American history, young
artists walked into major museums and saw their immediate
predecessors on the walls: Pollock and de Kooning, Rothko
and Newman, Motherwell and Kline. And those walls were
covered with enormous canvases in which the bold, expressionistic paint handling seemed to give a direct and jolting connection to the psyche of the artist. The paintings pulsated in
revolution against the niceties of polite composition, proper
draftsmanship, and tasteful color harmonies found in Parisian
art; the new style destroyed the recognizable subject matter,
cubist organization and painterly cuisine of all prior Modernist
painting. The young American artists who gazed upon these
acres of angst-filled canvas must have wondered whether there
was any of hope of a second act in American art; what could a
young person do to follow a generation of genius? Most of the
solutions to this conundrum, of how to respond to Abstract
Expressionism without jettisoning its most important advances,
were formulated in the 1960s, not only a decade of youthful rebellion and political agitation in the West, but also the most tumultuous decade in American artistic history.
The most effective and long-lasting responses to the question
of a possible Second Act, Pop Art and Minimalism, Conceptualism
and Color Field Painting, involved the ruthless excision of the
autobiographical element in Abstract Expressionism, including its existential dread and focus on the cosmic, often tragic
themes inherent in the autographic and expressionistic manipulation of paint. Pop Art achieved this amputation through
the introduction of mass-produced mundane objects as subject matter (ie, soup cans, automobiles, comic strips) and a
seemingly commercial approach to paint handling and objectmaking, often employing the “flat” technology of mass media
(eg, magazines and newspapers). Color Field artists eliminated
the last vestige of painterly cuisine and illusion, inevitable with
brushed paint sitting on the surface of the canvas, by soaking
their thinned paints into the canvas and by using rollers, spray
guns and gravity to eliminate all evidence of the artist’s hand.
Minimalism took the response one step further by essentially
rejecting painting and ordinary sculpture in favor of “objects”
based on fundamental geometric and mathematical shapes,
usually manufactured out of ready-made off-the-shelf components and farmed out to fabricators and factories for production. These often large and physically imposing objects alter
NEUROSURGERY
Incomplete Open Cube. LeWitt,
Sol (1928-2007) © ARS, NY
Open Cube. 1968. Painted aluminum. 105 × 105 × 105 cm.
Inv. Sammlung Marzona 0341.
Photo: Peter Neumann.
Location: Nationalgalerie,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany
Photo Credit: Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz/
Art Resource, NY
Image Reference: ART329122
the subjective experience of the space in which the viewer
encounters them; the essential literalism and theatricality of the
confrontation imposed by Minimalist objects were best defined
in a thoroughly negative article (!) by Michael Fried, a major
opponent of Minimalism and one of the major proponents of
abstract expressionist and color field painting.2 Although a
painter (ie, Frank Stella, a friend of Fried’s at Princeton) was
essential to the early formulation of the Minimalist ethos, the
5 canonical Minimalist artists were all object-makers: Donald
Judd, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt
(1928-2007). Of these 5, only LeWitt was also critical to the
birth of Conceptual Art, the ultimate negation of everything the
Abstract Expressionists believed in, a radically new type of artistic practice in which the Idea reigned supreme and paintings,
sculptures and objects were eliminated altogether.
Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Russian
Jewish immigrant parents and received a BFA from Syracuse
University. He traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old
Master painting, then served in the Korean War and moved to
New York in the 1950s where he studied at the School of Visual
Arts. Initially a graphic designer at Seventeen magazine and in
the office of architect I.M. Pei, LeWitt took an entry-level job
at the Museum of Modern Art where his coworkers included
future Minimalists Dan Flavin, Robert Mangold, and Robert
Ryman. In 1960 they were exposed to Dorothy Miller’s seminal Sixteen Americans show including the work of Jasper Johns,
Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, 3 artists who blurred the
line between painting and sculpture. In particular, Stella’s Black
Paintings, hand-made but consisting of repetitive stripes that
echoed the shape and width of the paintings’ thick supports
(stretchers), appeared to be “objects” hung on the wall, “structures” that might have been fabricated by machine according
to instructions mailed to workers at a factory. Judd, Morris,
and LeWitt quickly realized the implications of Stella’s work
for the future of art and, together with Flavin and Carl Andre
(Stella’s classmate at Phillips Andover Academy), became the
foundational artists of Minimalism. In 1966, the Jewish Museum
included LeWitt in its famous Primary Structures show where
he exhibited an untitled open modular cube of 9 units or cells.
Almost from the beginning, LeWitt’s work consisted of sculptures (he called them “structures”) built up from the repetition
VOLUME 67 | NUMBER 1 | JULY 2010 | 1
COVER ESSAY
of identical, basic geometric forms, often arranged according to
mathematical principles (ie, possible permutations), and usually built out of standard lengths of balsa wood or aluminum
by assistants under his direction. Fried’s famous attack on
Minimalism first appeared in the very same issue of Art Forum
as LeWitt’s major artistic statement, “Paragraphs on Conceptual
Art.”3 In this essay and others, LeWitt laid out the basic principles of his artistic practice and produced one of the most
famous statements of the 20th century, averring that “The Idea
Becomes a Machine That Makes the Art,” from which axiom he
logically concluded that once one had the Concept, the object
itself need not be built or, conversely, the object might be recreated an infinite number of times. For this reason, LeWitt considered himself (as have many others), more than just a Minimalist
object-maker but the singular father of Conceptual Art. Next
to his cubic and modular sculptures, LeWitt’s most famous
works are his surprisingly beautiful Wall Drawings, impeccably executed by assistants who work from the brief algorithms
inscribed by LeWitt on index cards and note paper. Museums
and collectors exchange money for the instructions (the Concept)
and then pay another fee to have the piece executed; each piece
can be made as large or small as the wall available and each
work, if erased by accident or necessity, can be recreated on
another wall at another time.
The beautiful Incomplete Open Cube on our cover comes
from 1968 (Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museum, Berlin), the
year after LeWitt’s full articulation of his ideas. The complete series
of works of this type demonstrate the artist’s dogged pursuit of
a basic serial premise: the elaboration of every variation of an
open-sided cube missing between 1 and 9 of its edges. No 2
sculptures in the series have the same form. LeWitt eventually
arrived at 122 such permutations, which he realized in a variety
of media and formats, including wooden structures, schematic
perspectival drawings, photographs, an artist s book, and fortyinch aluminum units. This large Incomplete Open Cube is
made of aluminum sections or beams, welded with perfect joints
and painted a flat enamel white so as to “make color or form
recede” and allow the object to act only as a 3-dimensional structure. The present example is missing 5 beams. Just over 1 meter
(105 cm) or 1 yard in every direction, Incomplete Open Cube
takes the permeability of space within sculpture to a new level;
compare, for example, the small voids cast within a typical reclining figure by Henry Moore. One of the most beautiful aspects
of such work is the degree to which its effectiveness depends
upon the natural tendency of the brain to “complete” or “fill
in” visual objects so as to make them whole and comprehensible. I have previously commented on this aspect of the brain’s
physiology in an essay on the Creation of Adam panel in
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel,4 a painting in which some commentators have likened the billowing draperies surrounding the
figure of God to the inner surface of the brain’s right hemisphere
and the dangling legs of the angels to the brain stem and vertebral artery. The major purpose of all brains, not just our own,
is to make sense of the sensible world, to determine whether
the rushing shadows are blowing leaves or, more ominously, a
charging lion. The brain continuously makes conclusions on
2 | VOLUME 67 | NUMBER 1 | JULY 2010
partial information. Sometimes this is an aspect of its redundancy. Hans-Lukas Teuber (1916-1977), generally credited with
inventing the term “neuropsychology”, was the first to recognize that patients made blind by virtue of occipital lobe infarcts
could still detect the movement of lighted objects in their
“blinded” visual field.5,6 This was one of the first clues that the
brain contained more than one visual system, not just the primary system devoted to shape but others devoted to movement,
color and facial recognition.7 It was later discovered that the
ability of Teuber’s subjects to correctly identify the position of
objects with unknown shapes depended on the existence of a
dorsal visual pathway from the superior colliculus to the parietal lobe, one devoted to the analysis of movement.
LeWitt knew that we would try to complete his incomplete
cube within the realm of mental processing. We hardly miss
the 5 aluminum sections or beams, the brain feasting on the
remaining 7. Exactly how this works remains to be determined
but the mechanism must have something in common with the
brain’s susceptibility to ambiguous visual targets or visual illusions, famously including drawn and dotted cubes in which
the anterior and posterior faces regularly exchange places.
Similarly, most human subjects misjudge the relative length of
2 identically long arrows in which the only actual difference is
the direction of the arrowheads. I have written a poem called
“Ambiguity” about this phenomenon.8 The impulse to complete the cube is a strong one and a beautiful demonstration
of the principle most clearly enunciated by the grandfather of
conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, that the completion of any
art work depends upon its context and its audience. This is not
such a surprising conclusion. Ever since the discovery of single
point perspective in the Renaissance, all of us have been willing to see the convincing depiction of 3-dimensional space on
the 2-dimensional surface of a painting, whether abstract or
realist. In this respect at least, all great art, from Caravaggio to
LeWitt is conceptual in nature, depending on the artist’s execution of an idea in the mind of the viewer, very often achieved
by manipulation of the visual system, ie, by fooling the eye
which really means fooling the brain.
Michael Salcman, MD
Baltimore, Maryland
REFERENCES
1. Perl, J. New Art City, Manhattan at Mid-Century. New York, NY: Alfred
A. Knopf; 2005:33-62
2. Fried, M. Art and objecthood (Artforum, vol.5 no.10, summer 1967).
Reprinted in: Battcock, G. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press; 1995:116-147
3. LeWitt, S. Paragraphs on conceptual art. Artforum. Vol 5, No10, Summer
1967.
4. Salcman, M. The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Buonarroti (14751564). Neurosurgery. 2006;59(6):N11-N12.
5. Teuber HL, Battersby WS, Bender MB. Performance of complex visual
tasks after cerebral lesions. J Nerv Ment Dis. 1951;114(5):413-429.
6. Teuber, H-L, Battersby, WS, Bender, MB. Visual Field Defects after Penetrating
Missile Wounds of the Brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press; 1960.
7. Zeki, S. Inner Vision, An Exploration of Art and the Brain. New York, NY:
Oxford; 1999:58-80
8. Salcman, M. Ambiguity, Notre Dame Review. Issue No.31, 2011 (in press).
www.neurosurgery-online.com