Looking into a 1989 etching this morning led me to the Sol LeWitt Prints Catalogue Raisonné, which is great. It’s one of three postwar print CRs produced by Krakow Witkin Gallery in Boston. [The other two are for Mel Bochner and Fred Sandback.]
Which is where I saw Windows, a 1980 photogrid LeWitt made as an edition by mounting 72 snapshots onto museum board, 25 times. The example Krakow Witkin has [ed. 15/20] still includes the pencil marks for mounting, which makes them feel like a carefully constructed collage object more than a traditional print. If only I’d made it up to Craig Starr’s show of Phong Bui and LeWitt last summer, I could have seen Windows in person.
LeWitt used photography more than it might seem. Edweard Muybridge’s time and motion studies were an early part of LeWitt’s engagement with seriality. And he made artist books with photos, including some incredible photos of the variations of sunlight on a rough brick wall outside his window that feel like gritty urban Monets. Some books make the SLPCR, but not this one, I guess. Anyway, point is, photographs.
I’d thought of Brick Walls because of how LeWitt’s photos of light on brick captured a sense of space, which an earlier photo book/series Stone Walls (1975) doesn’t. Because while it first appears as just found typology, Windows actually conjures a sense of place. Seeing all the arches in a jpg, I just assumed LeWitt had been shooting lofts in SoHo. But that is not at all what’s going on.
A closer look at the signage shows LeWitt’s photos are from Thailand, specifically Phuket. Place was not something I usually associate with LeWitt’s work—at least not before some highly site- and context-specific works here.
[Now I’m racking my brain to remember which artist had compiled a massive archive of photographs in various typologies and grids, was it the TIME LIFE project Mungo Thompson did?]
Anyway, like learning a new word, I started to see references to place in LeWitt’s work where I’d least expected it. Or at least this once, on another fascinating but atypical-seeming print. Rectangles of Color (Prato) is a woodcut from 1994 that, tbh kind of gives the game away by having a place in the title. It turns out to be an edition published by the Museo Pecci in Prato, Italy, in conjunction with their 1993 commission of a wall drawing for their lobby.
Seeing the print first was baffling, but then I realized it includes the doorways in the museum’s curved wall. I’d imagine many of LeWitt’s wall drawings have similar site-specific characteristics, but none of them had souvenir prints. And the wall drawings catalogue raisonné is $600 for a single login, plus $60/year.