monumental, abstract annunciations and visitations and sacred conversations

Post title via the New York Times review of the Sol Lewitt exhibition at MASSMoCA. For those of you traveling to the Grace Potter and the Nocturnals show here on Thursday please make an effort to arrive early and leave a couple hours to explore this one of a kind museum.

Not that these drawings are street art. They aren’t populist in that way; they were meant for the great indoors. But neither do they depend on elite settings — museums or galleries — to make sense. They are abstract, not arcane. Their visual effects can be complex, but their language is plain: lines, colors, clean surfaces, the basics of grade-school art class. No wonder they feel welcoming; they take us back to the past before they take us somewhere else.

Within those essential elements there’s diversity. The lines come straight and curved; vertical, diagonal, horizontal. They resolve into geometric shapes (cubes, grids, bulls’-eyes); they splinter and fight; they gather in doodly squiggles like metal shavings to a magnet. In many cases they simply stream on, parallel and continuous, from floor to ceiling and wall edge to wall edge, like some crazy, destinationless Bruckner scherzo that expresses high joy by running in place.
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The ideas in LeWitt’s drawings — in the monumental, abstract annunciations and visitations and sacred conversations at Mass MoCA — are exhilarating and of this moment on earth.

The action is minimal and seemingly simple. Inside a building, massive windows have been broken, and someone is slowly sweeping up the shattered remains. From a floor level perspective, we see the legs of an anonymous audience/public and hear the sound of broom-swept glass. The location, action, and incongruous audience reaction are unexplained. What is clear is that we have arrived late, always late, always after.