The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) is pleased to announce the release of Sol LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art: Manuscript and Draft Materials 1968–69, a publication documenting Sol LeWitt's original manuscript exhbited at OCA from 21 October to 19 December 2009, as part of 'Columns, Grottos, Niches: The Grammar of Forms – On Art Criticism, Writing, Publishing and Distribution'. In January 1969 LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art were first published in the magazine 0-9 edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, and later the same year in Art-Language as a declaration of independence of 'art as idea'. These rarely exhibited handwritten notes illustrate the evolution of LeWitt's thought with respect to his proposal and were made available to the public courtesy of the Collection Daled, Beglium.
Besides reproducing the original manuscript, the publication includes 'An Image of Romanticism – Fragment and Project: From Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments to LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art', an essay that Peter Osborne first presented as a lecture at OCA on 21 October, as the opening event of 'Columns, Grottos, Niches: The Grammar of Forms. The text approaches how many ideas central to the understanding of contemporary art – genre, fragment, project, concepts of the new and of concepts of art and art criticism themselves – derive from early German Romanticism. In doing so, Osborne points out how the significance of these connections has been obscured, in large part, by continuing pre-occupations with notions of 'medium' and 'aesthetic' and by the literary origins of the ideas themselves. The text further delves into how Conceptual art in the 1960s broke with these conventions, laying the foundation for the radical openness of contemporary art.
Sol LeWitt (9 September 1928 – 8 April 2007) is considered one of the most important artists to have emerged from the Minimal and Conceptual art movements. Since 1960, LeWitt has worked in a variety of media including sculpture, drawing (both on paper and walls), prints, and photography. He helped establish Conceptual Art and Minimalism of the post war era, creating drawings and structures (a term that the artist preferred to sculpture) by reducing art to the most basic shapes and colors. LeWitt has been included in numerous museum exhibitions, including the Tate Gallery, London; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, London and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. His books include The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (Verso, 1995), Philosophy in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 2000), Conceptual Art (Phaidon, 2002), How to Read Marx (Granta, 2005) and Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory (editor, 3 Volumes, Routledge, 2005). He has contributed to many catalogues and periodicals with essays on artists such as Victor Burgin, Gerhard Richter and Robert Smithson.
ISBN: 978-82-92495-15-5
ISSN: 1503-8467
72 pages
Price: NOK 100 / €12 + postage
For further information, distribution enquires or to order, please contact info@oca.no.
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