During the 1960s, the American artist Sol Lewitt began creating his famous wall drawings: short textual instructions to be materialized on a wall surface by trained draftsmen. This simple and clean separation between idea and execution, two that are traditionally perceived as a single indivisible entity emerging from the artist’s inner-world, was not only an important milestone in conceptualism but also serves as an ongoing inquiry into the state of the personal in a reality which is since becoming ever more embedded in algorithms. When even the most basic building blocks of art become as concrete and well defined as an assembly line, is there anything which insists to remain intimate, inherently “under the hood”?
The exhibition “He said wall surface” brings together thirteen contemporary Israeli artists who have all accepted the same constraint: perform a small-scale pencil on paper version of Sol Lewitt’s wall drawing #118 and briefly comment on the process in writing. The result is a set of thirteen singular confrontations with the dilemma of personal creation within a constricted environment where the only part which is truly personal, the textual commentary, takes place in a medium which is not the artists’ creative “mother tongue”.
From a different perspective, the result can also be viewed as a single work of art; a wall drawing of sorts, performed by thirteen artist-draftsmen executing a small set of instructions not unlike the original ones by Lewitt.
The project was initiated and initially published as part of the second anthology of conceptual writing in Hebrew (Poetry Place publishing house).
Artists: Maya Attoun, , Eden Bannet, Merav Shinn Ben-Alon, Dganit Brest, Yair Garbuz, Noa Giniger, Hadas Hassid, Hilla Toony Navok, Ruth Orr, Galia Pasternak, Hillel Roman, Tomer Sapir, Shay Yehezkely
Curator: Alex Ben-Ari
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
