Sol Lewitts’s work was a challenge to execute because of the language he used in order to express it. The language itself is not advanced but is instead presented in a complex set of rules where it is hard to see where the instructions for one line begin and where it ends. It calls for a very focused endeavor by the participant to take each of his lines and execute it word for word. In a ways, this may mimic programming since a machine is built just for that, however, even a program would have a problem with the punctuation and confusion in Lewitt’s work. In this way, it seems to be something that only a tenacious human can work out and put together. The piece was hard enough that I began having to restart my work since it looked nothing like the quadrangle Lewitt’s promised at the beginning of his instructions.

I actually found myself enjoying the work–untangling Lewitt’s instructions was fun, like solving a puzzle. I was lucky enough to have a ruler with me while working on this, so I found myself doing a lot of measuring to get precise halfway points. I initially set up a framework for myself by dividing the drawing space into equal quadrants, which made figuring out some of the points referenced a lot easier. I also threw the instructions into Photoshop and found myself hiding parts of the instructions I wasn’t working on and highlighting different smaller tasks within each instruction.

I really enjoyed this piece and would love to experience and construct more instruction-based work. It’s very much like programming an extremely advanced computer, intentionally leaving points of ambiguity or technical absurdity (the equidistant instruction comes to mind) seemed to produce delightful variations on each work as people worked to come up with ways to correct the original text.

Executing this work was a trial of patience. At the onset I was drawing lines with certainty, but nearing the weary end I realized the glory of parenthesis, brackets, and color-coding systems, all of which ended up on my instructions (along with triumphant lines crossing out what I had finished.) The instructions for this work are code in a literal sense that they are explicit instructions written by a human to achieve an end, even if that end is only to bewilder another human (which, arguably, some programmers set out to do.) This artwork is interesting in the way it connects the large amounts of people executing it yet allows them to preserve their individuality through the work. Every interpretation ends up different, though the instructions remain the same.

 

I drew the first 2 lines with some struggle, but I managed by crossing out the instructions I have already finished. However, starting from the third line, I was no longer able to keep track of which points are the points for the line, and which points are the reference points for drawing those points. Yes, this instruction is code, but it is a disgustingly bad one. Math was invented for a reason, and if Sol LeWitt even attempted to be efficient, he would put parentheses around phrases to emphasize where the description of each point or reference point started and ended. A good code would be able to execute the same drawing with just a few lines. But of course, this was not his intention, so be it.

Were this Lewitt piece written in an existing computer code, the computer would be able to churn out a result in less than a fraction of a second. For me, it took me about an hour to sift through Lewitt’s instructions in an organized manner. I would consider this to be a code written in a computer language that Lewitt invented. It has certain organizational syntax that I had to become accustomed to, and that’s what consumed a bulk of my time. Even so, either my interpretation of his syntax is off, or Lewitt made an error writing his own code, as some “between” statements ended up with 3 parameters and a “to” statement was made without a preceding “from”.

Drawing the quadrangle through Sol Lewitt’s instructions paralleled the experience of coding. Sol Lewitt’s instructions were precise and specific, similar to the code or “instructions” a programmer would type into a compiler. When programming, one must be extremely careful to include every little detail and check every case, so that the compiler doesn’t become confused. It’s often quite easy to assume incorrectly that the compiler is “smart” enough to know when to automatically check for certain cases. Sol Lewitt exaggerates the importance of detail by over emphasizing direction, position and relativity to other lines on the page which he instructs the audience to draw. Creating the quadrangle proved to be extremely tedious and unnecessarily time consuming because it was actually too detailed. Now I realize that it is amazing how compilers can take over-detailed instructions, analyze and reproduce the product in a logical correct procedure. For compilers, relativity is everything. As a human, we can only contain and consume so much information before comparisons between points or positions start to become confusing. Our intelligence and ability to make assumptions ironically becomes a hindrance.

Executing Sol Lewitt’s artwork was mostly a challenge not because of the instructions themselves, but the way the instructions were presented. In all the computer science classes I’ve taken, they always remind students that they should write code for people to read – not for machines to execute. The strict ‘style’ rules about line length, proper indentation, and commenting code is a clear indicator of how seriously they want students to follow this philosophy. As in the case of Lewitt’s instructions the audience can be interpreted as both the person and machine, it becomes very challenging to execute because of the drawn-out line length (it certainly does not follow the standard ‘at most 80 characters per line’ protocol), lack of punctuation, and abundance of connectives. For me, it became confusing to the point that I had to annotate the instructions to keep track of key points, positions, and the like.

 

My first attempt was pretty heavily annotated:

When I first took on the assignment of attempting Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing, I thought following instructions would be a very simple thing to do. Boy, was I wrong. Just in the first line, I was stuck trying to put parentheses around the groupings of words and just couldn’t get it right. Sure enough, an hour whittled away. So I tried to read a little about Lewitt instead.

I learned he was a German artist, and I was suddenly struck with the thought that the instructions I’ve been reading are probably a translation. When I looked through the instructions on how to draw the first line once more, I figured that there must have been a part omitted by accident. Here is what I think the first part should read:

… the first of which is drawn from [a point halfway between] a point halfway between point halfway between the center of the wall and the upper left corner and the midpoint of the left side and the upper left corner to a point halfway between the midpoint of the top side and the upper right corner…

This is the only way it made sense to me and allowed me to finish the drawing. Then again, I may just be bad at following instructions.

In conclusion, I thought this was a great demonstration of instructional art, and how an artists’ instructions must be as full-proof as possible for the desired results. This is definitely important as well when implementing code, as computers just churn out what you tell them to do without question.