Marsha at Marsha in the Middle is the curator for this round of Style Imitating Art (SIA), and she selected the painted wall installation Wall Drawing No. 652 by American conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. It's hard to pin a date on this artwork because LeWitt developed schematics for his wall drawings that anyone could then paint following his instructions, but this particular installation was (I think) first executed by students from Butler University in 1990 using Pelican ink washes, then recreated in 2005 using acrylic paints. The gallery label indicates that LeWitt believed "the concept is the work of art, and the end result is 'perfunctory'." Marsha is training to be a docent at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where this installation resides. She thought it would perfect for a style challenge with the "different shapes, colors, and 'textures' in this painting."
I liked the colorful geometric integrity of the artwork, which reminds me very much of the four color theorem in mathematics, which states that "no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any map so that no two adjacent regions have the same color." I don't know whether any of LeWitt's work was inspired by that theorem (which was proven in 1976, during his wall drawing era, but had been first proposed in 1852), but it was the first thing to come into my mind when I saw this artwork.
Speaking of four colors...even though the finished project has many, many colors (way more than the four needed to satisfy the map criteria), this wall drawing was created using only four colors of paint - the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue plus grey. The four colors were applied in layers of wash to create the variety of colors in the final artwork as opposed to mixing the paints into the many different colors and applying them directly. To create the schematic for this artwork, LeWitt "plotted points randomly across the surface...and then connected them intuitively with lines," but I don't know how he chose which colors to layer where. Did he do it randomly? Intuitively? Using some mathematical logic?
It's interesting - as you can see from the schematic below, LeWitt not only applied multiple different colors to many of the triangles (e.g. BYR = blue, then yellow, then red), he also sometimes applied more than one coat of the same color (e.g. RRY = red, then red again, then yellow or GG = grey, then more grey). So the finished piece could have many different versions of a color; for example, with yellow, you could have pure yellow (Y), a more opaque pure yellow (YY), a greyed-down yellow (YG), and so on.
I'm not much of an artist, but mathematical art that you don't even have to execute yourself? Maybe!
I was a bit surprised that my wardrobe did not turn up a print scarf that was reminiscent of this artwork, but I do have a print dress that matches the color palette pretty well. I would have preferred a print that shared the strong geometric quality but this organic stylized plant print is going to have to do the job.
I have to say that I kind of hate this dress! I bought it from Shein in July 2020, when I was curious about this company and didn't realize what it was. It was $5.14...which in itself should have told me something about a brand-new dress. I do really like the fun colors and print but the fabric is a really cheap polyester that is not very comfortable to wear in the warm seasons (which is obviously what it was designed for) and that looks basically terrible. (Also on a negative note, the dress hangs like a shapeless sack, but I can't remember if this was apparent on the website or only obvious once I had it in hand.)
I definitely would not buy this dress again, but I'm not quite ready to write it off. I kind of hate this dress, but I also kind of don't hate it, leaving it to exist in a precarious state in my wardrobe. I'm guessing it will stay there until I come up with an idea to upcycle the fabric in some way or the strength of the hate it side outweighs the don't hate it. For the record, I have worn it 5 times for a current cost per wear (CPW) of $1.03. 5 wears in almost 5 years...that is really terrible!
Now on to the outfit...
Unfortunately, between a sinus infection and a pulled neck muscle, I haven't been in condition to get dressed and take outfit photos, so I thought I'd have to take a pass on this SIA challenge. But going through my OOTD archives, I found that I had worn this dress in a cold-weather outfit last winter that I think will fit well enough with the artwork to be one of my occasional "precog" outfits. Hurray!
The background of the dress is a deep green color, so I paired it with a dark hunter green cardigan...which is long enough to obscure much of the hated fabric along with the beloved colorful print. Luckily the artwork has a good number of dark green triangles in it so I can pass this off as intentional ;)
With a vibrantly colored, chaotic print like this, I think the standard black tights and boots works quite well. To adhere more strongly to the artwork, brown tights/boots is another good option for winterizing this dress, but I actually prefer the black; I think the depth of black stands up well to the intense colors of the print and the flat shininess of it matches the (deplorable) fabric of the dress. Brown can look a bit softer and more visually textured in some way, which doesn't feel as harmonious to me. And I think these pointy-toed boots are as close as I get to triangles in my entire outfit!
I further obscured the dress with an ombré green scarf that I tied using method #5: loop to the front with ends brought through as described in this post. At the time, I was leaning into the leafy organic quality of the dress's print with the green fabric draping down unevenly like foliage. But can we retrofit this for LeWitt's wall drawing by saying the ombré blending of colors is a reference to the layers of paint washed over each other in the artwork, right?
My all-DIY daily bracelet stack features a paper bead bracelet that I made to coordinate with this dress. I say "paper bead bracelet" rather than "paper bead bracelet set" because I really did only make one paper bracelet for the dress. The paper I used was chunky enough to create 9mm beads, and I planned to wear the black and gold paper bracelet with 10mm beads to supplement it (as shown). Add 3 more 8-10mm bead bracelets and that makes a hefty 5 bracelet stack. In this stack, I added black, blue, and yellow bracelets (rather than green) for some variety. {stretch bracelet tutorial} {bicone paper bead tutorial} {tube paper bead tutorial}
I chose this colorful drawing on thick paper from an alumni magazine to create my beads. I am happy with how they turned out, but I was a bit surprised by how strongly the black color came through on them relative to how much black is on the paper. I hadn't realized the significance of the fact that the largest figure in the drawing is a man in a black (or dark navy???) suit jacket. When looking at the drawing as a whole, the black jacket sort of recedes into the background. But that's the thing about paper beads - they really decontextualize images into shapes and colors that lack meaning or priority.
Of course I made some easy stack earrings from my bead soup to coordinate with the dress and bracelet, picking out green, pink, and blue as three dominant colors from the dress's print. I added a gold swirl bead to the earrings to match the focal bead on the bracelet. The swirl shape makes sense in the context of the many rounded shapes in the plant print but less so for our artwork. But I can come up with a logic to support its inclusion here, right? Let's say that the golden swirls represent the sun, a little riff on the artist's first name of Sol.
Now for the highlight of every Style Imitating Art post: our Rabbit Imitating Art selection! I included two black Polish rabbits in the last SIA, and I followed that up with a black broken Polish rabbit in this one. His particular broken color pattern of black with white sits nicely between the highly delineated geometric pattern of the artwork and the blended flows of color and irregular shapes of my dress. I love how the wide eye and raised ears demonstrate so clearly that this bunny is on high alert! And look at that ruff of fur on the nape of his neck - so incredibly pettable.
It was a very long, loud time in the gallery as the retinue of humans put up the wall drawing installation. Usually the artwork came into the museum already made, but this one was created on site. And the "artist" himself wasn't even there! He sent a bunch of students with painstaking instructions of how to draw shapes on a wall and then cover them with multiple layers of paint. But he couldn't be bothered to even oversee the work.
Confusingly, the artwork was then attributed to him personally, who hadn't even touched the thing. And no, not "School of" Artist-who-can't-be-arsed-to-show-up; just straight up Wall Drawing Number Whatever by That Absent Dude. Because he was a "conceptual" artist, and it was only the idea that mattered, not the making of the art itself. And the humans actually accepted that nonsense.
Hmm, maybe rabbits should try it: Hello, I had the idea of a carrot - now you make one for me! Would that work? How about getting even more ambitious? Ideas aren't difficult to come by....
The rabbit suddenly came out of his reverie when the room fell silent; the students had at last gathered their supplies and walked out, equally exhausted and exhilarated by their experience. Ah, finally, time to come out of hiding and experiment with this brand new vegetable/fruit hybrid idea - as big as a head of lettuce, as firm as a carrot, as sweet as a raisin!
But wait, the sound of clomping feet coming closer along the hallway! What's this all about? Perked up ears catch the voice: "Look, I'm telling you, I definitely painted it with two layers of yellow then one of grey just as the instructions said. And even if I didn't do the second layer of yellow, who's ever going to notice? Come on! UGH, FINE! We can look at it one more time."
The rabbit sighed to himself and darted behind the wall once again. Silly humans. Leave it to them to find a way for conceptual art to be even more of a nuisance than the usual kind!
Thanks for joining me today for this Style Imitating Art + Rabbit Imitating (and Improving) Art post!
To see other outfit interpretations of this artwork, check out the review on Marsha in the Middle.
Wondering how an AI vs. human would do in executing some of Sol LeWitt's wall drawings from their text instructions? Check out this post.
Have you ever bought anything from Shein? Do you have a hate/not hate relationship with anything in your closet? Are you sympathetic with our Rabbit Improving Art's views on conceptual art?
Blogs I link up with are listed here.