Last Talk With: Joe Thompson

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Lacayo

Sol LeWitt at MASS MoCA/Photos: Lacayo

Let’s finish up that conversation with MASS MoCA Director Joe Thompson about the 25-year installation of Sol LeWitt wall drawings that just opened at MASS MoCA.

LACAYO: Sol did his first wall drawing at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York in 1968. And he drew that one himself, right?

THOMPSON: He did. That first work and several others. In the early works, in the 1960s and early ’70s, you often see Sol listed among the draftspeople. Towards the end his name never appears.

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LACAYO: But for many years he would continue to show up at the site of the drawings to see how they were going.

THOMPSON: He would. But often he wouldn’t. Jock Reynolds told me he oversaw the end of the big Andover show by fax.

LACAYO: How did you come up with the idea of keeping the drawings on the walls for 25 years?

THOMPSON: It was part practicality and part philosophical. We knew we needed to borrow a bunch of works and that a permanent show, with having to sort through ownership issues, was going to cost a lot of time and money and effort. I like 25 years because it forces a kind of generational referendum on the work. In year 24, a representative of the LeWitt estate will meet with whoever is running the Yale University Art Gallery, MASS MoCA and the Williams College Gallery. If for any reason any of those three want to pull the plug on the show and get out the whitewash, they can. But if all agree that’s worthwhile to keep it up, it’ll stay up.

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LACAYO: I know Sol didn’t want any of the drawings roped off, so even if your visitors are very careful there’s still going to be some wear and tear over 25 years. What’s your philosophy on preservation? Do you occasionally touch them up or do you let them crumble a bit like Renaissance frescoes? With a Giotto, you can’t really have a restorer paint in the missing parts. It wouldn’t be by Giotto. But the whole idea of a Conceptual drawing is that anybody, not just the artist, can draw it, or re-draw it.

THOMPSON: Part of how this project began was in thinking about how to deal with these questions with all of Sol’s drawings everywhere. There are 800 or so of these things all around the world. Somebody needs to figure out when deterioration has gone too far and the drawing needs to be repainted or repaired. But there’s not doubt that we’re going to have to do some kind of conservation. Some of the works are incredibly delicate. Some of them are quite durable, like the ones on the top floor that are acrylic and have all been coated with a couple of layers of varnish. But Sol even said to us: “Don’t spend a lot on security, why bother? You can just paint ’em again.”

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LACAYO: Last question. Of lot of your time over the last year or two was devoted to the disagreement you had with the Swiss artist Christoph Buchel over the installation he was working on at MASS MoCA until you and he had a falling out over costs and it all ended up in court. Have there been any further developments in that dispute or is that a closed chapter?

THOMPSON: The judge issued his written opinion two months ago and MASS MoCA prevailed on all five questions. We were granted the right to do what we would wish to do with the materials. We took the installation down. Buchel has appealed and that’s where it is now, in the first circuit federal court in Boston.

LACAYO: Do you communicate with Buchel at all?

THOMPSON: We haven’t spoken since he left here on Sept. 17, almost two years go.

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