Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Jun 30, 2015, 10:13AM

It Shouldn't Be Boring

A 2015 Eliptik magazine interview with sound designer Richard Devine vs. a 2003 Bomb magazine interview with artist Sol LeWitt.

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Sol LeWitt: Unless you’re involved with thinking about what you’re doing, you end up doing the same thing over and over, and that becomes tedious and, in the end, defeating.

Richard Devine: Yeah, I went back. Because that’s where the flexibility is.

LeWitt: Too large, and it becomes grandiose and rhetorical. I wouldn’t delete or add anything. 

Devine: It’s like an architectural object unfolding and re-glueing and re-suctioning to different areas. 

LeWitt: Basically it was a repudiation of Duchampian aesthetics.

***

Devine: Sometimes I still feel bad taking money for this. 

LeWitt: I was not interested in that. Words are another thing.

Devine: It’s like telling a story. The different wave shapes, frequency ranges, etc.

LeWitt: Of course. It shouldn’t be boring. These were maps and postcards with drawings or cutouts, crumpled paper, folded paper, torn paper, and so on. 

Devine: I didn’t choose a very popular or well-known form of expression.

***

LeWitt: But that’s to be expected, too, because they have to learn something else. It has to be something more universal, more important.

Devine: I see where this could go. I think time is the issue.

LeWitt: Not only in art of course, but feminism, racial equality and opposition to war.

Devine: You just don’t get that looking at a computer, working with a mouse. 

LeWitt: In my case, it’s often revulsion.

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