To work with a plan that is preset is one way of avoiding subjectivity. It also obviates the necessity of designing each work in turn. The plan would design the work. Some plans would require millions of variations, and some a limited number, but both are finite. Other plans imply infinity. In each case, however, the artist would select the basic form and rules that would govern the solution of the problem. After that the fewer decisions made in the course of completing the work, the better. This eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible. This is the reason for using this method. -Sol LeWitt from “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” first published in Artforum, June 1967

Without Sol LeWitt’s conceptions of where an artist’s touch could end and begin in the making of an artwork, or how an artist’s hand and mind could be extended into and through the hands and minds of others – along with the thousands of little decisions that might go into the making of a thousand little marks – there is no way I could be making the work I make today. - Allan McCollum from Sol LeWitt: 100 Views, (North Adams, MA: MASS, MoCA, 2009), p. 80.

Armand Bartos Fine Art is pleased to present the two person exhibition Seriality: Sol LeWitt and Allan McCollum. Bringing together works that span each artist’s career reveals a shared interest in issues relating to authorship, subjectivity and originality. While LeWitt belies his minimalist roots with work that takes its most basic forms (grids, cubes, lines, irregular shapes) from geometry and mathematical progressions, McCollum is much more interested in anthropological constructs, specifically those surrounding art and culture. McCollum’s Surrogates are about painting as a signifier. The Drawings are about the tension between the uniqueness of the art object and mass production. The Perfect Vehicles are about the scared in art. And the Natural Copies from the Coal Mines of Central Utah are about community and the institutions that surround the codification of art.

Both artists are actively involved in object making, but the serial nature of their work removes the focus from the fetishism of the art object and firmly situates them within conceptualism. For many of their projects, individual artworks are part of much larger sets. LeWitt often indicated a work’s serial classification through titles such as Wall Drawing 253 from Arcs, Circles and Grids. This work is just one example adapted to the wall from a book that he made in 1972 of the same title, which depicted all of the possible combinations of arcs, grids and circles as they relate to the corners and midpoints of the page. Wall Drawing 253 specifically illustrates the following instruction, “Grid and arcs from one corner and midpoints of two adjacent sides, surrounding the corner.” Alternately, McCollum’s serial production is made apparent in his insistence that single artworks be made up of multiple constituent objects, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. For both artists carrying the idea to its logical limits determines the number of possible permutations in a set. The enduring allure is that despite the systematic nature of their methods, the resulting works are infused with both beauty and humanism.