art: home is Incomplete Open Cubes 5/9

Sol LeWitt programmatically/accidentally made the most simple, refined, and beautiful home evar,

Can you spot it in this housing development?

I saw this exhibition at SFMOMA around 2024, a sublime quiet experience. The artwork is the name: starting with three connected sides of a cube that extend in three directions/dimensions, what are all the possible forms of a cube? But as usual with LeWitt, the realization of the conceptual art is itself aesthetically pleasing: the drawings, the actual existence of the conceptual forms as sculptures laid out in real space, how the number of variations increases with more edges then decreases; it’s all so good. The way they get more varied with more “limbs” and then simplify as they approach 11 edges (it doesn’t include the final “full” cube) is lovely. It is much bigger than this appears (it was in a huge room), but it isn’t overwhelming.

I was quickly drawn to it over every other shape in the set.

Here’s a link to an SVG reconstruction of it.

Make me a concept, mmmkay?

I’d love to own a realization of this particular instance, Incomplete Open Cubes 5/9, or commission a replica; 30-33 cm (12-13 inches) a side would fit nicely at the top of our staircase. It’s just painted wood or baked enamel on aluminum, how expensive can it be? Uh-oh, the auctioneer Christie’s sold Incomplete Open Cube 7/14 in 2011 for… $206,500.

True, this is a larger floor-standing sculpture, 42 inches (106.6 cm) on a side. The dozens at SFMOMA were more petite, apparently only 8×8×8 inches. And this has two extra edges, so the smaller one should be 28% off!?

Is there an official fabricator of these? What are the ethics of ripping off the exquisitely thoughtful concept of a dead artist (Sol LeWitt, 1928-2007, RIP). I contacted the Artists Rights Society which licenses reproductions of his work, we’ll see what happens.

Incomplete list of Incomplete Open Cubes

Links

I’m not the only one struck by the excellence of the idea, execution, and result. Critics and mathematicians love it.

• The catalog from the original 1974 exhibition at John Weber Gallery, ‘Sol Lewitt “Incomplete Open Cubes”,’ ISBN 978-0686467731. It’s only $500 for a rumpled version.
• Great project https://cubes-revisited.art/about/ by Rob Weychert doesn’t restrict itself to connected edges so it has many more variations. In its numbering scheme my favorite is “5/79”
• Nice blog post, “Irrational Thoughts Should be Followed Absolutely and Logically”: Sol LeWitt’s “Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes” (1974)
• Sol LeWitt: Variations of Incomplete Cubes, 1974 mentions Open Cubes Revisited.
• Sculpture of 7/21 , also from Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Someone’s Master of Science paper, “ANALYSIS OF VARIATIONS OF INCOMPLETE OPEN CUBES BY SOL LEWITT”
• Another paper, Is the List of Incomplete Open Cubes Complete?
• An early article about Sol LeWitt, LeWitt in Progress
• The Mathematical Tourist: Incomplete Open Cubes
• “Mind-Bending Shapes,” Scott Kim article in Discover Magazine in his Bogglers
• Artforum article on 2002 exhibition at Wadsworth Atheneum (which apparently has a lot of his works – road trip!), and the exhibition had a catalog with essays
• Sadly lewittcollection.org is defunct. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has archived copies including a page with links
• One tidbit from that is there was a Sol LeWitt app authored by Lindsay Aveilhé available on the Apple/Google/Microsoft stores, though it seems defunct now. Microsoft had a brief “In Culture” article about him and the app, also gone but archived in the Wayback Machine
• Lindsay also co-created (with Cycymymy) the “Being Sol” immersive web site at Microsoft Unlocked.

Home

The Earth can be any shape you want it
Any shape at all
Dark and cold or bright and warm
Long or thin or small
But it’s home and all I ever had
And maybe why for me the Earth is flat

— “The Flat Earth”, Thomas Dolby (1984)