The Devil and the Details:

The Ontology of Contemporary Art in

Conservation Theory and Practice
Renée van de Vall

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Conservation problems can reveal unsuspected complexities in the ontological make-up of modern
and contemporary artworks. Using a problem in the conservation of one of Sol LeWitt’s Wall
Drawings as my starting point, I argue that Goodman’s well-known and often criticized distinction
between autographic and allographic art can be fruitfully used to articulate the different options
in conservation dilemmas, but only if used in a non-disjunctive way and in the context of a
biographical approach to the works under consideration.

1.  The Problem

On 4 August 2008, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s conservator Chantal Bernicky posted a
message on the distribution list of cool.conservation, explaining a difficult problem with one of
the museum’s Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings. Cracks had appeared in the drywall sheets forming
the substrate of the painting on places where the sheets had been joined by tape. Attempts to
consolidate the delaminating layers did not prove successful and the author suspected
that the expansion and contraction of the wall and the vibration (freight elevator and
patrons on the stairs) are causing the paint to buckle in that specific area. Treating
the surface has proven unsuccessful: the cracks in the drywall keep reappearing,
and we are wondering if we need to be more intrusive by removing the tape and
perhaps placing a rigid fill material in the gap between the sheets of drywall to stop
the movement.1
An interesting discussion evolved. Whereas the conservator was worrying whether she
should take more intrusive measures, the first of the responses to the post asked, why was
she making it so difficult? Just redo the whole thing! Mark Clarke from the University of
Amsterdam questioned the conservation problem as such:
This is an interesting post which goes to the heart of what conservators are try-
ing to achieve. *Why* is this drawing being conserved? I may be wrong or missing
something here, and I am not the curator of this example, and it is not my place to
criticise the decision to restore it, but my understanding of Sol LeWitt’s wall draw-
ings was always that he rejected the idea that these were ‘original’ works—rather,

1 Chantal Bernicky, ‘Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing’ (Cons DistList, August 4, 2008; August 9, 2008) <http://cool.
conservation-us.org/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/2008/0878.html> accessed 28 October 2013.

British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 55 | Number 3 | July 2015 | pp. 285–302 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayv036
© British Society of Aesthetics 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.
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286 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

the art work consists of a set of detailed instructions for making the drawings. They
were then made, to specification, by a team of technicians, assistants, whoever, but
not by the artist. Surely it misses the point to restore it? Rather than wasting valuable
conservator time here, the thing could (or indeed, should) simply be done again by a
gang of art students, or decorators.2
Another response questioned the sense of restoring a work that was already no longer an
original. Referring to the fact that the mural had been repainted in 2007, Berit Moller,

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paintings conservator at Rosenborg Palace Copenhagen, asked:
Why try to save something that is a copy of the original work? I think the original
decision makers must go back to the drawing board and restart the discussion because
the conservation problems described regarding the art work is now completely differ-
ent since it is no longer the original work.3
A week later Jonathan Kemp, Senior Sculpture Conservator at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in London commented:
LeWitt was interested in instruction sets viz. instructions to others from which to
make products—and so such works are allographic rather than autographic (think
of a musical score and its rendition in different performances, rather than a singular
work). Thus it seems to me to be in keeping with LeWitt’s ideas to restore the draw-
ing and, by executing the usual procedures of material analysis to determine with
what to restore it with, the idea of ‘instruction set’ is simply extended, with all deci-
sions added to the record (or ‘specification sheet’).4
Although Kemp agreed with the first comment about the work being defined by instruc-
tions, his conclusion was a different one: he advised to restore it by following the usual
procedures. Apparently, consensus about ontological definitions does not automatically
lead to agreement about conservation strategies.
In this paper, I take conservation dilemmas like this one as a heuristic lens to explore
the ontological complexities of modern and contemporary artworks. As soon as conserva-
tion decisions have to be made that might intervene in the physical and conceptual consti-
tution of the work, the work’s ontological ‘nature’ ceases to be a matter of interpretation
only: its future is at stake. Theoretical and practical assumptions about what the work ‘is’,
which seem to work nicely as long as nothing happens with it, often appear highly indeter-
minate or even inconsistent when something goes wrong. I will discuss alternative ways
of conceiving of LeWitt’s wall drawings, in particular the suggestion that they are—at
least partly—allographic, two-stage works of art. With the conservation dilemma as my
guiding line, I will argue that such ontological characterizations have a limited value only,
but nevertheless help us in articulating different conservation options and in discerning
more general patterns in artworks’ biographies.

2 Mark Clarke, ‘Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing’ (Cons DistList, August 11, 2008; August 14 2008) <http://cool.
conservation-us.org/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/2008/0888.html> accessed 28 October 2013.
3 Berit Moller, ‘Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing’, (Cons DistList, August 17, 2008; August 23, 2008) <http://cool.
conservation-us.org/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/2008/0921.html> accessed 28 October 2013.
4 Jonathan Kemp, ‘Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing’, (Cons DistList, August 24, 2008; September 7, 2008) <http://cool.
conservation-us.org/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/2008/0954.html> accessed 28 October 2013.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 287

2. Conservation Ethics
Now what exactly was at stake in this discussion? The Carnegie Museum’s conservator
stated her problem in terms of generally accepted conservation ethics. When she won-
dered ‘if we need to be more intrusive’, she implicitly referred to the professional guide-
lines of minimal intervention and reversibility. In current ethical codes, the aims of fine
art conservation are still primarily focused on the preservation of the art object’s material
integrity.5 This means that treatment should be as restricted as possible and should not

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intervene any more than absolutely necessary with the original material. Moreover, res-
toration treatments like re-touchings should be such that they can be distinguished from
the original and can be undone in the future. The importance of these guidelines became
painfully apparent in 1992, when one of the most scandalous conservation cases ever came
to light. Although he claimed to have re-touched only the damaged areas with tiny dots, it
appeared that restorer Goldreyer had been painting over Barnett Newman’s Who Is Afraid
of Red, Yellow and Blue III with a roller, covering the whole red oil paint surface with a
layer of irremovable alkyd.6 When another Newman in the same collection was damaged
in the same way as the previous one, the owner of the painting, the Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam, wisely decided to perform its restoration in house. Cathedra was successfully
restored, fully in accordance with the ethical guidelines.7
This is not to suggest, however, that these guidelines are undisputed. As valid as they are
when applied to paintings like Newman’s, there are many types of modern and contempo-
rary artworks for which the guidelines have become an obstacle rather than a solid base.
When it comes to conserving installation art, media art, or performances—experimental
works that are inherently variable because of their concept, technology or materials—
preservation and restoration of their material components might interfere with their artis-
tic identity. Take an installation made of found objects. When one of these objects, a bottle
for instance, breaks, it does not make sense to try to repair the original item; it is far more
in agreement with the work’s concept or artistic idea to go to the supermarket and buy a
new one, or, even better, go to the site where it was found (say, a garbage dump) and search
for another. For more than two decades, the field of contemporary art conservation has in

5 The 2004 ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums states:

2.24 Collection Conservation and Restoration
The museum should carefully monitor the condition of collections to determine when an object or specimen may
require conservation-restoration work and the services of a qualified conservator-restorer. The principal goal
should be the stabilisation of the object or specimen. All conservation procedures should be documented and as
reversible as possible, and all alterations should be clearly distinguishable from the original object or specimen.
<http://icom.museum/ethics.html> accessed 07 November 2014.
6 Ysbrand Hummelen, ‘“Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III”, Barnett Newman’, Zeitschrift für
Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 6 (1992), 215–222.
7 Angela Matyssek, ‘Überleben und Restaurierung. Barnett Newmans Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III
und Cathedra’, in Peter Geimer and Michael Hagner (eds), Nachleben und Rekonstruktion. Vergangenheit im Bild
(München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1992), 49–69; Elisabeth Bracht et al., ‘The Restoration of Barnett Newman’s
Cathedra’, SMA Cahiers 24: Barnett Newman Cathedra 24 (2001), 66–99.
288 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

fact been looking for new methods and strategies to preserve such works without compro-
mising their artistic integrity. There have been numerous pilot research cases, landmark
conferences and seminal publications gradually moving towards new ethical paradigms
which no longer take minimal intervention and reversibility as indisputable tenets.8
A very important publication for articulating a new paradigm was Tate conservator Pip
Laurenson’s (2006) paper on the conservation of time-based media art.9 Laurenson pro-
posed to think differently of the ontology of time-based media installations and instal-

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lations in general: not primarily as a kind of sculptures, but more like theatre plays or
music. Rather than being tied to an authentic material entity which should be preserved in
its original state, installations are defined by instructions stipulating their ‘work-defining
properties’ and can therefore be re-executed time and again, in the same way as theatre
plays and symphonies are being re-performed without losing their authenticity. Laurenson
was not the first to suggest this—Boris Groys had proposed the same in a far more radical
way in an article titled ‘The Restoration of Destruction’, even stating that the quality of
a re-performance of an installation should be sought in its being adventurous and innova-
tive.10 Laurenson, herself a conservator, was far more cautious. She used Nelson Goodman’s
well-known distinction between allographic and autographic arts, arguing that time-based
media installations should be ranged somewhere on an ‘ontological continuum’ between
autographic works (like sculptures) and allographic works (like musical performances).11

3.  Goodman’s Distinction Applied to Installation Art

Although Goodman’s distinction was not intended to answer conservation questions, it
is highly relevant for conservation, as it tries to formulate the different ways in which the
authenticity of different types of artworks should be defined.12 Goodman asked why in a

8 Examples of collaborative research projects: Modern Art: Who Cares? (1995–7) Amsterdam: The Foundation for
the Conservation of Modern Art and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN); Inside Installations:
Preservation and Presentation of Installation Art (2005–8) funded by the European Union Culture 2000 programme
and initiated by ICN; PRACTICs—Practices, Research, Access, Collaboration, Teaching In Conservation of Contemporary
Art (2009–11); NECCAR – Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art Research (2011–14). Platforms:
INCCA (International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art); DOCAM (Documentation and
Conservation of the Media Arts Heritage) Research Alliance; SBMK: Stichting Behoud Moderne Kunst.
9 Pip Laurenson, ‘Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations’, Tate
Papers 6 (Autumn 2006).
<http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/06autumn/laurenson.htm> accessed 7 November 2014.
10 Boris Groys, ‘The Restoration of Destruction’, Witte de With Cahier 4 (1996), 155–160.
11 Laurenson, ‘Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations’, 4.
12 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976). When
I consider the restoration problem in terms of Goodman’s distinction, I do not discount the long list of objections,
amendments and refutations that this distinction has solicited. To name some examples which are relevant for
my argument: Jerrold Levinson, ‘Autographic and Allographic Art Revisited’, Philosophical Studies 38 (1980),
367–383; Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosopy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 41–44; Joseph Margolis, ‘A Farewell to Goodman and Danto’, BJA 38 (1998), 353–374.
Both Levinson and Danto, and Margolis in Danto’s wake, point out that Goodman overlooks the historically and
contextually bound (and therefore autographic) nature of all art forms.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 289

painting forgery of a known work (say, Rembrandt’s Nightwatch) is possible, but why there
is no such thing as a forgery of Hamlet. Forgery of the play as a text is impossible, according
to Goodman, because every correct copy of the manuscript is as genuine as the original.
When you read an exact copy of the manuscript’s text, you are actually reading Hamlet;
when you look at an exact copy of the Nightwatch, you’re not looking at the Nightwatch at
all. Painting is autographic, but literature and theatre are not: they are allographic:
Let us speak of a work of art as autographic if and only if the distinction between

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original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact
duplication of it does not hereby count as genuine.13
The difference between allographic and autographic arts intersects with another one: that
between one-stage and two-stage arts. Reading the text of Hamlet is not yet watching the
play. Theatre is two-stage and painting one-stage, that is: when the playwright has com-
pleted the script the work still has to be staged and performed, usually by others, whereas
when the painter has finished the picture the work is complete:14 ‘No matter how many
studies or revisions are made in either case, painting is in this sense a one-stage and music
a two-stage art.’15 It might seem that the difference between allographic and autographic
arts can be explained by the number of stages involved, but this is not the case: a work can
be one-stage and yet allographic, like a novel, or two-stage and autographic, like etch-
ing. The decisive difference between allographic and autographic arts is that in literature,
music and theatre, there is a system of notation which entails an explicit standard of cor-
rectness and ‘provides the means for distinguishing the properties constitutive of a work
from all contingent properties—that is, for fixing the required features and the limits of
permissible variation in each’.16 In autographic arts, there is no such system of notation:
In painting, on the contrary, with no such alphabet of characters, none of the pictorial
properties—none of the properties the picture has as such—is distinguished as consti-
tutive; no such feature can be dismissed as contingent, and no deviation as insignificant.17

13 Goodman, Languages of Art, 113.

14 Analytically, this remains true also in the cases when the playwright is also the director and performer or when
the painter employs assistants; in the first case the playwright takes up a different function that could also be
fulfilled by others; the painter still is the one who has to judge and authorize the work of the assistants.
15 Ibid., 114. But see also Nelson Goodman, ‘A Note on Copies’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44 (1986),
291–292, at 291, where he answers a review by W.E. Kennick: ‘If Kennick’s aim is to show that painting is not
necessarily autographic, I never said it was. What constitutes the identity of a work derives from practice, and
practice may change.’
16 Goodman, Languages of Art, 116.
17 Ibid. The implications of a painting’s being autographic for restoration ethics are clearly indicated by Ernst van
de Wetering: ‘Minimalism in conservation and restoration can be defended in various ways. The most significant
argument is surely the need to preserve the many-layered documentary evidence that every historic object bears.
No one can foretell what sort of questions will be asked of the object in connection with future attempts at
interpretation; in examining (art) historical objects one all too often discovers that essential traces have been made
unintelligible or destroyed during treatment because their meaning went unrecognized’ (‘The Surface of Objects
and Museum Style’, in Nicholas Stanley Price et al. (eds), Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of
Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1996), 415–421, at 421).
290 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

Using Goodman’s distinction, Laurenson proposed to locate the authenticity of installa-

tions not in their material integrity, but in the work-defining properties specified in what
could count as the equivalent of a score, the artist’s instructions and subsequent documen-
tation of the work. However, she admitted, whereas there is an elaborate conventional
system of notation in the case of (for instance) classical western works of music, no such
system exists for installation art. With a term from philosopher Stephen Davies, Laurenson
says that, like musical works, installations can be thinly and thickly specified depending on

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how precisely the artist has specified the qualities of the work and its presentation.18
After Laurenson’s paper, the idea of thinking of conceptual art installations and media
art as being allographic two-stage works has gained currency in the field of conserva-
tion.19 This certainly makes sense. A good example of an artwork that can be considered
as thickly defined, allographic, two-stage work is Olafur Eliasson’s Notion Motion (2005),
in the collection of Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Apart from some
technical equipment, the work mainly consists of large water basins and wooden walk-
ways; water, basins and wood are thrown away after the exhibition, the most important
physical item remaining in the collection being the set of instructions. As the museum’s
conservators involved in its conservation comment:
Since Notion Motion is built anew every time it is installed and new materials are used,
physical preservation has no relevance at all. Precise documentation, both of the mate-
rial aspects and the concept, on the other hand, are extremely important. Only through
this, it is possible to preserve the work for the future. It is the preservation of a splash.20
For the first installation, technical drawings were made that could be considered being the
‘score’ or ‘script’ of the work while the artist supervised the execution of its first performance,
setting the standards, so to speak, for the compliance of the performance with the score.
The Werkstatt/Büro Olafur Eliasson had been doing research for the initial project for
more than a year. They prepared technical drawings for the work and one of Eliasson’s
employees came to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen to lead the installation for two
weeks. Apart from him, Notion Motion was executed by a building company and the tech-
nical staff of the museum. The artist was present for two days to fine-tune the work.21

4.  Back to LeWitt

LeWitt’s Wall Drawings are in many respects comparable to Notion Motion. What is com-
pletely unthinkable (although it has been done) in the case of Newman, rolling over a painted

18 Laurenson, ‘Authenticity, Change and Loss in the Conservation of Time-Based Media Installations’, 5.
19 Tina Fiske, ‘White Walls: Installations, Absence, Iteration and Difference’, in Alison Richmond and Alison
Bracker (eds), Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas and Uncomfortable Truths (Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann,
2009), 229–240, at 233–234 and 239 n. 11.
20 Elbrig de Groot, Jaap Guldemond and Annick Kleizen, ‘Summary of the case study Notion Motion 2005’, in Inside
Installations: Preservation and Presentation of Installation Art (2007), 2 <www.inside-installations.org> accessed 07
November 2014.
21 Ibid., 1.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 291

surface, has become (with some exaggeration) common practice in the case of Sol LeWitt’s
Wall Drawings. Take Wall Drawing #801: Spiral, currently on show in the cupola of Maastricht’s
Bonnenfantenmuseum. It was first executed in 1996 and has been removed and re-executed
twice since then—the last time after LeWitt’s death, with nobody raising an eyebrow about
either its removal or its reconstruction. One of LeWitt’s most famous statements confirms
this practice: ‘In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the
work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and

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decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a
machine that makes the art.’22 LeWitt himself in fact compared his wall drawings with musi-
cal performances: ‘I think of them [wall drawings] like a musical score that can be redone by
any or some people. I like the idea that the same work can exist in two or more places at the
same time.’23 In terms of the conservation dilemma we started with, these statements seem
to confirm the solution of the first comment on Bernicky’s question: ‘The thing could (or
indeed should) simply be done again by a gang of art students, or decorators.’
Although a LeWitt wall drawing might have a lot in common with a piece of music,
there are some significant differences as well. Murals are solid objects and not tran-
sient events like musical performances and usually do not ‘go away’ just by themselves.
Moreover, whereas there is a tradition of established conventions about how to notate and
execute musical scores, in modern and contemporary art these are often specific for the
individual artist. For a LeWitt wall drawing this is more consequential than for Eliasson’s
Notion Motion, because LeWitt’s ‘scores’ are more than merely technical instructions:
they are part of the work, not always easy to interpret and leaving far more freedom to
the drafters who execute them. As Victoria Roberts explains, variability and multiplic-
ity became critical elements in LeWitt’s work around 1970, two years after his first wall
drawing.24 LeWitt allowed for a variety of interpretations of a single set of instructions:
‘Each individual, being unique, if given the same instructions would understand them dif-
ferently and would carry them out differently.’25 The instructions, moreover, were often
phrased as open invitations for active collaboration and subjective decisions by the drafter,
like in the following example:
In two separate rooms so they are not visible to one another, two drafters draw paral-
lel lines within a 36″ x 36″ square.
1) Vertical lines from left side to center
2) Horizontal lines from top to center

22 Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ (1967), reprinted in Béatrice Gross (ed.), Sol LeWitt (Metz: Éditions
du Centre Pompidou-Metz, 2012), 208–211, at 208.
23 From Andrea Miller-Keller, ‘Excerpts from a Correspondence, 1981–1983’, in Susanna Singer (ed.), Sol LeWitt:
Wall Drawings 1969–1984, exhibition catalogue (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1984), quoted in Veronica
Roberts, ‘“Like a Musical Score”: Variability and Multiplicity in Sol LeWitt’s 1970s Wall Drawings’, Master
Drawings 50 (2012) 193–211, at 193.
24 Veronica Roberts, ‘“Like a Musical Score”’, 193.
25 LeWitt, ‘Doing Wall Drawings’, quoted in Béatrice Gross, ‘Order and Disorder: Where Every Wall is a Door’,
in her Sol LeWitt, 10–29, at 22.
292 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

3) Diagonal right lines from right corner to center

4) Diagonal right lines from right corner to center.26
Re-executions are never mere copies of previous executions, but require new interpreta-
tions. Wall drawings initially conceived for a specific site have to be subsequently adjusted
to new exhibition venues.27 As a result, and even though a specific wall drawing may
exist at several places simultaneously, or in different versions at the same place succes-
sively, each execution is unique according to the specific site and the interpretation of

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the drafter(s). The same could of course be said about musical performances of a score;
however, as performances are transient, new performances do not sit in the way of previ-
ous ones. In contrast ‘re-performing’ a wall drawing at the same site (that is, re-painting
it) would mean that a unique artistic object would have to be destroyed. In theory LeWitt
may have had few qualms about a mural’s destruction, and once he even claimed: ‘The
wall drawing is a permanent installation, until destroyed.’28 He was not amused, however,
when in 1998 during a renovation the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague removed the Wall
Drawing designed for the museum’s staircase without notifying him.29 ‘Simply’ redoing
the mural, or parts of it, might therefore not always be the solution for problems with
buckling paint.

5. LeWitt’s Wall Drawings as a Challenge to Goodman’s Distinction

This may indicate that LeWitt’s murals are not just allographic, two-stage works. Kirk
Pillow has argued, ingeniously so,30 that LeWitt’s wall drawings undermine Goodman’s
distinction, because the wall drawings are both allographic and autographic (a possibility
Goodman excluded31). How exactly does this combination of allographic and autographic
come about? According to Pillow,
the initial content of the drawing is a set of allographically replicable instructions that
prescribe a form for the work, but the execution of that form gives rise to works the
final content of which depends on the historically specific rendering choices of their
draftsmen.32

26 Quoted in Roberts, ‘“Like a Musical Score”’, 198.

27 Gross, ‘Order and Disorder’, 19; see also Anna Lovatt, ‘Ideas in Transmission: LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and
the Question of Medium’, Tate Papers Issue 14 (2010) <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-
papers/14/ideas-in-transmission-lewitt-wall-drawings-and-the-question-of-medium> accessed 14 Feb 2013.
28 Sol LeWitt, ‘Wall Drawings’, Arts Magazine 44 (1970), 45, reprinted in Gross, Sol LeWitt, 218–219, at 219.
29 Wilma Suto, ‘Conceptuele werken sneuvelen bij renovatie van Haags Gemeentemuseum’, Volkskrant, 13
November 1998 <http://www.volkskrant.nl/dossier-archief> accessed 07 November 2014.
30 Kirk Pillow, ‘Did Goodman’s Distinction Survive LeWitt?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 61 (2003),
365–380.
31 Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merill, 1972), 83–84, reference in Pillow, ‘Did
Goodman’s Distinction Survive LeWitt?’, 366.
32 Ibid., 372.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 293

In allographic works, the notations decide which features of the work are constitutive of
the work and which are not—this is also the case for the LeWitts, because the instruc-
tions stipulate those features. Nevertheless, once executed, ‘the interpretive and stylistic
choices of the draftsman result in a drawing every feature of which is uniquely constitutive
of it, in which no mark on the wall can be dismissed as contingent, as is the case with
autographic painting’.33 So LeWitt’s wall drawings compromise Goodman’s distinction
because they are not either allographic or autographic but both; and because, although being

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autographic in their execution, they cannot be forged. Pillow demonstrates this with a
hilarious story of a forger attempting but never succeeding to forge a known LeWitt:
every ‘fake’ work she tries to make turns out to be a genuine work, because in one way or
another the effort requires taking LeWitt’s instructions into account—and any drawing
executed from, and complying with, the instructions is inevitably the real thing.
Now it is very important in Pillow’s argument that the stipulation that ‘any drawing
executed from, and complying with, the instructions is inevitably the real thing’ holds and that
there are no other restrictions. Pillow explicitly rejects the option that a wall drawing
should need LeWitt’s authorization in order to be genuine. Although he concedes that
later in his career LeWitt actually stipulated that his drawings should be executed by spe-
cific people, Pillow prefers to ignore this development to be able to question Goodman’s
distinction. For him LeWitt’s earlier position—that any wall drawing executed from and
in compliance with a set of LeWitt’s instructions is a LeWitt wall drawing—is the most
radical from an art-theoretical point of view and philosophically most interesting.34 Why?
If any wall drawing complying with LeWitt’s instructions would be genuine, the wall
drawings would be plainly allographic. There is no need to enquire into the historical
fact of how the painting had come about and whether the draftsman, rather than copying
a previous execution, had indeed followed and interpreted LeWitt’s instructions—just
like there is no need to enquire how the performance of a play has come about, as long as
we can test that it complies with the script of Hamlet (in that case, watching it is watch-
ing Hamlet). When on the other hand, the wall drawing would need LeWitt’s authoriza-
tion, the wall drawing would be plainly autographic: we would need to enquire into the
painting’s history in order to identify it as a genuine LeWitt. But when all wall drawings
executed from and in compliance with a set of LeWitt’s instructions are LeWitt wall drawings,
there is the interesting situation that the wall drawings are allographic in their planning
stage and autographic when executed.35

6.  Drawing a LeWitt in Practice

So far, this stipulation does not contradict the solution of hiring a gang of art students to
redo the mural. But does it indeed hold in actual practice—which is what conservation
has to deal with? Although LeWitt may have once claimed that the execution of his works

33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 371–372.
35 Ibid., 372. As LeWitt himself tended to become more conservative, Pillow introduces a fictional Soll LeWitte
staying faithful to the radical version of LeWitt’s ideas.
294 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

was a ‘perfunctory affair’, in the course of his career he in fact became increasingly precise
about who was doing the re-execution, where and how. Whereas in 1974 he still main-
tained that the execution required few technical skills, in subsequent years he
attributed increasing importance to production methods. The walls had to be pre-
pared in a particular way; the wall drawings were carried out according to strict
application techniques; new, more demanding materials made their appearance, and
the works themselves were bigger and bigger. All of these factors ultimately called for

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constituting a team of professional drafters.36
Brenda Richardson relates that LeWitt initially allowed anybody who conscientiously fol-
lowed the instructions to make copies of his work, but that after the mid-eighties he grew
more reluctant to endorse executions done without his authorization and supervision.
Reflecting recently on the issue of ‘copies’ of his wall drawings, LeWitt acknowl-
edged that his initial views were overly idealistic. At the time, he wanted to believe
that ‘anyone with a pencil, a hand, and clear verbal directions’ could execute credible
versions of his wall drawings. On the evidence, he has come to understand that his
confidence was unrealistic and he now concedes that he was mistaken in espousing
such a position.37
Indeed, one does not easily make or re-make a LeWitt. There is a very interesting day-
by-day report by one of these drafters: artist and writer Stephen Persing has described
how in 2005 he and eight other crew members, two LeWitt studio assistants and six local
recruits, worked for about two months in the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in
Hartford, Connecticut, to execute Wall Drawing #1131, Whirls and Twirls.38 What strikes
the reader in Persing’s narrative are the physical requirements for making the work and
the wall drawing’s materiality: it consists of fifteen layers of paint, of which seven layers
were of white primer, two final coats of white latex and six coats of acrylics. The execu-
tion was a highly complex process requiring several stages: preparing the walls, calcu-
lating the outlines of the arcs and segments, making sketches and transmitting these to
the walls, coordinating the simultaneous and subsequent painting actions, taking precau-
tionary measures to prevent, for instance, dripping and leaking, and making corrections
afterwards.
As the instructions had to be matched to the sizes of the walls, their outlines were
transmitted to the walls by a method called pouncing: the arcs were drawn on large sheets
of paper and holes were pricked along the lines; after the papers were taped into place
on the walls, chalk was pushed through the holes marking the arcs on the wall. The next
step was breaking the arcs into segments and marking each segment with one of the six
colours indicated by LeWitt; the arrangement was random, but no segment should touch
a segment of the same colour. The segments to be painted were masked from adjacent

36 Gross, ‘Order and Disorder’, 21. See also Roberts,‘“Like a Musical Score”’, and Lovatt, ‘Ideas in Transmission’.
37 Brenda Richardson, ‘Unexpected Directions: Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings’, in Gary Garrels (ed.), Sol LeWitt:
A Retrospective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 37–47, at 38.
38 Stephen Persing, ‘Climbing the Walls for Art’, Art in America (2005), 146–151, 215.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 295

areas and lined with paper gutters made of cash register tape to catch drips and prevent
leakage. The unmasked segments were painted with several layers of paint; when painted,
they were covered and the adjacent segments painted. There was a complicated working
system:
The acrylics are applied in rotation, so that each of us applies one coat of every color
to every segment. After each coat we wait 15 or 20 minutes to allow it to dry before
starting the next. During each hiatus Tak and Jesse [LeWitt’s assistants] study the

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paint minutely, looking for missed spots, drips or overly regular brushstrokes (we
must avoid anything that might look like a pattern—randomness is the watchword).
It feels like having an exam graded by two exacting professors.39
Often corrections had to be made:
Once the masking is off today, we get a chance to see our work as never before. There
are a few mistakes. Somehow, two adjoining segments were both painted purple (that
is the biggest mistake), and there are places where segments or arcs abut that need
help. Where the drafting tape did not adhere firmly to the wall some white latex
leaked through, despite the acrylic medium, leaving irregular edges that must be
touched up with a small brush.40
After LeWitt’s death in 2007 the studio assistants continued supervising the execution of
Wall Drawings. More or less the same awe for the meticulous and demanding drafting pro-
cess as we sense in Persing’s report is expressed by critic Bénédicte Ramade in response
to the execution of thirty-three works in the 2012–13 LeWitt retrospective at the Centre
Pompidou-Metz. As Ramade notes, more than seventy people were needed to make the
exhibition possible: some sixty art or architecture students trained by twelve profes-
sional artists under the guidance of seven draftsmen accredited by the LeWitt estate,
with head assistant John Hogan—having thirty-three years of experience—serving as
‘chef d’orchestre’.41 This crew worked for six days a week during two months. Everything
counted: the sizes of the pencils and chalk sticks, the wringing of the cloths used for
the washing of the ink, the number of paint layers.42 Ramade remarks that this extreme
perfectionism might surprise and shatter the image one might have formed of conceptual-
ists neglecting realization. On the contrary, there are, for instance, five phases required
for appropriately sharpening the points of the crayons. For Wall Drawing # 542, there is
even ‘a precise and immutable ritual’ for the washing: ‘“wipe, boom, wipe”, pour “essuyer,
tapoter, essuyer”, rythme et musique d’une oeuvre en apparence simple, mais réellement
fastidieuse à executer’.43 Ramade observes that through the systematic transmission of
craftmanship, LeWitt is one of the few conceptual artists who has secured the future of his
works. There is, however, a downside to this almost ritual precision: exhibiting a LeWitt

39 Ibid., 149.
40 Ibid., 150.
41 Bénédicte Ramade, ‘Sol LeWitt: Les coulisses du montage’, L’oeil (2012), 66–71, at 68.
42 Ibid., 69.
43 Ibid.
296 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

means that one has to invite his crew, which has its price. Returning to our conservation
problem, we may conclude that the Carnegie Museum might have had good reasons not
to redo the wall drawing again, in particular taking into account that it had already been
repainted in 2007: a gang of students would have been neither equipped nor authorized,
to do so—and going back to the LeWitt studio might have been far too expensive.

7.  Back to the Autographic?

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When we consider LeWitt’s work in purely ontological terms, we tend to foreground
the symbolic relation between the work’s concept and its resulting materialization and to
overlook the practical fact that there is an enormous amount of partly explicit, partly tacit
knowhow involved, which is currently transmitted under the supervision of his studio
assistants. Theoretically, the requirement of involving LeWitt’s studio in the execution of
the murals means that not every execution of LeWitt’s instructions that is executed from
and compliant with the instructions is a genuine LeWitt. Could we solve the puzzle by
saying (as Pillow suggests—and rejects—and Goodman seems to imply) that although
the wall drawings are executed by others following instructions, analytically they are
still autographic, one-stage paintings—because it is the artist who finally authorizes the
result?
A convincing argument we could use for defending this position has been formulated
by Sherri Irvin, stating that it is always the artist’s sanction that determines what features
belong to the artwork and what features do not belong to it.44 Contemporary artworks
are more variable than traditional works; but we need to distinguish between changes
which have an impact on the work as an artwork, and thereby on the range of appropriate
interpretations, and changes which only affect the work as an object, leaving its possible
interpretations unchanged.45 Flaking paint usually belongs to the latter type of changes;
we deliberately ignore or try to look through such alterations in our appreciation of a
work’s possible meanings—unless, as in the case of Saburo Murakami’s Peeling Off paint-
ings, the flaking is a relevant feature of the work as an artwork.46 It is the artist’s sanction-
ing that is decisive for the difference: the publicly available actions and communications
through which she or he implicitly or explicitly stipulates what elements and features
constitute—to go back to Laurenson’s terminology—its work-defining properties.47 We
find here another difference between notated music or scripted plays on the one hand and

44 Sherri Irvin, ‘The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005),
315–326.
45 The distinction between the work as a physical object and the work as a work of art has a long history; for
an elaborate discussion, see Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). In
conservation theory, see Cesare Brandi, Theory of Restoration, ed. Giuseppe Basile, trans. Cynthia Rockwell
(Rome: Instituto Centrale de Restauro/Nardini Editore 2005).
46 Sherri Irvin, ‘The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks’, in Kathleen Stock and Katherine Thomson-Jones
(eds), New Waves in Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) 1–19, at 5.
47 The public nature of these sanctioning actions and communications distinguish them from mere intentions
(Irvin, The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art, 320–322).
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 297

supposedly allographic two-stage visual artworks on the other: not only are murals more
solid and less entrenched in conventional and codified execution practices than musical
or theatrical performances, but their ontological ‘make up’ is far more dependent on the
artist’s authorization. Although there are famous instances, like the Beckett estate that
exerts tight control over the performances of Beckett’s plays, this does not mean that an
illegitimate performance of Waiting for Godot is not—ontologically speaking—an instance
of the work. With a LeWitt Wall Drawing, it is ultimately the artist who decides—even if

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he decides to delegate a part of his authority to others.
Yet calling the work fully and unambiguously autographic goes against both LeWitt’s the-
ory and practice, which emphatically separated the conception of the idea from the process
of execution. In his ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, he stipulated 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’.48 Victoria Roberts emphasizes that the
Paragraphs were written before LeWitt made his first Wall Drawing. In particular from 1970
onwards, some room was given for ‘the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective’, but not
as pertaining to the subjective decisions of the artist himself but to those of his drafters.49
The aesthetic impact of his wall drawings often surprised him and even if he became increas-
ingly cautious and critical about the execution of his works, he hardly ever intervened in the
process: ‘with a few rare exceptions, there were no interventions of an aesthetic nature dur-
ing the realization of the works’.50 This was even the case when a student took the liberty to
interpret the instructions for a print in such a way that the outcome uncannily resembled a
work of Frank Stella; although unpleasantly surprised, LeWitt approved the edition.51
LeWitt’s working method is the complete opposite of Michael Baxandall’s analysis of the
artist’s intentionality. Using Picasso’s portrait of Kahnweiler as his example, Baxandall argues
that Picasso continuously would have to redefine the artistic problem he addressed through
the painting, each stroke altering the painting so as to present the painter with a new situation:
Cézanne had said, and Picasso later quoted him with approval as saying, that every
brushstroke changes a picture. ... They meant that in the course of painting a picture
each brushstroke will modify the effect of the brushstrokes so far made, so that with
each brushstroke the painter finds himself addressing a new situation. For instance,
the addition of a new tone or hue can modify the relationships and the phenomenal
character of the previously placed tones and hues; and because of the simultaneous
presence of the elements of a picture this effect is very powerful, however clearly the
painter has in mind a final character. This is to say that in a painting a picture the total
problem of the picture is liable to be a continually developing and self-revising one.52

48 Reprinted in Gross, Sol Lewitt, 208–213, at 209.

49 Roberts, ‘“Like a Musical Score”’, 196.
50 Gross, ‘Order and Disorder’, 26.
51 Roberts, ‘“Like a Musical Score”’, 199.
52 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1985), 62.
298 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

Abstract expressionist action painters like Pollock and De Kooning had elevated this logic
of continual redefinition to the status of an all-determining artistic method, a practice
LeWitt rejected by eliminating what he called ‘the arbitrary, the capricious, and the sub-
jective’ from his own decision-making (even if he granted some leeway for other people’s
decisions). By formulating the instructions beforehand and leaving the execution wholly
to others, LeWitt acted more like Benjamin Baker, the designer of the Forth Bridge, to
whose working methods Baxandall contrasted Picasso’s. This is not without consequence

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for the wall drawings’ possibly autographic status. The significance of Goodman’s asser-
tion that in painting no distinction can be made between its constitutive and contin-
gent properties ultimately hinges upon the assumption that in painting the painting, the
painter has been in a continuous exchange with the results of his work and that even the
most subtle features are therefore at least potentially intentional. Although LeWitt revised
his ideas and methods throughout his life, this happened in the stage between one work
and another, not during the execution of a single work.53
Classifying LeWitt’s wall drawings unambiguously under the label ‘autographic art’
seems just as counter-intuitive as calling them allographic—which has particular implica-
tions for the conservation options open to the Carnegie Museum. Traditional guidelines
such as minimal intervention and reversibility do not have the same pertinence as they
would have had in the case of a Rembrandt self-portrait, or a Newman colour field.

8.  A Pragmatic and Historical Understanding of Goodman’s

Distinction
The distinction between allographic and autographic as outlined by Goodman, Pillow
and others helps conservation theory to analyse the rationale behind, and the limits of,
the comparison of installation art, media art, performance art and the like with notated
music. However, such distinctions tend to lead to classifications that overlook the gradual
differences between and the complexity of individual works of art. It is therefore tempting
to leave such classifications altogether behind us and follow Sherri Irvin’s proposal to ‘con-
sider the ontological status of each contemporary artwork individually’.54 Starting from
a definition of the artwork as ‘the entity that realizes the parameters sanctioned by the
artist’55 and pointing to the fact that ‘artists sanction different kinds of entities in different
cases’56, she concludes that ‘because the background knowledge that establishes which
features of the object are relevant varies from case to case, there is no straightforward

53 Corrections of mistakes and improvements happened in later works or later executions of the same work.
For instance, for a specific wall drawing LeWitt used instructions of an earlier print, but phrased them more
precisely to prevent misunderstandings (Roberts, ‘“Like a Musical Score”’, 199); or he substituted acrylic for ink
in the re-execution of certain wall drawings. The same would also go for Baxandall’s Picasso, whose painting of
Kahnweiler ‘appears as one episode in a serial performance of problem-stating and problem-solving’ (Baxandall,
Patterns of Intention, 66).
54 Irvin, ‘The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks’, 1.
55 Ibid., 6.
56 Ibid.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 299

algorithm for inferring the artwork based on the physical object’—and, I would like to
add, not from the initial concept either. Therefore, ‘one must attend directly to the details
of what the artist has sanctioned in the particular case’.57
Although I agree with Irvin that we need to look at individual artworks each time, I would
not wish to give up the attempt to transcend sheer individuality and look for more general
patterns and tendencies.58 Moreover, Irvin’s focus on critical practice as the defining constraint
informing claims about artworks tends to pinpoint an artwork’s ontology to the time of its

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initial critical reception and raises the problem that works may, sometimes subtly and gradu-
ally and sometimes drastically, shift status in different phases of their career.59 Irvin herself has
explicitly addressed this problem in her paper on the artist’s sanction,60 where she presents
the case of Liz Magor’s Time and Mrs. Tiber (1976) in the collection of the National Gallery of
Canada, a work consisting, among other objects, of jars of preserves which Magor initially had
ordered to be thrown away when they were no longer in an exhibitable condition. When the
jars turned out to deteriorate much faster than Magor had expected, she consented to take
conservation measures and keep unexhibitable jars in the gallery’s Study Collection rather than
throwing them out. This change in sanctioning, Irvin shows, has far-reaching consequences
for how the work should be apprehended and for the range of its appropriate interpretations.
The literature on contemporary art conservation suggests that Magor’s case is not an iso-
lated one. Unforeseen alterations of materials occur quite often, and so do other factors—
obsolescence of display equipment, changes in the environment of site-specific works—that
profoundly affect the identity of contemporary artworks. Very regularly, museum conser-
vators have to take decisions that affect important features of such works and the artist’s
voice is not always decisive in the decision making.61 We have to investigate such changes on

57 Ibid., 15.
58 Sally Wyatt and Brian Balmer, ‘Home on the Range: What and Where is the Middle in Science and Technology
Studies?’, Science, Technology, and Human Values 32 (2007), 619–626.
59 See Irvin’s claim that a work like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) will continue to
exist even when the pile of candies it is made of is thrown away in between exhibitions. I am not so sure whether
that will always be the case; the candy factory may go out of business and thereby indirectly, but fundamentally,
change the nature of a next installation. Irvin, ‘The Ontological Diversity of Visual Artworks’, at 11.
60 Irvin, ‘The Artist’s Sanction in Contemporary Art’.
61 A selection of the relevant literature: Ysbrand Hummelen and Dionne Sillé (eds), Modern Art: Who Cares? An
Interdisciplinary Research Project and an International Symposium on the Conservation of Modern and Contemporary Art
(Amsterdam: The Foundation for the Conservation of Modern Art and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural
Heritage, 1999); Glenn Wharton, ‘The Challenges of Conserving Contemporary Art’, in Bruce Altshuler (ed.),
Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 163–178;
Cornelia Weyer, ‘Restoration Theory Applied to Installation Art’, Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst und Kulturgut,
(2006), 40–48; Rita Macedo, ‘Between the Aesthetics and the Ethics of the Ephemeral’, in Rita Macedo and
Raquel Henriques da Silva (eds), Ephemeral Art and Conservation: The Paradigm of Contemporary Art and Ethnographic
Objects (Lisbon: IHA, 2010); Jan Marontate, ‘Rethinking Permanence and Change in Contemporary Cultural
Preservation Strategies’, Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society 34 (2010), 285–305; Tatja Scholte and Glenn
Wharton (eds), Inside Installations: Theory and Practice in the Care of Complex Artworks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2011); Vivian van Saaze, Installation Art and the Museum: Presentation and Conservation of Changing
Artworks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013).
300 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

a case-by-case basis indeed, but this does not mean that we cannot discern commonalities
between different cases—for instance by pointing out that comparable shifts in an artist’s
stance towards the conservation of a work occur more often in certain stages of a work’s
biography, in particular after a work’s acquisition by a museum and especially after long
periods of storage.62 Embedding a work’s changing ontological characteristics within a
biography with culturally recognized stages not only provides a framework for comparison
and generalization; it also solves a problem of how to account for a work’s history in our

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interpretations. If the new state of the work asks for a new interpretation, what should we
do with the fact that it was a different work ten years ago? Have the interpretations of its
past state all of a sudden lost their validity, or do they, in some way or another, still resonate
in our appreciation of its present state? The term ‘biography’ as applied to cultural objects
helps to link a work’s present with its past and its possible futures. Moreover, it embeds its
fortunes in a historical, cultural and institutional context.
Not only do contemporary artworks’ biographies manifest comparable developments
in comparable stages, we can also discern different normative ‘logics’ in how they should
be perpetuated. Within the biographical framework, I  would propose to keep general
ontological terms and distinctions in our critical vocabulary, but use them differently.
Rather than dividing the arts into mutually exclusive and (supposedly) internally homo-
geneous categories, the terms may constitute poles marking a field of possibilities. In
contemporary art, fully autographic, one-stage artworks are relatively rare and so are
out-and-out allographic, two-stage works.63 Those rare instances may serve as paradig-
matic cases, helping us to sort out relevant characteristics of more ambiguous examples by
means of careful comparison.64 Both individual works and whole oeuvres might be ranged
along a continuum and, moreover, shift over time into one direction or another according
to a developing practice.65 With regard to the distinction discussed in this paper, I would

62 Suggesting that institutional practices may have a more decisive impact on an artist’s sanctioning than Irvin
theoretically allows for. For a discussion of the notion of a cultural biography of objects and relevant stages see
Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as a Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.) The
Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91;
Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, ‘The Cultural Biography of Objects’, World Archeology 31 (1999), 169–178;
Renée van de Vall et al., ‘Reflections on a Biographical Approach to Contemporary Art Conservation’, Proceedings
ICOM-CC 16th Triennial Conference: WG Theory and History in Conservation, Lisbon, September 2011.
63 Many contemporary works contain both autographic, one-stage and allographic, two-stage elements, comparable
to what Hanna Hölling has demonstrated for Nam June Paik (Re: Paik: On Time, Changeability and Identity in the
Conservation of Nam June Paiks’s Multimedia Installations, PhD thesis University of Amsterdam, 2013, 90–96).
64 Albert R. Jonson and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1988).
65 I have argued elsewhere that seen from a conservation perspective, contemporary artworks come in three broad
varieties: works that should be preserved in their original physical state as much as possible; works that should
be repeated/re-executed according to a set of instructions; works that should evolve along some previously set
rules or parameters. The autographic/allographic distinction helps to articulate the difference between the first
and the second variety. I will leave the third variety aside here, for this see Renée van de Vall, ‘Documenting
Dilemmas: On the Relevance of Ethically Ambiguous Cases’, Revista de História da Arte (forthcoming). These
varieties are paradigmatically defined (according to exemplary cases) and not mutually exclusive.
 THE DEVIL AND THE DETAILS | 301

suggest that rather than being either autographical or allographical, or both autographical
and allographical, the wall drawings hover between the two and change over time.
In this the current situation of LeWitt’s work might resemble what Goodman himself
stated about dance. At the end of his chapter on art and authenticity, Goodman concedes
that ultimately the difference between autographic and allographic arts is a pragmatic
rather than an essential one:
Initially, perhaps, all arts are autographic. Where the works are transitory, as in sing-

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ing and reciting, or require many persons for their production, as in architecture and
symphonic music, a notation may be devised in order to transcend the limitations of
time and the individual. This involves a distinction between the constitutive and the
contingent properties of a work.66
Whether and how such distinctions can be drawn depends on precedent practices, practi-
cal decisions as to what is prescribed and what is optional for specific works. Introducing
a notational system may also amend these practices. Dance offers an interesting example
of an art where the possibility of introducing such a system is a controversial issue. But
where, according to Goodman, dance, being ephemeral and not producible by one per-
son, is amenable to notation, painting, which is neither, is not.67 In this, LeWitt indeed
proves him wrong.68
What happened with LeWitt’s oeuvre was a slightly different sequence than the one
Goodman outlined. First a notational system was devised that—in Pillow’s words—
enabled everybody who executed a wall drawing from and in compliance with the instruc-
tions to produce a genuine LeWitt. In the course of his artistic practice and the evolution
of his work, these notations were deemed insufficient to allow everybody to re-do his
work; so he singled out people that were capable of doing it the right way. This select
group grew out to a whole crew of people all over the world being trained under the
supervision of a few trusted assistants. Although never becoming fully autographic works
like Rembrandt’s Nightwatch or Newman’s Who’s Afraid, the works tended more to the
autographic pole than previously. Finally, after LeWitt’s death we may see that his work
will gradually tend more to the allographic pole again. When years pass by, the oral and
embodied transmission of the tacit knowledge and skills of the assistants might be sup-
ported by or even substituted by written guidelines, and the instructions as stipulated
by LeWitt will be amended and supplemented by working notes of his crew. As Gross
indicated in a footnote, this process is already underway, as
a kind of manual, or ‘cook book’, for future drafters, based on documents established
by the artist (instructions, diagrams, preparatory drawings, samples of materials,
etc.) is being developed at the Yale University Study Center under the direction of
the LeWitt studio.69

66 Goodman, Languages of Art, 121.

67 Ibid., 122.
68 But see also note 15.
69 Gross, ‘Order and Disorder’, 22 n. 58.
302 | RENÉE VAN DE VALL

9.  Back to the Conservation Problem: How to Restore a Wall Drawing?

Used within the context of a biographical approach, Goodman’s terms help us to articu-
late the different sides of the conservation dilemma and corresponding options for con-
servation. If the Carnegie Museum’s wall drawing would have been plainly allographic,
the hesitation of the conservator to take invasive measures would have been as incompre-
hensible as when the Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum would have hesitated to replace a
broken or rotten wooden walkway of Notion Motion. However, if a single execution would

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have been autographic in the same sense as a traditional painting is, the 2007 repainting
would already have been unthinkable. Guidelines like minimal intervention and revers-
ibility apply to works which are unique; no particle taken away from the Nightwatch or
Who’s Afraid can ever be brought back again. LeWitt’s wall drawings are relatively unique.
A  work can have different simultaneous or successive executions that are each unique
and yet genuine instantiations of the work. Although we can say for each specific execu-
tion that every feature is uniquely constitutive of it, and that no mark on the wall can be
dismissed as contingent, removal of original material is not as irrevocable as it would be
in a fully autographic painting. The Wall Drawing is not ephemeral, but it is temporary; and
although each mural is a solid material entity, it is replaceable in that it can be removed
and re-executed. However, as re-executing a Wall Drawing costs a lot of time, organiza-
tion, effort and costs, few museums will like to do so frequently. For the Carnegie this
would mean that ‘more intrusive’ measures like stripping of tapes and repainting the
removed paint layers would be precarious, but would not result in irreversible losses.
Ethically speaking this suggests that the Carnegie Museum may provisionally opt for an
intrusive restoration, preferably under the supervision of LeWitt’s studio, knowing that,
come time and money, it can re-execute the whole drawing again.

Renée van de Vall

Maastricht University
r.vandevall@maastrichtuniversity.nl