Insurance Law

The Courthouse with a Heart Full of Sol

By George Wallace

The intersection of art and law has been a recurring topic here at Decs&Excs, especially when one declines to yield the right of way to the other.  One subset of that topic has been courthouses of artistic or architectural interest.  See, e.g., here or here.

The newish federal courthouse in Springfield, Massachusetts, boasts a highly respectable architectural pedigree.  The principal architect is Moshe Safdie, perhaps best known for Habitat, the apartment building he constructed for Montreal's Expo '67 by literally stacking modular residential units on and around one another.  Better yet, as Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight reports online today,the Springfield courthouse is home to an important -- and large -- piece of contemporary art.

The late Sol LeWitt (1928 - 2007) worked in many media and is associated with both the Minimalist and Conceptualist strains of contemporary art.  Those strains meld in LeWitt's large body of "Wall Drawings."  As their name suggests, LeWitt's wall drawings are drawn (or painted or otherwise applied) on walls of existing buildings.  LeWitt rarely executed the drawings himself.  Instead, the artist's creative contribution was to create the detailed sets of written instructions that others would follow, with or without Lewitt's supervison, to bring the drawing into the material world.  The wall drawings, in other words, exist principally as sets of instructions for their own creation.  The idea of the drawing is the drawing.  This is the sort of thing that some of us like very much and that others point to as Exhibit "A" in support of their "Motion to Strike All Contemporary 'Art' as a Sham, a Frolic, and a Banter."

The wall drawing in the Springfield courthouse is one of the last LeWitt created.  "Wall Drawing No. 1259: Loopy Doopy (Springfield)" is 300 feet long, covering the entire length of the third floor and enveloping the entrances to four courtrooms.  Christopher Knight writes:

In the last decade or so of his life, LeWitt made a number of drawings by ... 

... taping together two pencils and rolling them through his fingers and twisting his wrist as he moved across the page. That became the template for the mural.

The energy of the piece derives from the way it negotiates the crazy play of its linear twists and turns with the strict rationality of the architectural setting.  (The building was designed by Boston architect Moshe Safdie.)  On a black acrylic ground, the wide white lines seem to emerge from the surrounding white-walled interior, which merges a rectilinear grid with a compound curve.  Buildings can be eccentric, but they must also subscribe to the logic of structural codes -- which an artist can happily ignore.  The loopy-doopy drawing, flooded with natural light from the building's glass facade and skylights directly above, takes that fundamental difference and runs with it.

He even provides video, walking the full length of the third floor corridor:

As public art goes, this is top flight.  I cannot speak for attorneys who actually have to practice in its presence, but I suspect that if I found myself in Springfield, Massachusetts, waiting to make an argument in one of those courtrooms, the contemplation of all those loops and doops would be just what I would want to get my head on straight.  Other advocates' mileage may vary.

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For Extra Credit: Since last November, and for the next couple of decades, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art [Mass MOCA] will be home to the world's largest assemblage of executed LeWitt wall drawings: 105 of them, to be exact.  This Mass MOCA video looks in depth at the variety of the drawings and at the processes involved in fulfilling the artist's instructions.  In some sense, these works are not so much art as they are repetitive motion injuries waiting to happen:

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Your Government has created a lavishly illustrated brochure [PDF] about the Springfield Courthouse, its architecture and art.  The photo at top has been excerpted from that publication.  A gallery of photos of the building, including one more of the LeWitt, is accessible on the Court's site.

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Full post as published by Declarations and Exclusions on March 25, 2009 (boomark / email).