Music of the spheres? Sol LeWitt & Paula Robison at the Gardner, ‘Quantum Grids’ at Harvard BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	"VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY SOL LeWITT & PAULA ROBISON Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum | Through November 13 "QUANTUM GRIDS" Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Arts, Harvard University | Through April 16

"The Music of Forgetting" is the title of the essay curator Nicholas Baume wrote for the "Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes" show that opened at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum in 2001. Baume was quoting Frederick Nietzsche, and he meant the kind of forgetting "that can clear the mind in order to make space in which to think anew." The current shows at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Harvard’s Sert Gallery, both involving conceptual-art pioneer LeWitt, raise vital questions about the music of forgetting and also remembering, about how art begins in the mind and where it goes from there.

Sol LeWitt and flutist Paula Robison met in 1987 at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, where, having been introduced to each other by Pieranna Cavalchini, they discovered they both loved Mozart, in particular his D-major Flute Quartet. Cavalchini is now curator of contemporary art at the Gardner, and she’s brought LeWitt and Robison together again, this time for a collaboration in the museum’s special-exhibition room. LeWitt’s concept (the work was executed by three drawers) has thick lines in eight colors — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, gray, and black (no brown) — rising and dipping and racing around the room’s white walls, frequently intersecting (no pattern as to which overlaps) and just as frequently disappearing into the ceiling or the floor, to reappear a few feet later where you’d expect to see the continuation of the curve. The entire work intersects with Mozart’s four flute quartets, one of which is performed each day in the room according to a schedule that’s posted on the museum’s http://www.gardnermuseum.org/ Web site.

At the press reception for "Variations," Robison and three students played the D-major Quartet and LeWitt himself made a surprise appearance. Artists’ workshops have been turning out art since at least the Middle Ages, but in this case the artist didn’t supervise, and so we got to watch as he saw his work for the first time. A composer is also a conceptual artist: the score isn’t really art until he or someone else performs it, and then he hears it for the first time, along with the rest of the audience. That’s where Mozart and LeWitt intersect. But otherwise, it’s hard to find a common theme. The space LeWitt has made at the Gardner to think anew is stark white with industrial-strength primary colors in sharp outline. It’s the music of forgetting not just the (possibly outmoded) traditions of artmaking but the entire spectrum of human emotion. Mozart’s art is the music of remembering. Even in the Flute Quartets, which he wrote on commission and for an instrument that was far from his favorite, he’s reforging rather than forgetting, making us remember emotions we mightn’t have known we had.

The performance of the Quartet conjured LeWitt more than Mozart: hard-edged, relentlessly upbeat and cheery, with little subtlety or sadness. Playing in a small room with bare walls before a small audience isn’t flattering to anyone’s acoustic; Robison sounds much better on her old Vanguard recording with members of the Tokyo String Quartet. Still, when I closed my eyes, I "saw" Picasso’s 1946 painting Le joie de vivre rather than anything by LeWitt. The one thing in the room that made me remember Mozart was LeWitt himself, beaming at his three drawers (his chief technician, Takeshi Arita, plus Mass Art graduate April Gymiski and SMFA graduate Reese Inman), posing for photos with the Gardner staff, exuding the Menschlichkeit that seems to be missing from his art.

Across the river at the Sert Gallery, in Harvard’s Carpenter Center, "Quantum Grids" raises questions about the nature of the physical world as well as the nature of art. Another one-room show, it’s anchored by LeWitt’s Four-Part Geometric Structure (1978-’79), which takes up the floor. One wall is given over to Yayoi Kusama’s oil Accretions II (1967), another to Fred Tomaselli’s inkjet digital print Guilty (2005). Cai Guo-Qiang’s The Century with Mushroom Clouds (1996) comprises three elements with the same name: a large gunpowder-on-paper painting, a video, and a brass display rack of postcards made from the video.

Quantum theory arose from the discovery that matter and energy exist as both particles ("quanta") and waves, and it takes in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and Einstein’s discovery that matter bends light and that space is actually spacetime. The grid of Four-Part Geometric Structure just looks like old-fashioned cubic geometry. Five open but complete shapes — cube, pyramid, truncated pyramid, upright oblong, leaning oblong — are arranged in groups of four on five planks, with a different shape missing from each plank, and all of it painted bright white. In her brochure note, associate curator of contemporary art Linda Norden notes Richard Serra’s contention that "the industrial grid has been made obsolete by higher-order forms that propel movement rather than framing experience" but argues that "the sense of possibility keeps LeWitt’s grid-idea current."

Accretions II is a network of indeterminate white shapes on a madder-rose ground, or maybe vice versa; up close it looks chaotic, but from a distance spiral forms appear, as if galaxies were coming into being. Guilty reproduces the front page of this year’s March 16 New York Times, in which we read that WorldCom head Bernard Ebbers has been convicted of fraud and see a photo in which he’s holding hands with his wife, Kristie. Tomaselli has covered Ebbers’s face with an exploding psychedelic flower mask that suggests the lysergic ’60s; a flash of lightning yellow centers on Kristie’s left eye, looking like a bullet hole, and electric current seems to surge from the couple’s clasped hands. The applied LSD-tab grid reads like an afterthought. Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder painting, on the other hand, only implies a grid, with its 90 or so irregularly placed gunshot mushroom clouds, and then transcends it by inviting you to meditate on the idea of bullets as miniature atomic bombs, or the thought that gunpowder facilitated fireworks before it facilitated firearms. For an instant during the video, which uses footage from atom-bomb test sites, the decaying mushroom cloud even resembles Cai’s painting.

This is art that remembers where LeWitt’s seems to forget, that conjures where his conceptualizes. LeWitt clears — in some cases empties — the mind so art can begin, but where it goes is entirely up to the viewer; great artists from Giotto to De Kooning have suggested a direction. Norden’s essay concludes, "Each of the artworks here invokes the grid less as container than as counterpoint." Fair enough: give us less concept, less container, more counterpoint.