Chris Cobb

Photo album from the installation of Sol LeWitt's Drawing Retrospective at MASS MoCA.

• Chris Cobb (American).
• North Adams, MA: [n.p.], 2008.
• 85 pages.
• Wall drawings 343 and 146 installation.
• Brief identifying notes to verso of all prints.
• Production mark-up notes in silver ink to rectos of a small number of photos.
• Loose sheet briefly cataloging the contents, handwritten and signed by Cobb.
• Prints in white envelope, small folio with protective plastic sleeves housed in ring-bound portfolio with handle and zipper closure.

Portraits of Sol LeWitt wall drawing installers, with images of the wall drawings themselves, photographed by artist and writer Chris Cobb, himself one of the installers for the exhibition, over course of the six-month creation of the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Retrospective at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

From Cabb's included description: "These were made as tests for the final portfolios made for the museum & for Sol's widow Carol LeWitt. The portraits haven't been published, only shown at Mass MoCA." Portrait subjects are identified on versos by first name and position title; of the several Wall Drawings visible, most are shown in progress, with a few shots of drawings #343 and #146 in a completed or nearly completed state.

As LeWitt wrote in his 1967 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair." Accordingly, his Wall Drawings were recreated each time they were exhibited, as Cobb detailed in a 2008 Believer article: "Early in LeWitt's career he made the drawings himself, but as demand for them grew it became necessary for him to rely on a small group of draftsmen who could faithfully carry out his instructions, developing techniques specific to each wall drawing [...] I am working, alongside my apprentice Julia, on Wall Drawing #343. By 'working on' I mean that I am attempting to recreate, from a brief page of written instructions, a work of conceptual art."

A remarkable collection, documenting the process of recreating a body of artwork itself impermanent by design. And according to the photographer, the first time a Lewitt work has been allowed to be documented in process.