A Conversation with Werner Kramarsky

CR: Maybe I should say a second thing that relativizes that to some degree, which is that I was surprised going through this selection of artists to see the amount of almost expressive or vaguely surrealist choice of imagery, way of drawing a line. A hand that is much more reminiscent of early Eva Hesse then early Sol LeWitt. Which is almost a going back to—

WK: Let me stop you there, because you’re probably right in that it is more expressive and more related to early Eva Hesse and also to late Sol LeWitt. Because that is a part of it. Really strict geometric abstraction, although there is some of it, is less useful from that teaching point of view that I was interested in. So I suspect that you are right. There are fewer hard-edge geometric abstraction drawings in most of the teaching material that I have given away, but there is quite a lot of word art in it, which leans back to that. There is some geometric material. I guess that Sol’s later drawings, which I think of as romantic, the colors and their motion, also played a part in what I gave away in later years because by that time I had looked at a lot of that.

CR: I think late Sol LeWitt is an excellent moment to dwell on because I think no one else from that generation insisted as much on the material qualities of the process. Of trying to move forward and push further what you can do with the paint and with the paper with the exception of maybe Richard Serra’s drawings, which are becoming more and more material driven, particularly if I compare it to other conceptual artists. For me, Sol LeWitt was always the artist who brought along the late 60s conceptual traditions where it really moved away from materials and where the process got pushed into the theoretical arena. To insist on Sol LeWitt and to carry that through into the late drawings, in a way, puts a primacy on the material. I’m interested in that because the way you talk about this material selected as a teaching tool—where you learn about the paper and the support and the various graphic tools and the way in which they translate the line and what kind of line comes out—I think is a very particular focus on how process is understood through materials rather than through concepts.