Wall Drawing 289
Sol LeWitt's 1976 instructions for a 6-inch grid and white crayon lines on black walls, executed by draftsmen who choose each line's exact grid-point endpoint.
Run it
What it looks like when it goes wrong (4)
- With only a handful of grid points to choose among, many of the lines from one origin land on the same few points. A dozen supposedly independent choices collapse into two or three repeated angles — the instruction is followed correctly, the grid just stopped offering enough options for that to look free.
- Sampling only the grid points immediately around each origin, instead of anywhere on the grid as the instruction actually allows, bunches every fan into a tight tangle at its starting point instead of spreading across the wall — a plausible coding slip (“pick a nearby point” instead of “pick any point”), not a legitimate reading of the rule.
- At the coarsest possible grid, the four corners ARE the only grid points, so a corner’s own position is one of just four candidates for where its lines can end. Several of the twelve lines from a corner land on that exact point by chance and vanish into a dot instead of a line — a technically valid execution of the rule that still reads as broken.
- The instruction fixes 24 lines from the centre and 12 from each of the eight side- and corner-origins. Doubling those counts still produces a plausible-looking radial drawing, but it is no longer an execution of Wall Drawing 289 — the counts are the one part of the rule with no room for interpretation.
Clean-room implementation — written from the described algorithm, not from source. Reuse policy
What it is
A 6-inch (15 cm) pencil grid covers each of four black walls, and white crayon lines run to points on that grid. The work is dated July 1976. At MASS MoCA only one of the four walls is on view — Sol LeWitt chose to present the fourth wall alone there, not the draftsmen.
The rule behind it
The instruction fixes the grid, the origin points, and how many lines run from each origin — but leaves open the one thing a naive reading of “instructions” expects to be nailed down: where each line actually ends.
For the fourth wall — the only one this evidence specifies — the counts and origins are exact:
- Rule a 6-inch grid across the wall.
- Draw 24 white crayon lines from the center of the wall.
- Draw 12 white crayon lines from the midpoint of each of the four sides (12 per midpoint).
- Draw 12 white crayon lines from each of the four corners (12 per corner).
- Every line must end at a point on the grid, but which point is left to the draftsman: “it is up to the draftsmen to determine at which point each line should end.” Length and placement are, in the instruction’s own terms, “determined by the drafter.”
Before a line goes down in crayon, the draftsmen lay it out first in red string, which stands in for the white line — a way of resolving the endpoint before it’s fixed permanently.
What the other three walls specify is not in this evidence, so whether they share the fourth wall’s origins and counts, or use different ones, is an open question here. What the fourth wall’s rule does show is that fixing structure precisely — spacing, origins, how many lines from where — is compatible with leaving the geometry itself undetermined. Nothing in the instruction picks one endpoint over another, so two draftsmen following it could reasonably choose differently and both would be executing the piece correctly.
Why it mattered
The instruction separates what the artist controls from what he hands off: LeWitt’s specification fixes the grid, the wall count, and the exact line counts from each origin, and delegates the actual drawing — every line’s length and terminus — to whoever executes it. That delegation isn’t total, though: it was LeWitt, not the draftsmen, who decided which one of the four walls MASS MoCA would show.
Where to see the original
The fourth wall is installed at MASS MoCA: white crayon lines and a black pencil grid on a black wall.
Connected to
Created by: Sol LeWitt
Example of: bounded indeterminacy