Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance art and the performing arts 211
least three possible answers to these questions are suggested by LeWitt’s
various observations.
(1) The “conceptual work” interpretation : The vehicle is the idea of carrying out
the actions characterized in the specifications. If enactment of the idea
furthers our appreciation, it does so only by enlivening the idea as
verbally specified. Or, more radically, the experiencing of the object
together with the realization of the contingent nature of our aesthetic
responses given LeWitt’s plan, serves merely to bring home to us the
purely conceptual nature of the piece. This fits well with the account of
conceptual art in the “Paragraphs,” but fits much less well with LeWitt’s
insistence on the importance of there being executions of his plans.
(2) The “multiple work” interpretation : This suggests a second answer to our
questions, which supplements the first answer by developing LeWitt’s
“music” analogy. The vehicle, on this view, is an abstractly specified
design-structure, or perhaps an “indicated” design structure in
Levinson’s sense,^9 which has executions as “performances” through
which various aesthetic possibilities permitted by that design-structure
can be realized. On this reading, an encounter with a particular exe-
cuted product of a LeWitt plan is essential if we are to properly appre-
ciate the work, just as properties bearing essentially on the appreciation
of musical works are given only through performances of those works.
Where the executed wall drawing complies with the plan, we can refer
appreciable properties of the mural to the piece itself in determining
the artistic statement thereby articulated. Pillow rejects the music
analogy, however, as a confusion on LeWitt’s part, and as incompatible
with what Pillow views as the most philosophically interesting feature
of the wall drawings, namely, LeWitt’s “remarkable stipulation that
each execution of a particular plan makes for a distinct work rather
than an instance of one work” (Pillow 2003, 378).
(3) The “two-stage work” interpretation : Pillow’s own reading focuses on the
latter claim. A LeWitt wall drawing, or a LeWitt as he terms it, is a
two-stage art form “consisting of instructions and their execution on
some wall” (Pillow 2003, 370). The artistic vehicle, then, is the par-
ticular materialization that one confronts in the gallery, taken together
with the plan with which it complies. The plan might be thought to
function rather like the title for a standard work of visual art, providing
a weighting for the manifest properties whereby the piece articulates
its artistic statement.
LeWitt’s wall drawings exemplify something symptomatic of late modern
visual art, namely, genuine puzzlement as to the nature of a work’s artistic