The day I got stuck inside a Sol LeWitt sculpture

After a long, busy semester, I spent a few much-needed hours at the Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon, where I got trapped inside a 1976 sculpture by Sol LeWitt.

It's funny, because I've seen the piece, which bears the ungainly title Modular Open Cube Pieces (9 x 9 x 9) Floor/Corner 2 (Corner Piece), on a number of other occasions and given it only the most cursory attention. This time, though, I felt an unexpected and immediate connection, something that held me in front of it for a good half hour.

Sol LeWitt, Modular Open Cube Pieces (9 x 9 x 9) Floor/Corner 2 (Corner Piece), 1976, 43 1/2 × 43 1/2 × 43 1/2 in. Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Modular Open Cube Pieces is made of white-painted wood. (I'm grateful that when I saw it, it was displayed on a simple white platform that didn't distract from it, as the busy-looking floor in the DIA's photo does.) Gazing at it, my eye was in constant motion. I have not seen many LeWitt sculptures in person, and maybe for the first time, I really understood their connection to Lucinda Childs' minimalist dances of the same era: simple forms, repeated, and though still, somehow always in motion, aggregated into a complex and variable whole. 

The more time I spent standing in front of the piece (and crouching, backing up, walking around it, standing on my tiptoes) the more I saw, suddenly and with the force of revelation. There are the basic building blocks, the individual pieces of wood. Then there all the cubes, stacked upon one another, the vertical and horizontal structures of varying height and length that are created by the stacked cubes, and the tunnels, straight up and down and diagonal, that draw the eye into the sculpture's interior. 

For a few minutes, I only noticed the positive space (the wood) and then suddenly, I became aware of the dynamism of the negative space, the tunnels and holes that were as engaging as the structure itself. Equally arresting were the shadows; pieces of wood cast shadows on other pieces, creating what appeared to be stripes or notches cut into the wood. These shadows increased in frequency as the eye moved closer and closer to the dense center of the piece. Eventually I became aware of the shadows the sculpture itself cast on the white platform it sat on, beautiful forms created out of light and darkness that echoed the wood forms: lines of varying intensity projected onto the blank base, again increasing in density and complexity as the eye moved inward.

The interior was a crowded wonder: line after line, structure after structure, leading in and out and up and down. A whole environment. White and shadow alternately capturing and directing the eye, overwhelming it with unexpected depths. I felt an urge, a wish, to dive inside it, to become tiny and crawl around, playing and climbing through the tunnels and along the wood until I collapsed in exhaustion.

I kept feeling like I should leave, but I couldn't. I tried once, after about fifteen minutes, but then looked back, noticed another series of shadows I'd missed, and returned, staying for fifteen more. I felt that it was completely irrational to want to stay so long, but then felt the freedom of the holiday vacation, the absence of pressing obligations, and thought that there was nothing else I'd rather be doing than looking at this wondrous structure.

Ten or twelve people came and went during the time I was there. None stayed more than a minute, and I kept wanting to say, "Wait! Don't go! You'll miss everything!" But of course, this is what people do at museums. This is what I do at museums when a piece piques my interest and nothing more, and in fact, this is what I've done when I encountered this particular piece in the past.

Their reactions, nonetheless, were pretty wonderful: a toddler tried to dash toward it, presumably to climb on it, only to be effortlessly reigned in by his mother. He then stood obediently back, eying it and me in equal, fascinated measure. Some kids with an older woman talked about how much it looked like a building, and how they would love to see a building like that, where all the squares created by the cubes were windows. A teenage couple looked at it for about fifteen seconds, pronounced it "cool," and moved on. Two bright kids, who seemed like a brother and sister, tried to calculate how many individual cubes comprised the whole structure. I think they eventually came up with a formula for figuring it out, but neither of them offered an authoritative answer.

Finally, gradually, the piece released its uncanny grip on me and I drifted away, wandering around the contemporary gallery. While I saw much else that intrigued me, I felt a little depleted, a little wrung out, and my mind kept returning, insistently, to the intricacies of the open cubes.