What is procedural drawing?

What would you think if I told you that Sol Lewitt didn’t draw his own wall-covering masterpieces?

Before you get too confused: what about if I told you the architect of the Empire State Building didn’t build the project himself. Logically, we are used to the fact that architects create instructions that are often followed by construction crews and contractors to build the final product.

Lewitt’s process is similar.

Rather than producing a finished product, for these wall drawings, Lewitt instead writes a series of instructions, or rules, that are then followed to create the works you see. This design of procedure, creates his procedural drawings. Many of these drawings provide the potential for variability; the drawing is controlled by a set of rules, yet produces different outcomes on every wall it finds.

Lets look at a couple examples

One example of this is ‘Wall Drawing No. 118.’ The instructions for this particular piece?

“50 randomly placed points all connected by straight lines.”

The placement of the points controls the final composition, anyone could decide to complete the drawing, and nearly every outcome would be different.

The instructions for ‘Wall Drawing No. 160’ call for:

“A black outlined square with a red diagonal line centered on the axis between the upper left and lower right corners and another red diagonal line centered on the axis between the lower left and upper right corners.”

This might seem like a more highly specified drawing instruction set, yet variability lives within it. How thick are the lines? How big is the square? How long are the red lines?

For Lewitt, the wall was an under-utilized surface with the potential for more. Some artists of the same era reimagined the desert or the salt flats; Lewitt rediscovered the wall and radicalized the process of art creation.

Geometry:

‘Wall Drawing No. 160’

“A black outlined square with a red diagonal line centered on the axis between the upper left and lower right corners and another red diagonal line centered on the axis between the lower left and upper right corners.”