Leonardo Electronic Almanac / Volume 13, No. 4 / April

world expects work by naives - like Arthur Wallis or Grandma
Moses - to be crudely constructed and unsophisticated. By
contrast, the computer-based works by people from a technical
background are often exquisitely crafted and finished. This was
another quandary for the mainstream, who responded by
simplistically rejecting the work and condemning the field.
The conceptual artist Sol LeWitt was a major influence on the
early computer arts scene. His 1967 statement - “the idea
becomes a machine that makes the art” [2] - has obvious
resonances with the field and is often quoted. In 1978, theorist
Rosalind Krauss expressed an important contemporary critical
position when she dismissed LeWitt’s work as obsessive - the
“babble” of serial expansion which fails to summarize by using
“the single example that would imply the whole” [3]. For me,
this glib dismissal illustrates both Krauss’ unwillingness or
inability to engage with the work on its own level and also her
failure to consider the context from which it emerged. She
simply projects her own limited opinion of what constitutes art
and then, when she fails to comprehend Lewitt’s intellectual
pursuit, decides to exclude him from her pantheon.
Nevertheless, Krauss was influential and in her words we see,
if not the origin, then the essence of the mainstream viewpoint
that has led to so much neglect of this period of art history.
So it is refreshing at this dawn of a new millennium to
discover a renewed interest in the “lost” histories of the late
modern era and especially those exploring the interdisciplinary
collaborations of the mid to late twentieth century. In April
2005, the Creativity and Cognition 05 Conference - C&C05 [4] is
to take place at Goldsmiths College in London and features a
stream dedicated to “Retrospectives in Creative Practice and
Research.” In September 2005, Refresh! The First International
Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology
[5] is to take place at Banff, Canada.
This two-part special issue of LEA is timed to coincide with
C&C05 and includes contributions by contemporary critical
theorists and historians as well as first-hand accounts by the
pioneers themselves. The response to our call for participation
in this issue was overwhelming. We would like to thank our peerreviewers
for their hard work and apologize to our authors for
having to constrain their contributions to fit the limitations
of the LEA format. We hope that the complete, full-length papers
will now form the basis of a print volume in the not-too-distant
future and encourage other potential contributors to contact us.
_____________________________
REFERENCES
1. Patric Prince, *SIGGRAPH ‘86 Art Show Catalog* (Dallas, TX:
ACM SIGGRAPH 86, 1986).
2. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in *Artforum* 5,
p. 80 (Summer 1967)
3. Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in *October*, No. 6,
pp. 46-60 (Fall 1978); quoted by Pamela M. Lee in N. Baume, ed.,
*Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes*, (exhibition catalog,
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CN); Cambridge, MA;
London: MIT Press (2001) p.53.
4. Creativity and Cognition 05, 12-15 April 2005, Goldsmiths
APRIL 2005 VOL 13 NO 4 LEONARDOELECTRONICALMANAC 6