Rather, LeWitt is (also) always concerned with a concept that now and then eludes direct contemplation. For him, the purpose of a work is not only to evoke sensory experiences, but it always stands symbolically for a concept which does not have to be evident straight away. In the case of his “Serial Projects ABCD,” which go back forty years, several works permit a lasting experience of this. Imagine a presentation of cube-shaped objects that does not simply show what is there, but which gives the viewer the opportunity of finding out—by grasping the concept, by carefully weighing up what one sees and thinks—that smaller objects, whose existence is indispensable for understanding the work, (must) be hidden under certain other objects. In the case of the synagogue in Stommeln several conceptual decisions were made not to show something or to make something inaccessible. This applies to two-thirds of the space, the two loudspeakers, and the gallery. The basis for this, however, is not only a sound aesthetic conviction, but Sol LeWitt’s awareness of the inability to make up for the past through practiced forms of representation, his conceptual admission of a principal inability to represent, but also a painfully felt void for which he sought and found an aesthetic equivalent. How could it be otherwise: “Lost Voices” in the synagogue in Stommeln also deals with realms of experience without evidence, with something that denies or eludes direct sensory contemplation and for which it is nevertheless—or for this reason—worth sensitizing oneself. Sol LeWitt devotes a place to this “other,” which lies beyond perception and is indeed not possible to represent. This kind of openly demonstrated attitude definitely accommodates the Jewish prohibition of images—not only for religious, but above all for aesthetic-conceptual reasons—since it, as Theodor W. Adorno formulated for Modernism, starts from the “impossibility of the image” and keeps a mental space open for those areas that elude not only direct contemplation, but also rational comprehension. LeWitt, too, assumes that reality cannot be made up for through its illustration and description, let alone be banned forever in a useful formula.
