Sam Lewitt: Less Light Warm Words | The New Yorker
Jun 28 2016
This nonprofit has had an excellent run in the last three years, under its ebullient young director, Simon Castets. Alas, it will lose its SoHo home later this summer. For its last major show in the location, the New York-based Lewitt has replaced the gallery’s lighting with slender, custom-designed copper heaters, of the sort used to regulate the temperature of cameras or satellites. “More heat than light” is usually a pejorative phrase, but Lewitt’s literal rechannelling of the gallery’s energy converts the one resource every art space needs into something ambient and ungraspable. (Still, think of the Con Ed bill.) On one recent visit, by midday the heaters had already reached a hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. If you visit at the end of the day, prepare to shvitz.