ART / It's the thought that counts: Sol LeWitt's involvement with his art is so 'Minimalist' he leaves making it to others. Dalya Alberge reports

Sol LeWitt, the Minimalist, would like to make one thing clear: he is not a Minimalist. 'I'm not anything,' he insists in a defensive tone of voice that suggests that the art-term is a term of abuse. Some 30 years since he produced the first piece that people labelled as 'Minimalist', the word grates on his ears.

Quite simply, the artist best-known for playing with clusters of 2- and 3-D cubes, dislikes all labels and categories. 'The problem,' he says, 'is that no one has really been able to define Minimalism . . .' Indeed, if Minimalism is simplification to an extreme, it does not apply to LeWitt, who takes a basic shape and builds up complex but calming patterns with it. 'Minimalism means different things to different people. I just like the idea I make art . . . I've been grouped with the Minimalists, the Conceptualists and whoever happens to have an axe to grind.'

Fair enough. But, however much he may try to distance himself from 'art- isms', LeWitt (born in 1929) is down in all the history books as one of the key figures in the Minimalist and Conceptualist movements. Even the publicity material for his first UK retrospective, opening next month at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, calls him the 'great Minimalist'. Don't mention the word, he laughs.

That's not the only appellation with which LeWitt takes issue. He quibbles over my description of his latest installation - painting the walls of a 10m-square room in the Museum of Amiens with his characteristic geometric shapes - as an 'exhibition'. 'It's not an exhibition,' he says firmly, 'as it is a permanent show. The word 'exhibition' applies to temporary shows . . . But it's just semantics.' We move on.

One must be careful not to call his sculptures 'sculptures': they are 'structures' - a word he has applied to his work from the earliest geometric 3-D wall piece of 1962 to the more complex and irregular shaped works of recent years. But LeWitt is not just playing with words - nor playing the temperamental 'artiste' - since, as Chrissie Iles, exhibitions organiser of MOMA, explains, the first wall structures actually incorporated elements of both painting and sculpture. 'LeWitt didn't want an association of meanings . . . This was the idea of art being more democratic, a reductive, almost impersonal rationalisation of artwork as pure form free from descriptive or subjective expression . . . Anyone could make it . . .'

Indeed, other people do make his work. LeWitt's structures are made by masons, carpenters or welders, depending on the material specified. 'I have no competency in metalwork,' LeWitt admits. 'I'm not a good carpenter. I'm not a mason.' Whether or not he is being modest is hard to say. But he gets overall credit (even though the names of the artist-craftsmen are featured somewhere in the exhibition). So where do his talents lie? 'I'm good at thinking the things up,' he answers.

LeWitt, who redefined the distinction between invention and execution, once described the making of his work as 'a mechanical process to be carried out blind'. As his 'structures' are pre-determined to a logical system, they come with complex instructions, often a grid-format that is displayed with the final composition. Dimensions and proportions are intended to be as precise as musical notation.

A team of assistants will work to LeWitt's specifications for his large- scale Wall Drawings at MOMA, Oxford. He will, as always, keep a close check on them. But ultimately, as he once wrote, 'the artist must allow various interpretations of his plan . . . Each person draws a line differently and each person understands words differently . . . As long as they are consistent there is no preference.' Because the art can be 'reproduced' again and again in this impersonal way, there will be little pain for the artist when the Wall Drawings are painted over at the end of the show.

On the whole, LeWitt - a softly- spoken man who rarely gives interviews and refuses to be photographed - has a Minimalist's attitude to discussing art, particularly his own. But he doesn't have to discuss it: others do it for him. If only they chose their words as carefully as he does. One LeWitt scholar asks us to consider that '. . . the concept of a Wall Drawing implies its own non-exclusivity by introducing - on the perceptual level - the wall, part of that 'reality' that is not art: the concept of the Wall Drawings brings about an interweaving of that which is mutually exclusive'. It is refreshing to learn that the artist himself 'finds it hard to read what they say about me'. Indeed, he rarely bothers, he adds.

LeWitt agrees that in drawing his structures and having other people make them, his way of working is not dissimilar to that of an architect. Indeed, he worked in an architectural practice for a year before studying art at Syracuse University, New York, in the late 1940s. The MOMA exhibition sets out both to reflect the fact that the roots of LeWitt's work lie in the history of European art and to put his work in perspective against that of his contemporaries, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre and Dan Flavin. It will show the influence of the Bauhaus - 'where artists weren't painters or sculptors,' says LeWitt, 'but could make a building or a tapestry . . . Art wasn't cubby-holed into specific areas' - and of De Stijl - 'that was making art in simple, abstract ways,' he explains.

There is, too, the influence of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century English photographer who experimented with multiple images of animals and people in motion. LeWitt's 'Muybridge II' (1965) is a 10ft-long rectangular black box with 10 peep-holes. Look inside and you see a photograph of a figure coming towards you. As you move on to the next peep-hole, the photograph changes: the figure is getting closer. It gets closer and closer until, at the final hole, you're faced with the figure's navel. 'Muybridge's work was entirely Conceptual,' says LeWitt (slipping, despite himself, into an '-ism'). He sees his own approach as a logical development of that Conceptualism.

He took it a stage further in his 1968 work, Buried Cube, in which the act of burying a metal cube was recorded in a series of photographs. Although the last image of that work leaves the viewer with nothing more than a patch of earth, the exhibition catalogue points out that the transformative nature of LeWitt's art is about 'continuous regeneration - the activity of permutation, rotation, mirroring, reversals . . .'

Not everyone would agree. When the Lisson Gallery held a small show of LeWitt's structures a few years ago, a woman was overheard describing the clusters of white cubes as 'just stacks of wine-bottle racks'. David Elliott, director of MOMA, takes issue with that. 'LeWitt's pieces are put together in complicated ways. You can see into them. You look at the light and geometry, their size and relationship to the room and to you. Try and look at a wine rack in that way. You'd get worn out very quickly.'

Museum of Modern Art, 30 Pembroke St, Oxford (0865 722733) 24 Jan- 28 Mar. Then at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 10 Aug-17 Oct, and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 6 Nov- 8 Jan 1994. Organised by the Haags Gemeentemuseum, Holland, in association with the South Bank Centre. Sponsored by Nina Ricci, for whom LeWitt has designed packaging.

(Photograph omitted)