Lawrence Weiner

“It is appropriate that his art, like his thoughts, reflect his travels. Even so, this work is less like an atlas, and more like the diary of a traveler in search of communication with others in their own language.”

Lawrence Weiner at the Whitney

Valery Oisteanu

Valery Oisteanu is an international critic and author. Lawrence Weiner, a central figure of the Conceptual Art movement, lives and works in New York and Amsterdam. His exhibition As Far as the Eye Can See was on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in February.

Lawrence Weiner, A BIT OF MATTER AND A LITTLE BIT MORE, 1976, installation at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1983. Language + the materials referred to, dimensions variable. Daled Collection, Brussels.

 

Upon entering the Emily Fisher Landau Galleries at the Whitney Museum, I found myself surrounded by an alphabet of conceptual minimalist sculpture forming words strung out into strange sentences–not quite poetry, not quite anything else. It formed a welcome to an exhibit encompassing 40 years of creativity gone wild, a retrospective sprawled throughout the museum’s fourth floor and containing art in every shape possible: a splash of paint on the floor, a crater of buckshot on a wall, and large displays of posters and memorabilia. Another room contained books, buttons, and objects bearing words, word-games, horizontal and vertical texts, sound works, and videos with more words. In short, the surreal world of Lawrence Weiner.

Weiner is a key figure responsible for the foundation and emergence of Conceptual art in the 60s. Finally, after a prodigiously creative career, he deservedly gets a comprehensive exhibition co-organized by the Whitney Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA) with careful oversight by chief curators Donna de Salvo of the Whitney and Ann Goldstein, who will bring the show to MOCA from April 13-July 14.

The artist started out with experimental paintings called Propeller works and followed with his "removal" and "cratering" period of the 60s. Using a hammer and chisel, Weiner carved his works out of the wall, following an outline, or setting up a small firework explosion to remove a part of the ground (cratering.) He even cut a square in a functional rug and a corner of an existing painting.

After a disturbing event at an art display on a college campus, in which one of his artworks was destroyed–some ropes that were tied to sticks were cut by student vandals–Weiner decided to graduate to a more conceptual form, one he called “announcement” instead of art. His first manifesto was short and to the point: “1.The artist may construct the piece. 2. The piece may be fabricated. 3.The piece may not be built.” He began using carefully composed sentences on paper, or in films, video, books and posters, and often painted directly onto floors or exterior walls (borrowing from an Oriental tradition, where the sage words of ancient Chinese wisdom are painted on the floors and walls of the temple or tea houses.)

“His works exist on the façade of the buildings as song lyrics, as tattoos on the bodies, and on the walls of the galleries,” says Donna de Salvo. “A compilation of these efforts reads more like an atlas than an exhibition catalogue.”

Weiner often travels to Holland, Germany, England, Belgium, and Switzerland each year for six months, where he graffities his trails with stencils in several languages. It is appropriate that his art, like his thoughts, reflect his travels. Even so, this work is less like an atlas, and more like the diary of a traveler in search of communication with others in their own language. One critic has remarked that “his works are a well-shaped phrase,” while another notes that they are of “a haiku-type, or maybe a slogan.”

To me, many of Weiner’s sentences looked like verbal riddles or puns, à la Marcel Duchamp or Ray Johnson, and I had to walk around several times to decipher them. In the hallway outside his 13 Bleecker Street studio, a stencil proclaims “A bit of matter and a little bit more” in black nondescript lettering, slightly damaged by peeling paint.
Another verbal epigrammatic cliché is a 70s text, "Earth to Earth Ashes to Ashes Dust to Dust," a Christian burial recitation made for a vertical display that became in non-liturgical circumstances a simple meditation on the materials described and their processes of transmutation. Encased by + Reduced to Rust, 1986 is one that puzzles the brain.

Occasionally, Weiner reproduces older works such as the self-explanatory Two Minutes of Spray Paint Directly Upon a Floor from a Standard Aerosol Spray Can, 1968. His allusions to pop culture can be detected in many of his one-liners, such as the conceptual riddle: “Crystallized with Drippings from the Trees that Came from the Land,” where a curved line separates the answer to the riddle that reads: (Forever Amber), 2007, a possible reference to a famous novel by Kathleen Winsor and the subsequent film by Otto Preminger (1947), re-released at Film Forum in New York in January.

The forerunners of Weiner’s art forms were the Futurists, the Dadaists and some of the Constructivists, like Lissitzky and Mayakovsky. Russian Rayonists were writing poems on sculptures as early as 1924 and publishing books with experimental typography and alternate fonts, drawing poems on their faces, such as in Mayakovsky’s quote, "Cud you splash a glass of paint on your daily map?"

“The future has returned to the past” and “What was old is new again” could be inscribed in the temples of conceptual-minimalist art. Weiner is a “common denominator communicator.” For example, his Public Art Fund work, in collaboration with Con Edison, brought downtowners a constellation of 19 cast-iron manholes covers titled In Direct Line with Another and Next, 2000, one of which could be found for the duration of the show at the entrance to the Whitney on Madison Avenue.

Weiner not only manipulates language and materials, he also offers a deep observation of the human response to it all, presenting nonsensical ads and slogans for our consumerist, erotically charged world, such as Stretched as Tightly as Is Possible (Satin) & (Petroleum Jelly), 1994. One of the most effective visual displays is the Lawrence Weiner Poster Archive of 290 works, some of which are displayed in a grandiose collage covering an entire wall and documenting different periods of this artist’s 40 years of creative effort.

As far as I can see, in his most recent work, Weiner has become more mature and profound, as shown in his narrative about decay and death, “Some Flowers Cut and Strewn Upon Some Apples Fallen from the Tree & Laid to Rest” in three separate black boxes/coffins. His bio-manifesto ends with a quasi-conceptualist definition: “Art is the empirical fact of the relationship of object to object in relation to human beings & not dependent upon historical precedent for either use or legitimacy.”

In sum, Weiner is an American art-folklorist, collecting urban expressions and turning them into songs: Through the eye of the needle, just one time through a hole in a wall, just one time through a crack in the door just one time, just one time, 2002. In conjunction with the exhibition, a series of Weiner’s films were screened in January at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, and in an audio program of 16 works, Melodic Noise for Radio, on an acoustaguide, supplied for free at the museum.

“Weiner’s employment of language allows the work to be used by the receiver. It is purposely left open for translation, transference, and transformation; each time the work is made, it is made anew," writes co-curator Ann Goldstein in the show’s catalog. She concludes: “Not fixed in time and place, every manifestation and point of reception is different–each person will use the work differently and find a different relationship to its content.”