Zen Oflawrence Weiner Quote Art Shoud Messup Your Life

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John Haber
in New York City

Lawrence Weiner

Conceptual fine art is the most reticent of fine art forms, and Lawrence Weiner is the most reticent of conceptual artists. What then accounts for the impression 1 gets coming off the Whitney's elevators? Two walls bend forward, pressing themselves and the words right in one'due south face. More text flies past the heart in every direction.

The Whitney calls its retrospective "As Far as the Eye Can Come across," but how far tin one see in a museum? Maybe further than one idea. If 1 truly knows anything most Weiner, it turns out, i knows that one volition not know it afterward.

Words, words, words

Ane may think of Weiner as predictable. I take often seen 1 of his gnomic texts, shrugged, and moved on. As Hamlet says when asked what he is reading, "Words, words, words."

Some will feel that mode nigh the whole prove. Pretty much anything on view could appointment to whatsoever fourth dimension in the last forty years. After all, conceptual fine art is a fact, not a medium, by definition. How can a fact develop over time? No wonder another prove of art and text has called itself "Cartoon Time, Reading Time."

In practice, however, the prove adds up to a surfeit of sensation, although less patently than in text art by Mel Bochner. Information technology may not have long to absorb information technology all, but only considering it assaults the viewer virtually all at once. And that, too, says something about the very idea of conceptual art. Over again past definition, 1 cannot predict anything—non the shape and color of the work, its placement, or even whether it will go made. Then over again, Village, too, has some interesting things to say, and he dies in a fight scene.

Weiner works with linguistic communication and not with what ane may think of every bit art objects. A slyer conceptual artist, Barbara Blossom, leaves much of her text to wall labels, adjacent to the loveliest or stoniest of art objects. Weiner stencils big sans serif letters directly on museum, received forms that may seem to eliminate the medium and to insist on the message. They belong to commerce or telegraphy more to art.

Even when they form sentences, the block capitals and lack of punctuation deny a signal of origin or an ending. They could accept begun somewhere else entirely—apart from the creative person, somewhere unseen. Critics often associate Weiner with installation art or Minimalism. Both imply a specific see in space and time, between the viewer and the art. Non hither. As he puts it himself, "the piece of work need non exist built."

When it is built, however, one certain notices. The installation includes walls jam-packed with posters, busy brandish cases for other exhibition records, and a hot-pink stain on that beautiful Marcel Breuer stone floor. A shotgun blast has torn into the Sheetrock and riddled it with holes. Elsewhere Weiner rips plasterboard abroad by mitt, leaving a precise simply lumpy square of gypsum.

Discussion and object

The more one reads the text, the more it, also, carries physical weight. When he lists "the weight of it all / the length of it all / the breadth of it all / the sound of it all / the smell of information technology all," Weiner evokes sensual overload. When he writes "encased past + reduced to rust," he could exist describing steel in the hands of Richard Serra. When he imagines "a cup of sea h2o poured upon the floor," i can near taste the salt. When he asks one to imagine unstated things "in the rut of the day" and (like Ina Archer) "in the rut of the night," they sizzle.

1 of the largest works insists on cumulative physical encounters. It starts "some stone to stand on / some stone to hold / some stone to throw." It repeats the triad like stanzas in a poem—merely with stone replaced in turn by wood, drinking glass, steel, gold, earth, coal, salt, pb, ashes, safety, and hemp. They suggest not just different materials just unlike sensations of difficult and soft, hot and common cold, solidity and decay.

The tall, narrow wall of black text itself mimes a physical pile. Elsewhere a large stone fragment rests on an ungainly forest creation, somewhere between a tabletop and scaffolding. Information technology defies i to see which near closely resembles the monument or the pedestal.

The appearance of the work as well veers ambiguously between linguistic communication and object. I quote it throughout without Weiner's ever-present capital letters simply to keep information technology from overwhelming a review. The artist may utilise deletion symbols or parentheses to suggest emptiness or formal elements in a mathematical equation. They could serve equally variables that each viewer may insert at will. They also bring out how deliberately clunky the lettering can wait. He writes the thoughts to place in the heat of the day as ( ) + ( ) , and he circles the word placed.

The installation also has ane piecing together give-and-take and object—or what a Structuralist would call sign and signified. Ane might be scrambling around to locate the wall label, much less to friction match it to the art. 1 might be staring at that red stain on the floor and text almost seawater on the wall. Did the execution of the piece of work come up out wrong, or did pouring water practice something unforeseen? That question takes ane back to something else one knows nigh Weiner: "the work may not be congenital."

The curators, Donna de Salvo and Ann Goldstein, make a signal of the piece of work's status every bit conceptual art. Says de Salvo, it ways "jettisoning the most fundamental notions almost the fine art object and its dissemination." That is not the same, however, every bit jettisoning the art object.

Conceptual art equally object

Perchance conceptual art never has to endeavour. Remember of the mammoth slab covered with blackness scribbles and erected for Sol LeWitt after his decease, the leap volumes photographed by Mickey Smith, or the maze of words past Joseph Kosuth. Weiner himself started way dorsum in 1965 by removing a corner from otherwise apartment monochrome paintings. Like the text, 1 can interpret the Removal Paintings every bit object or absenteeism, shaped canvas or defiantly plain and conceptual. Still, one need non label LeWitt a conceptual creative person. One definitely need non call Weiner's early on paintings conceptual fine art, and something did change when he turned to words.

Look more advisedly at his "statement of intent" of January 1969:

1. The creative person may construct the work
two. The piece of work may be fabricated
3. The work demand not be built
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the conclusion equally to status rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

It does matter whether the work is built. It matters a great deal. The point is that each remains possible.

Each as well represents a selection and a responsibility—just whose? One could interpret his texts equally instructions by the creative person or to the artist, to the curator, to the viewer, or to the art. In the aforementioned way, the walls curving toward and away from the elevators may confront one, but they never surround one. They open pathways and sightlines to the art. They open possibilities, even if it takes a loaded shotgun to bear them out.

The possibilities include the execution, the installation, repetition, and broadcasting. All this visual overload arises from each point in the chain. It includes the retrospective's side by side stop, at MOCA in Los Angeles, where it will have more infinite. Will that relieve the crowding or add additional possibilities? Probably a lilliputian of both, although I like Weiner more for the mess in New York. Likewise, it seems to arrange the city.

The possibilities also include the chain of language, the way words lead to and take sense from other words. That lesson, also, might come from structuralism or later philosophers, such as Jacques Derrida. It identifies text and art akin with an open chain, across the fixed moment of words spoken aloud. Ane work embodies that chain in a sequence of manhole covers, "in direct line with another and the adjacent." The simultaneity with which words attack ane coming off the elevator implies much the same thing. The work that lends its title to the retrospective describes its ambitions—"as far every bit the eye tin see."

Derrida would take approved, but the text goes in for evidently old puns too, in a very habitation-grown idiom. Equally Roberta Smith has noted in The Times, "reduced to rust" hints at "reduced to dust." The show'south title may repeat the idiom "as far as I tin meet." Does that imply an overbearing or an absent-minded creator? Weiner gets to play both.

Art in use

Born in 1942, the artist grew upward in the Bronx and attended Stuyvesant High Schoolhouse, the selective public school. (So, on both scores, did my grandfather many years earlier.) From at that place he hitchhiked across country, touched base in Canada, and landed in San Francisco. Soon he returned to Greenwich Village. These days he "divides his time betwixt New York City and a boat in Amsterdam." I can picture show him e'er in transit, like John Barth in the novel The Floating Opera or Robert Smithson on The Floating Island—or similar the dissemination of the piece of work.

Weiner's history anticipates the poles of his art, right down to the mathematical symbols. It draws on the rigor of his instruction and the gratis play of the Beats. One might call it language poetry, merely without the cluttered rush of words unmoored from their ordinary sense. The old posters and exhibition announcements think the spontaneity of 1960s. The smooth, abrupt blackness or cherry outline of his letters goes a long way to tidy upwardly Jack Kerouac's teletype scroll and mussed-up typewriter.

One might compare his allusive brevity to a haiku or Zen koan. However information technology has none of their reaching for profundity or authority, none of their desire to slip into ane's consciousness and out of time. One might retrieve of the visual clarity or modesty of William Carlos Williams, the poet of "this is only to say." Weiner, though, never turns abroad from the museum and toward nature. I cannot imagine him, like Williams, seeking "no ideas but the thing itself." He comes closest to the deadening, patient aggregating of epigrams in Ludwig Wittgenstein or Wallace Stevens, maybe the most poetic of philosophers or the most philosophical of poets.

One should not fifty-fifty call it painting with words. When On Kawara paints the date, he leaves zip to chance, and he roots the work in his life, apart from the viewer's, like a diary. When younger artists like Christopher Wool or Richard Prince fix words to aluminum or sheet, they take aggressive, nasty jokes out of mass culture and plow them into aggressive, nasty jokes about art. They also make them difficult to read, by gaps, drips, omissions, and odd breaks across the border of the motion picture. They are making art about art—and almost the seamy side of American life. By comparison, Weiner is making art about possibility itself.

With Weiner, a lot goes a long way. Just equally text enters into the concatenation of language, art enters into a tradition and a world already in progress. A philosopher has compared knowledge to the complete reconstruction of a ship, plank by plank and axle by axle, while at sea. 1 piece of work reads "a foursquare removal from a rug in utilise." Somehow, the foursquare has to come out while in use, while people are walking.

Weiner seems no less conceptual now, no less an assail on expression or formalism, simply as well much less dry out. His fixed messages have none of the variability of, say, Jenny Holzer with her clamber screens and blacked-out text paintings. One may nonetheless notice him deadly dull. I may next time myself. Notwithstanding, that, too, stands as merely a possibility or a choice. It, too, "rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership."

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Tin See" ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb 10, 2008.

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