Lawrence Weiner
"Lawrence Weiner" by Randall Anderson, Summer 2008, p. 88
A few years ago I had the pleasure of visiting Lawrence Weiner in his studio in New York. At the time he had a scale model of the Guggenheim Bilbao sitting on the floor and was working out the details of an installation he was soon to mount there. The placement of every element was being meticulously considered. This kind of care was also evident in his recent retrospective at the Whitney. It presented almost five decades of work, and the installation was so thoughtfully considered that the exhibition itself could be considered a piece of art.
Weiner’s art is weighted with the materiality of the world and the human body’s interaction with the act of getting on with the work of living in it. In a simple phrase strategically located within a space—be it wall, book or poster—Weiner brings us to the edge of knowing the world we inhabit. The weather, wind, water: forces beyond our control, but facts we have to accept and navigate through. It’s the stuff this fragile thing called humanity struggles with: mortality and our insignificance in the face of time and the elements.
Weiner’s art is commonly referred to as conceptual art, but that’s an over-simplification, a consequence of the artist’s choice to use language as his primary medium and critics and art historians trying to straighten out the jagged line that is history. Weiner presents his work intelligently, thinking of the viewer at all times. He doesn’t allow his subjectivity to override that of the viewer. The artist works, he makes things, we see them and we get it. It’s that simple. If the work doesn’t stand on its own, he’s failed.
Weiner’s extensive poster archive, now in the collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, occupied one huge wall at the Whitney. In these works you get an overview of the artist’s entire oeuvre: the way he uses text, how it is located in space and the varieties of imagery it conjures up.
W. H. Auden, in a work memorializing William Butler Yeats, wrote that poetry is “a way of happening.” Together, Weiner’s texts and his viewers do just that—they happen.
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