"Lawrence Weiner: AFTER ALL/NACH ALLES"
2000-07-15 until 2000-10-08
Guggenheim Museum, Berlin
Berlin, , DE

A pioneer of Conceptual Art, American artist Lawrence Weiner redefined the medium-based boundaries of Modernist painting and sculpture. Since 1968, when he concluded that the actual physical construction of a work was not critical to its existence in the world, he has created hundreds of artworks using language as the constant in an array of possible other materials. In short, Weiner is a sculptor whose medium is language.

. His art can literally be disseminated by word of mouth. A work can be made or merely spelled out on a museum wall, but it can also be read in a book or heard if uttered aloud. In a radical restructuring of the traditional artist/viewer relationship, Weiner shifted the responsibility of the work’s realization to its audience, while also redefining standard systems of artistic distribution.

The empirical nature of materials and the potential for viewers to ascribe metaphors to them is a topic that has occupied the artist for some years. His Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin commission, realized for the exhibition as a bilingual, environmental-scale installation entitled AFTER ALL/NACH ALLES, is composed of texts written directly on the gallery walls that address the multiple realities of materials as they coexist and interact in the same space. The title of the project is intended to connote the total accumulation of things with a reference to what might lie beyond (or after) such an aggregation of materials.

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