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Indepth Arts News:
"Bent & Broken Shafts of Light
Lawrence Weiner"
2000-11-11 until 2001-02-18
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Wolfsburg, ,
DE
Lawrence Weiner (born 1942) is undoubtedly one of the most
important, and also one of the most consistent, of the pioneers who
created American Conceptual Art in the late 1960s. According to them,
an artwork need not necessarily possess a material form, a physical
nature, but can equally well exist as an idea, a pure concept. The
execution of a piece, whether by the artist or by anybody else, is
simply a new state in which the idea exists.
Lawrence Weiner's material is language. For him, language serves as
the universal and infinitely versatile medium for the communication
of an artistic intention He always uses language concretely, never
metaphorically. When he says stone, water, wood or glass, he means
stone, water, wood or glass. When he describes them as matt, wet or
shining, he endows them with a concrete state that conveys a clear
and unambiguous message to the recipient of the information, the
viewer. And yet the mental images are infinite. Is it a big stone or a
little one? Does it have a smooth surface or a grainy one? What
colour is it? Deliberately, and as a matter of declared policy, Weiner
involves the viewer in the work as an extension of the artist's hand.
The viewer is the executant of Weiner's mental sculpture. It is left to
him or her to associate a symbolic content with the word sculptures,
above and beyond their concrete semantic content. The resultinginterpretations change and vary according to each viewer's life
experience and mental furniture, and also according to the locations
in which the work is executed: places that always have a history and
an atmosphere of their own, whether they are museums, public
spaces, or a collector's home.
Weiner's works are totally democratic. They purvey no ideology; and,
invariably, alongside the original English-language version, they
address the viewer in his or her own language.
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