Lawrence Weiner.
Markle, Leslie
The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles CA April 13 * July 14,
2008
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Major survey at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary, "AS FAR AS
THE EYE CAN SEE," the first of its kind in the U.S., offers a
timely reassessment of what this artist has often termed the opportunity
of being "perplexed in public." Including the early Propeller
(1964-65) and Removal (1966-68) paintings, his language pieces, as well
as works on paper, films, videos, books, posters, multiples, and audio
works, the conceptual practice of Weiner bridges both "specific 44
and general" aspects of words and things. The operational niche of
this almost half century of inquiry is the impossibly small interstices
that exist between those states of suspension in which things and their
representations inevitably collide and change places. In brief, Weiner
creates "formal situations" revealing "the relationship
of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human
beings." Although the radical insights of conceptual art have long
since been sidelined in the canon of art history, Weiner's
profoundly simple gestures demonstrate the true shortsightedness of this
strategy.
In the Geffen show, co-curated by MOCA's Ann Goldstein and the
Whitney's Donna De Salvo, Weiner's artistic development is
traced chronologically and in terms of the progression of ideas,
beginning with his Cratering Piece (1960), often considered to be the
first earthwork or land art. It involved blasting a series of holes with
TNT in Mill Valley, California. This led logically to What Is Set Upon
the Table Sits Upon The Table (Stone on Table) (ca. 1962-63), showing a
trimmed sandstone block sitting on a crude wood table. Finally, after
1968 there evolved such text pieces as AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE (1988),
which literally attests to Weiner's oft-quoted remark that
"Language, because it is the most nonobjective thing we have ever
developed in this world, never stops." Moreover these linguistic
art forms, mostly declarative statements, typically retain a high degree
of contextual and connotative ambiguity. Stuff like ENCASED BY + REDUCED
TO RUST (1986), evoking an invisibly crumbling object rusting to dust,
or a fractured AS LONG AS IT LASTS (1992), offers rich visual metaphors
for the imagination of the viewer.
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Somewhat like fellow conceptual minimalist Douglas Huebler, after
1968 Weiner turned increasingly to language to make his point about art
as (stated) absence. This new art trend is often correlated with
Wittgenstein's early Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), in
which he attempted to delimit the relationship between language and
reality by establishing "the conditions for a logically perfect
language," a form of logical atomism or positivism which the
philosopher later renounced. Critics of this art school--whose position
is ironically summed up by Proposition 7 of the Tractatus itself, namely
that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be
silent"--have tended to take shelter under glib Kantian dualities,
whereas its apologists, on the other hand, revel in Weiner's
denaturalization of the ordinary. However, the very nuanced shadings of
Weiner's use of textualized objects and objectival texts belie any
kind of simplistic neo-Kantianism, indeed going so far as to offer
inklings of a subtler, more random form of post-conceptual practice,
well outside the lineage of Duchamp.
As Donna De Salvo points out in her catalogue essay, Weiner's
emphasis on an object's use value as well as its physical
characteristics and given contexts to create meaningful perplexity differs dramatically from the Duchampian aesthetic of transubstantiation through recontextualization. Closely akin to the Beatnik experiments
with language and the lettrism of concrete poetry, Weiner's
aesthetic sensibility is actually more in line with Kerouac, Burroughs,
Geyson, and Ginsburg. It is this foregrounding of pure process and
relational objectality that gives Weiner's work such a unique
conceptual punch.
