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22/10/2009

Lawrence Weiner

EACC Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castello', Castello'

Lawrence Weiner is an explorer of materials and their relationships to humans and other materials in the world. Since the start of his career, Weiner has worked in the studio, bringing in materials and experimenting with their properties. In order to avoid the constraints and specificity of displaying objects, in 1968 Weiner turned to language as a means of presenting his sculpture. By translating his studio work into language, Weiner communicates the content of each piece without specifying any of its physical qualities. The properties of language match Weiner’s aspirations for his work: to be accessible, subjective, and above all useful for a diverse audience.

Known as one of the pioneers of the so-called Conceptual Art, Lawrence Weiner defines himself as a sculptor who uses language as expressive means. Since late 60’s his work has been materialized in books, animations and songs, T-shirts, pins, tattoos, sewer covers, posters… His proposal adapts itself mainly around the linguistic material. Weiner takes language as sculptural matter to create his works, the technique that he uses to compose Under the Sun, a project conceived to the Espai d’art contemporani de Castelló.

Weiner considers that the linguistic construction can cause the same reaction in the audience that a conventional object since the importance of the idea is above the materialization of the work. The concept is the piece of art independent of the support that is used.

Motivated by a social desire to contribute toward a solution, Weiner says his artwork succeeds simply if it enriches the lives of other human beings. By employing standard materials, such as water or stone, the work is potentially accessible to anyone. At the beginning of his career, Weiner started making “give-aways,” small objects that he would occasionally trade things for. These exchangeable objects point toward Weiner’s desire to endow his work with movement, something he fully achieved through language.

The egalitarian nature of Weiner’s artwork is always influenced by his life experience and the surrounding social, political, and artistic climate.

Though Weiner’s work is often disarmingly eloquent, flirting even with poetry, the work of art is not the text, but rather the idea (or content) that he sets out in language: the material, movement, or transition referenced by his words. As long as the content is conveyed, a piece may be re-created in a multitude of ways: spoken, as written language, or as a built manifestation of the object or circumstances the language describes.

Even when his works can show certain poetic appearance, it means just the opposite; it is not with the untranslatable, what cannot be expressed, with which Weiner faces, but rather with the need of translation, and therefore with the problematic of the interpretation. Weiner handles language not in an hermeneutic way but in a constructive one; he does not distinguish between nouns or verbs, between objects and actions. As he himself expresses it, in his propositions it is not indicated a determined sense: “The art that for its appreciation imposes conditions to the receiver (…) constitutes in my opinion a fascist aesthetic. My art never gives directions”.

Weiner applies this principle of directionality, challenging the audience to produce meaning from apparently unconnected concepts, a meaning that tendentiously reflects the reality of the receiver. Converts the directionality / non-directionality into the subject of the work: “In the West it is taken for granted that all people within certain cultures understand both the meaning and the use of straight lines, whereas in fact many people in the world do not understand straight lines.”

The comprehension of the “straight line” is not a mathematics option but it is also related to cultural language. North, South, West and East are also abstract concepts that assume universality, however become themselves rapidly dependent relative to the place where one is situated. Straight lines are really scant in a world that shows itself culturally dynamic and controversial.

In the last two decades Weiner has carried out works and exhibitions with texts directly painted or in vinyl on walls, floors or building facades; in posters and books that he himself designs. This way, Weiner’s art does not exist only as language, even it is not limited to be written on a support, but it incorporates the vagueness of meaning that can exist as spoken or in translation. Placing his works in different clearly accessible contexts he voluntarily democratises his proposal.

Answering to the EACC invitation, Lawrence Weiner proposes the project Under the Sun in two versions: a work devised for public space, more specifically, in the city centre, and an exhibition which is actually its concept that unfurls in the space of the EACC.

The public work refers to questions as to what constitutes a public sculpture? Who and where is this public? Weiner reiterates these questions with this project, which will be carried out in three languages: Valencian, Spanish and English.

Under the Sun functions in two discursive contexts, each one alluding to different spaces and ways of meeting or spaces of reception.

Under the Sun joins together these two levels, the one related to language as a necessary and ephemeral stopping place presentation of the public piece and the other as a permanent inscription of the public work itself. They are both different but at the same time indissociable as they share the same poetry. They represent the figures of the same movement, the flick of the wrist that makes the kite flying to the sky and leads it to kill the bull when it is falling down.

Under the Sun calls clearly in mind the bullfighting but also the lightness and the elegance of a wave that takes shape in the space as its own territory.

Under the Sun is an invitation of walking, playing or just simply exercising one’s mind.

The marking of a space within a public park that is dependent upon meaning not means the placing of a cluster of structures that afford a place demarked at that moment by the result of the flick of the wrist

a form that can fly a kite or kill a bull with grace

that sets aside a place for the moment that is yours

being only one meter high they afford not protection but a demarcation of sovereign territory when occupied

twisted & turned under the sun
Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner was born in 1942 in the Bronx, New York. After graduating from high school, he traveled across the country to California where he showed his famous Cratering Pieces at the Mill Valley with dynamite.
His first one-person show was held at the legendary Seth Siegelaub Gallery, New York, in 1964. At the same gallery he presented his Statements (1968), an artist book consisting only of language and since then, he is still exploring the abilities and presentation of language as sculptural media. Weiner has shown other solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2000), the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994), at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1990).
In 2007–2008, the Whitney Museum (2007) and Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (2008) made Lawrence Weiner's retrospective: As Far As The Eye Can See. Weiner lives between New York and Amsterdam.

Opening October 23rd / 8 pm

Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló (EACC)
Prim s/n 12003 Spain
Hours:
Tuesday to Sunday from 10.00 to 20.00 daily
Closed on Monday and public holidays

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