Can words be art, separate from literature? That was one of the driving questions behind the work of one of America’s most significant conceptual artists, Lawrence Weiner, who died last Thursday on 2nd December.
Weiner’s interest in art began young. He was born in the Bronx in 1942 and, having left school when he was 16, received little formal education. For years he got by in a variety of labour-intensive jobs, including on an oil tanker, at railroads and dockyards. He made his first artwork—an installation made up of four explosives in a grid displayed outside San Francisco—when he was 19. By 1964, he had caught the eye of art dealer and gallerist Seth Siegelaub, who put on an exhibition of his work at his New York gallery. From then onwards, aged just 23, Weiner’s calling as an artist was never in any doubt.
By the end of that decade, Weiner soon emerged as one of the main proponents of a new conceptual art movement in the United States, alongside the likes of Richard Serra, Edward Ruscha, Joseph Kosuth and Sol DeWitt. This new art was to prove a decisive break with Abstract Expressionism, which had for so long held a tight grip on America’s artistic sensibilities. Though unlike the equally avant-garde Pop Art, obsessed as it was with the saturation of imagery, this new conceptual movement was more about art that lay beyond image. How might art occupy physical space? Can language be art? And how might we still challenge the possibilities, after half a century of such challenges, of what art can be?
Weiner worked in dozens of different mediums at the start of his career, including painting and performance, but it was the public reaction to an outdoor installation he created in 1968 that would define his art. On the campus lawn of a Vermont college Weiner had installed a square grid of twine, intended as a sculpture. When he later noticed students had cut through the twine and unintentionally vandalised the work because it was getting in the way of their usual path to college—“they had no way of knowing it was art,” Weiner reflected in an interview with the Smithsonian in 2019—he realised the installation would have been more effective as a written text. Its title, A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS, was more evocative than looking at the work out there on the lawn. Even better, language would have allowed the work to enter the viewer’s imagination, where it could have taken on any number of new and individual meanings.
From then onwards, Weiner worked almost exclusively with language, his bold use of typography revealing a sensitivity to design principles rarely seen in artists. (I for one know that Weiner endeared himself to generations of design students when he observed that “everything set in Helvetica is saying exactly the same thing.”) His textual pronouncements, usually set in a distinct all-capped grotesque, went on to adorn the walls of public spaces, the inside of art galleries and publications. His words could be kinetic, reminiscent of the cover of Filippo Marinetti’s futurist Zang Tumb Tumb. They could be seen scaling up the sides of buildings or jumping across the pages of a book. They could say something descriptive—like SOMETHING TO PUT SOMETHING ON (2008)—or even poetic, like SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT) (1991). As the Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector observed, language affords Weiner’s art with another layer of interaction: it can “literally be disseminated by word of mouth,” can be read as text or looked at as image in equal measure.
Though despite a prolific output and an international reputation, it could be said that Weiner never did produce any single, “definitive” work. Perhaps that was deliberate. He was staunchly against the idea of art as the product of an isolated or ivy-tower genius—he believed all artists had a responsibility to occupy and engage with the wider world, because artists too are “in the stream of life, whether [they] like it or not.” How groundbreaking or original an artist’s thought might be did not matter. What did matter was how a work of art might bring its audience into the fold of meaning-making. “I suspect revolution never has anything to do with something new,” as Weiner told a symposium at Bradford Junior College, in 1968. “The true revolutionary act just changes the balance of things already existing.” That “already existing” thing for Weiner was everyday language, remade in the mould of art.
Social media means we are inundated with each other’s pithy one-liners, and contemporary viewers might see something profoundly superficial in some of Weiner’s more enigmatic texts. But the power of Weiner’s art is to remind us that the meanings we seek are maybe not so profound after all. Maybe they have always been there for the taking, if only we were more honest about how art makes us feel. Art can be for everyone, so long as we let everyone in. Art can change the balance of how we see the world, so long as art is allowed to change. And art, as Weiner himself discovered, can come in any form you may please—so long as it isn’t kept a secret.
