Taken to another Point Lawrence Weiner

In the late 1960s, Lawrence Weiner was one of the first artists to define linguistic expression as the primary medium of the autonomous work of art: rejecting the “conceptual” epithet that was deemed idealistic, he referred to his own activity as “sculpture”, emphasising the material and constructive role of language. The text (thought) is a finished work, while at the same time it carries the potential for physical implementation. The range of meaning in Weiner’s broadly associative, aphorism-like texts changes depending on the given circumstances in which they are presented. His texts can be executed in an infinity of forms, and his objects, his books, and his museum and public installations are produced in accordance with the artist’s instructions, using his own trademark font. The precise instructions for carrying out his artwork can also be read in the design displayed here, which was given physical form at the beginning of the 1990s in the gardens of the Villa di Verzegnis in Italy, as part of the collection of Egidio Marzona, alongside works by others including Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham and Robert Barry. The circular concrete foundation and the steel letters of Weiner’s work are located at the entrance to the gardens as a kind of “helipad”, which creates a specific context for interpreting the text, which takes spatial and temporal motion as its theme.

Dominika Sodics