Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE
Whitney Museum of American Art
Imaginary numbers are vital to modern mathematics. The discovery of imaginary art--a.k.a. conceptual art--in the 1960s was greeted as a breakthrough of comparable significance. It demonstrated, so the thinking went, that art was capable of the same heavy lifting required by more rigorous disciplines. In an era of vandalisms great and small, conceptual art combined the malice of deconstruction with the antics of Alan Kaprow's "happenings." Lawrence Weiner, now on show at New York's Whitney Museum, is a key figure of the movement. He helped put the torch to the traditional practice of painting and sculpture.
Conceptualism scorns material works of art and exalts the artist's mental labors instead. Execution of the concept is optional. Skills and aesthetic achievement do not apply. What counts is the artist's shining brainwork and subsequent commentary by Those Who Know. The aim is to demolish common understanding of the nature of art. A wrecking ball is better than a brush for effecting a Nietzschean upending of prevailing values. And this Whitney retrospective of Weiner's pranksmanship solemnizes the ethos of rebellion and disguised nihilism that rode Jefferson Airplane from the sixties into the Me Decade that followed. Those were the heydays of conceptual art.
In 1960, the 18-year-old Bronx-born artist jump-started his career by dynamiting holes (without permission) in a Mill Valley state park. He dubbed them "Cratering Pieces." On the qui vive to capture the zeitgeist, critics took the cue. They blessed the demolition and
announced it a "work." The game was on. In the axis year 1968, Weiner turned to detonating language, too. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, seedbed for deconstruction, was already on the stands. The Order of Things, Michel Foucault's assault on semantic habits, had appeared the year before. Relations between words and meanings, given an earlier shake by Dada texts, went into free fall. It was the cognoscenti's last joyride after the death of God.
Weiner seized the moment. He separated language from its communicative function with "word-works," nonconnotative phraselets broadcast on walls and building façades. Gigantic Post-It notes signifying nothing suited the times. To a generation whose critical capacities were capped by Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Hite Report, AND THEN UTILISED AS TO ANOTHER GENDER (as the capitalized titles read) sounded recondite and worldly.
At the Whitney, strings of Weinerisms are stenciled on walls and floors like riddles of the sphinx. The procession is punctuated here and there with a dollop of paint, sea water, firecracker residue, or some other clue to the existential status of the artist.
Guerrilla theater begins in the elevator with a blotch on the carpet. A wall plaque declares the stain a creative act: AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED UPON A RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH. Elsewhere, in caps: TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR FROM A STANDARD AEROSOL SPRAY CAN. Most lines have the ring of contrived enigma: EN ROUTE ON ANOTHER PLANE/EN ROUTE VIA ANOTHER ROUTE.
Do you need more? Photographs commemorate civic adventures such as the 2000 Public Art Fund project that cast Weiner's nonplusses onto 19 Manhattan manhole covers. Running the old cannabis trade route from the West Village to Washington Square, Union Square and Tompkins Square Park, each cast-iron plate carries the phrase: IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER AND THE NEXT. It is an apt motto for the persistent legacy of Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary.
|
