Lawrence Weiner and the Sculpture That Need Not Be Built

In 1968 Lawrence Weiner went to Windham College in Vermont and set out a grid of stakes on a campus lawn, joined with twine. Students cut the twine. The work, A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS, had been interrupted, and yet, as Weiner came to see it, nothing that mattered had been lost. The piece could have reached the public just as well as a set of words describing what to do. The Art Newspaper recorded his own account of the realisation: it did not matter whether a work was built or not, or put into language or not, so long as it was not kept secret.

From that point on, language was Weiner’s material. For more than half a century he made sculpture out of words: painted on walls, stencilled on floors, printed in books, set into the street.

From dynamite to statements

The route there was not straight. Weiner was born in the Bronx in 1942. The Whitney Museum describes a youth spent working the docks before classes at Stuyvesant High School, hitchhiking across the country, living among the Beat poets in San Francisco and protesting nuclear proliferation. According to Dia Art Foundation, it was in Mill Valley, California, in 1960 that he used dynamite to make his Cratering Piece. His first solo show was held at Seth Siegelaub Contemporary Art in New York in 1964, and painting was his main medium early on.

The turn came in 1968, the year of the twine at Windham. That year he published Statements, a book of works made entirely of language. The Whitney marks 1968 as the moment he took up language as the means of presenting sculpture. One work of the same year, TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR FROM A STANDARD AEROSOL SPRAY CAN, already reads as both instruction and finished object.

Another, ONE QUART EXTERIOR GREEN INDUSTRIAL ENAMEL THROWN ON A BRICK WALL (1968), shows how close the language works stayed to physical acts. Dia notes that Weiner actually made this one, hurling paint against the facade of his own home, and reads it as an allusion to Jackson Pollock: Pollock’s gesture extended into the real world. The medium line Dia gives for the work is a small manifesto in itself: language plus the materials referred to.

The Statement of Intent

The principle behind all of this was set down in the Statement of Intent, which Dia dates to 1969. It opens with three numbered lines:

“1. the artist may construct the work
2. the work may be fabricated
3. the work need not be built”

Weiner held each of these outcomes to be equal and consistent with the artist’s intent, so that whoever receives the work decides what physical condition, if any, it takes.

The three clauses quietly dismantle a long list of assumptions. Authorship no longer depends on the artist’s hand, since someone else may fabricate the work. The object no longer depends on being made at all. And the final say passes to the person who receives the piece, whether a collector, a curator or a reader of a book.

Dia’s guide puts the stakes clearly. Weiner treated his works as general representations of states or processes rather than material facts, which is why one work can have countless manifestations. The typeface, size, colour and placement change with each site. The letters might be stencilled, painted or mounted in relief. A poster, a book, a gallery wall and a public square each colour the meaning differently. The works are seldom site specific, Dia says, but they are often site related, conceived with the venue in mind.

On the question of subject, Weiner was blunt. Dia’s 2016 press release quotes him: “the subject of my art is art.”

At Dia Beacon

Dia has been the most sustained home for that thinking. The Statement of Intent is installed at Dia Beacon, where the foundation’s guide describes it suspended high above the admissions desk, a reminder that, in Weiner’s view, art always institutionalises itself wherever it is placed. Other works sit in a stairwell, among the sculpture galleries and in the café and bookshop. The installation of 5 Figures of Structure (1987) pairs five arrangements of rectangles with their textual descriptions, testing the relationship between instruction and installation.

The largest is outside. CADMIUM & MUD & TITANIUM & LEAD & FERROUS OXIDE & SO ON . . . was first commissioned for the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, where it was shown from April 1991 to April 1992. In 2016 Dia announced that it would be hand painted on the back facade of Dia Beacon, the fourth Weiner installation at the museum, visible from the lawn and from the Metro-North trains that run past. A list of pigments and earth, written as language, becomes a wall that commuters read at speed. Jessica Morgan, Dia’s director, observed in the same release that Weiner always cared about how his work is encountered.

Dia had also presented his work Displacement in 1991 and published a book of the same title.

Retrospective and the street

Museums kept giving Weiner solo shows: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington in 1990, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1991 and 1994, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2000. The first retrospective in the United States came in 2007. Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE was co-organised by the Whitney and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and co-curated by Donna De Salvo and Ann Goldstein. It ran at the Whitney from 15 November 2007 to 10 February 2008 and covered forty years of work.

The Whitney’s account of the artist stresses a social motive as much as a formal one. Weiner, it says, held that a work succeeded if it enriched other people’s lives. His early give aways, small objects meant to be exchanged, and his reliance on common materials such as water and stone were ways of keeping the work within reach.

That ambition reached the pavement. The Art Newspaper notes that his phrase IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER & THE NEXT was set into manhole covers in New York. Other works it lists include EARTH TO EARTH ASHES TO ASHES DUST TO DUST (1970), a 2008 work beginning SHELLS USED TO BUILD ROADS for the Bass Museum in Miami, and STASIS AS TO VECTOR ALL IN DUE COURSE (2012).

Weiner divided his later life between New York and Amsterdam. He died on 2 December 2021, aged 79.

The twine at Windham was cut more than fifty years earlier. The work survived, as Weiner predicted it would, because it had never depended on the twine.