Lawrence weiner artist biography

Lawrence Weiner was one of the pioneers of text-as-art during the era of Conceptualism.

Lawrence weiner artist biography: Lawrence Charles Weiner (February 10, –

His use of language is notable for its lyricism, its inquisitive engagement with the material world around it, and its distinctive, often colorful and playful visual forms. A fiercely egalitarian and anti-authoritarian spirit, hailing from a working-class background, Weiner saw his artworks as invitations for viewers to reconsider their relationships with the world around them, including with other people and systems of power.

Based between Amsterdam and his home city of New York for most of his career, Weiner remained an engaging and humane force within modern art for half a century, creatively active throughout. Lawrence Weiner's works make playful, probing interventions into the world around them. One of the first artists to work with text as his primary material, he rarely accepting teaching positions, as he was more interesting in questioning authority than assuming it.

This work, from Weiner's series of Propeller Paintingsfeatures a central sunburst- or propeller-like yellow form, set inside a larger red form with a similar shape. The background is comprised of geometric blue and orange fields, each outlined either by black lines or thicker gold lines. As with all of the works in the series, Weiner used readily available materials or as he put it, materials that were not "exotic" to create the piece.

Weiner's desire to present art as accessible, both to audiences and other would-be artists, would come to define his career. Weiner said of his Propeller Paintings"I was in a very distressed state about the political relation of the artist to society [ I had an old television set which only had one channel, with signals that I watched all night.

That became my modus operandi. I began to make these paintings, all in different sizes and all in different shapes and all at the same price. The artist noted that this series led to the creation of three-dimensional pieces, including his "cut-out sculptures" of and his later "notched paintings". He had also already begun experimenting with immaterial, or so-called "conceptual" art projects, when he made his Propeller Paintings.

In he created Cratering Piecean undocumented, unsanctioned performance-based earthwork that involved detonating a series of explosives in a California state park and declaring the resulting "craters" to be sculptures. Thus, his Propeller Paintings came at a time when the artist was experimenting with both tangible, traditional art forms and with practices that challenged the object-status of painting and sculpture.

This work, which comprises the title phrase written on a wall in green, is amongst the first of Weiner's text-based installations, which dominated his oeuvre from onwards. Weiner started producing these pieces after an incident at Windham College in Putney, when students cut down the twine that made up his outdoor sculpture Hay, Mesh, String to walk across the college lawn.

It was at that point that Weiner realized the work would have functioned better as a simple verbal description rather than as a physical manifestation. By describing the process that created the artwork, Weiner invites audiences to break down the veil of mystery, rarefication, and secrecy that surrounds the idea of 'art' or 'artists,' implying that anyone could remake this piece or produce an equivalent piece of their own.

He was therefore engaging in a subtly radical movement to democratize the discourses around modern art. Weiner later described his shift towards using words as form as "a political decision. If you wanted to lawrence weiner artist biography something that everybody could get, the way to do that was to make something with genuine sculptural values and to portray it in a language so that people could be able to do it themselves.

Not instructions. But something that sat by itself. Curator Ann Goldstein writes that "Weiner's employment of language allows the work to be used by its receiver. It is purposely left open for translation, transference, and transformation; each time the work is made, it is made anew. Not fixed in time and place, every manifestation and point of reception is different - each person will use the work differently and find a different relationship to its content.

He says "I realized that I was working with the materials that people called 'sculptors' work with.

Lawrence weiner artist biography: Lawrence Charles Weiner was an American

I was working with mass, I was working with all of the processes of taking out and putting in [ Therefore I did not think I was doing anything different from somebody putting fourteen tons of steel out. In this text-based work, Weiner's words do not so much refer to an imagined or imaginable artistic intervention as open out a lyrical space for wide-ranging viewer interpretations.

The Christian burial recitation 'Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust' becomes, in non-liturgical circumstances, a simple meditation on materials and processes of transmutation. This is one of the most unique and engaging aspects of his practice as compared to Conceptualism in general.

Lawrence weiner artist biography: › Visual Arts › Installation

In his early years, Weiner spent a great amount of time experimenting with sans-serif typefaces, trying to find the best one for his artistic purpose. He began by using Helvetica, which he described is "nice enough" although "sort of dumpy". However, he was soon turned off as he lawrence weiner artist biography it had accrued an air of "intellectual power" and didn't like things "that get away with just having power".

He then turned to Franklin Gothic but later said that "after a while, the work entered the culture so much that if anybody saw something in Franklin Gothic, they thought it was me and it wasn't". In the end, he developed his own unique typeface, Margaret Seaworthy Gothic. Works such as Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust exemplify the difference between Weiner's approach to Conceptual Art though he never accepted that term and other artists associated with the movement such as Joseph Kosuth.

Whereas both artists used language to describe an imagined visual or sculptural artwork that was not actually presented, Weiner's nuggets of language had a quality of self-sufficient aesthetic beauty that was often lacking in the more clinical, documentary style of Kosuth's texts. For this reason, Weiner is amongst those Conceptual Artists whose work has been appreciated by poets and compared to poetry as well as being placed in the company of art movements.

Guggenheim Museum, New York City. Weiner considered this film to be his "Godard movie". He was strongly influenced by Godard's A Bout de Souffle when it first came out, viewing it as "the first real work of Pop Art in film". He was most taken by Godard's "understanding of the relationships between reality and non-reality". In his own film, Weiner adopted many of the techniques used by Godard and other directors of Nouvelle Vague cinema, such as the presentation of simultaneous realities, altered flashbacks, and plays on time and space.

Says Weiner, "I started to make movies because I didn't want to write magazine articles [ The work is imagined as a series of "simultaneous realities" along the lines of Godard's cinema. Structurally, the artist stated that the film adapts the form of a feature film. Weiner sometimes incorporated a more explicitly sculptural element in his work, as in this three-dimensional piece which involved recasting the iron weighbridge of the former Dean Clough Carpet Factory and embossing the title-text onto the metal.

Writer Naomi Blumberg notes that "[s]ome of Weiner's phrases are unique to one site, whereas others may be repeated or installed in multiple places - in a public space, on a gallery wall, in a book - each context carrying with it a different meaning and experience for the reader. Part of the value of Weiner's work is in drawing attention to the wider realities enclosing it, including the industrial and architectural materials and space around it.

Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. American artist — Early life [ edit ]. Early Career [ edit ]. Artist's books [ edit ].

Lawrence weiner artist biography: Lawrence Weiner (born February 10,

Exhibitions [ edit ]. Selected solo-exhibitions: [ edit ]. Recognition [ edit ]. Prizes, awards, grants, and fellowships include: [ edit ]. Films [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Suggested further reading [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Lawrence Weiner. Contemporary artists. Contact About Privacy. Billy Childish. Sophie Gengembre Anderson.

Violetta Livshen. Not long after this, Weiner turned to language as the primary vehicle for his work, concluding in that:. Like other Conceptual artists who gained international recognition in the late s and early s, Weiner has investigated forms of display and distribution that challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object.

As the sole contribution to a presentation organized by Siegelaub inWeiner created a small book entitled Statements; since the work consisted of nothing but words, there was no reason to display a physical object. The wall installations that have been a primary medium for Weiner since the s consist solely of words in a nondescript lettering painted on walls.