Lawrence Weiner

Photo courtesy Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner, "In Direct Line with Another and the Next, Manhattan" (2000)

Photo by Karl Rabe

Lawrence Weiner, "Bard Enter"

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He is a central figure in the history of Conceptual art (though he has always been uneasy with the term) and was one of the first artists to take the position that art need only have sufficient physical presence to communicate an idea—a position that led him to embrace language as an artistic material as valid as stone or paint (and which demands that the viewer (or “receiver,” as Weiner puts it) play an active role in a work’s realization).

His famous breakthrough moment came after he installed a sculpture at Windham College—four stakes in the ground connected with string. When students cut the string, which inhibited their walks across campus, Weiner famously said he realized then that viewers could experience the work just as well by reading a verbal description of it.

This led to Weiner’s 1968 “Declaration of Intent,” which reads, in part, 1) The artist may construct the work; 2) The work may be fabricated; 3) The work need not be built.

These three points became at once a virtual mantra for the conceptual tendency in late Modernism—and a red flag to those (and there were many) who thought conceptual work at best merely provocative, and at worst simply absurd.

Although his work has ever since consisted almost entirely of text, Weiner has always insisted on its material nature (and his works include film, video, books, sculpture and performance).

Weiner has also always been an aggressively public artist, apparently feeling that, as an artist, he has a social obligation to fulfill. Among his most (in)famous pieces are the manhole covers that were permanently sited in Lower Manhattan in 2000 and that bear the legend, “In direct line with another and the next.”

He recently completed a commission, Bard Enter, for the entrance way to the Hessel Museum at Bard College, and—perhaps a little more surprisingly—he is looking forward to the publication of a children’s book that he has written in English and Spanish.

Lawrence, let’s start by talking about when your art first came to public attention. It seems to me that in the late 1960s and early ’70s, artists thought about what they were doing in a quite different way to nowadays.

That was a complicated time. There was more of a thought that what you were laying out was going to establish a new way of dealing with things. I didn’t think of it as any new way, I thought that it was just a development of what I had done before. I’m serious. All along I’ve always said that I was a materialist and not conceptual. It wasn’t just to differentiate myself, it was because my conversations were with Carl Andre, and with John Chamberlain, and with Don Judd, and with Bob Ryman, because we were all trying to deal with the same thing: the objectification of something that society did not yet realize that it had a use for. That’s all.

But things seemed so heated in those days. I remember the quite aggressive public debates you had with other artists, like the British group Art & Language.

They had the same problem as people like Joe Kosuth. They meant well, but they wanted so much to be part of the establishment that they claimed they were trying to break apart that they lost sight of the fact that the making of art is all about making something that you’re convinced has a function, but which has not yet found its place within society. They were always finding a place before they made the object, whatever it was. They always had a place, they were always using a relation to something, it was always a conversation with their elders. And it turned out that it was a conversation with their betters.

There’s an implicit political stance in your work. Your work consists of verbal statements, but you scrupulously avoid giving your audience orders.

I don’t tell anybody to do anything.

In order to hear what I have to say, or to see what I have to show, why should somebody have to do something? I don’t get it. My presumption is that, as artists, we are integral parts of society. Therefore our questions of the material world are legitimate questions and they have a legitimate reason to be presented.