Lawrence Weiner has been a leading figure in the art world for decades. Widely recognized as a pioneer of Conceptual art, his work uses language as its core material. Weiner investigates forms of display and distribution that challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object, and taking it further, his work challenges a relationship of the viewer or to use his term, ‘receiver’ to the work.
His body of work has expanded on the potential for language to serve as sculpture. The subjects of his epigrammatic statements are often simple materials affected or effected by a process. Using language has allowed Weiner to play more with meaning within a cultural context, as in two of his early works from 1969, one about translation and the other about boundaries: A TRANSLATION FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER and THE JOINING OF FRANCE GERMANY AND SWITZERLAND BY ROPE. Weiner has frequently designed his work to be presented in a variety of local languages (e.g. Modern Arabic and Modern Hebrew) as well as English. Here in Tel-Aviv, that fact endows his show with a universal dimension when placed within a core political context: it’s presence, it’s fact accumulates more and more impact with time. Weiner has also developed his work over the years creating inflections of meaning with punctuation, shape, gesture and the interactions of color.
Whether in the context of art or in the broader context of cities and landscapes, his texts create a multi-inspirational performance of humanism. His unique “handwriting,” recognizable and anonymous at once, maintains a genuine materialism in a world of art that is becoming increasingly focused on objects. As such, Weiner’s work is contemporaneous in ways that appear to transcend the needs of future generations.