Dvir / Paris
Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Thursday: 11:00 – 19:00
Friday – Saturday: 12:00 – 19:00
Lawrence Weiner in front of a tram inscribed with the sentence 'A line drawn from the first star of dusk to the last star of dawn' in German as well as English. Photograph: Frederico Gambarini/EPA
American conceptual artist with a contempt for commercialism who used words as his chief material
In February this year, a stencilled sign appeared on the gable end of the South London gallery’s new Fire Station annexe. Spray-painted in turquoise on white, it read AT A DISTANCE TO THE FOREGROUND. Passengers on passing buses mused over the sign’s meaning. It was a surveyor’s mark, perhaps, or something to do with health and safety. In fact, it was a work of art by the American conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, who has died aged 79 of cancer.
The road to AT A DISTANCE TO THE FOREGROUND (1999) had begun half a century before, with another work by Weiner called A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS TO FORM A RECTANGLE – TWINE STRUNG FROM STAKE TO STAKE TO DEMARK A GRID – A RECTANGLE REMOVED FROM THIS RECTANGLE (1968). The title of this was descriptive and literal. Weiner’s piece, installed on the sports field of a college in Vermont, was precisely as its name suggested. The college football team, oblivious to conceptual art, took objection to their pitch being co-opted for it.
Cutting its twine by night, they then pulled up Weiner’s titular stakes and dumped them on the touchline. Far from upsetting him, this intervention came as a damascene moment for the young artist. “I began the realisation that it seemed to mean something,” he recalled in an interview for the Archives of American Art in 2019. “People talked about it, even though it wasn’t there any more. So that was it.”
Read the full article here