DAILY MAGAZINE
BLOG ON WITH NEWS, VIEWS, REVIEWS, DIARIES, EVENTS & PHOTO-JOURNALS

Lawrence Weiner

Adam E Mendelsohn meets the American artist Lawrence Weiner for an exclusive interview for Saatchi Online, in which Weiner lays out the philosophical underpinning of much of his work

AM: I only just recently saw your movie Water In Milk Exists (2008). Is it a porno?

LW: The reason I was invited by the Swiss Institute to make a sort of home porn movie was to attack censorship in the United States. People begin to feel that they have the right to tell other people what is possible. In fact, unless it's sexist, racist, fascist, or involves children I don't think anyone has the right to tell anybody anything. So they asked if I would do it and of course in the 70's The Kitchen asked me to make one. I remember the censorship boards were going to put me in jail for it...somehow or other the world didn't come to an end and they stopped harassing me. They began to realize that there are things that are more important like snuff films and exploitation of children. It's interesting to think what somebody considers pornographic since I think in 36 states it's still illegal for a heterosexual couple to have sex with a female on top. Illegal.

AM: It's totally bizarre. There are all sorts of bizarre rules like that.

LW: There are bizarre laws because people are bizarre. There are people wandering around with a quotable, interpretable text and their interpretation seems to work.

AM: I heard a good one the other day that you might enjoy. Apparently in the state of Virginia you are still allowed to beat your wife but the stick has to be less than two inches wide.

LW: That would be an uncomely scar if it were more than two inches.

AM: Going back to your film...the way that pornography circulates now it seems to have lost its potency. It's not subversive.

LW: It's not subversive whatsoever. It carries a landscape. It sets the tone. It sets a mise-en-scène. The reason one would use those things is to place whatever you are placing in the world within a little bit of a different context than it usually finds itself. That's it. It's that simple. It's not an attack on the petit bourgeois. And it's not at all to attack or shock somebody. It's saying that this will function as well - outside of its projected environment.

AM: Your recent show in New York, where we met, is titled At The Level Of The Sea (Marian Goodman, 15 January - 21 February 2009). One of the first rooms I came to is the space where the drawings are. It was wonderful to notice the draughtsmanship. There's a text in one of the drawings, "All About Eve" rendered very delicately with silver ink on top of black ink. How important is draughtsmanship in your work?

LW: It should be taken as a given. When I set out to make an installation or I see other people making installations I take it as a given. Yeah, I do draw but the point is, in the end it's the product that counts. They're mostly skills that you acquire. You can't be self-taught because if you don't know something how can you teach yourself?

AM: Do these drawings become installations or are they just drawings?

LW: They're just drawings. They're drawings that I do when I'm starting to work on a project. I work with materials, solid materials. But sometimes one is trying to figure out what the logic structure is. I like to have logic conversations with drawings.

AM: They're not placing words on a page.

LW: No, the drawings aren't sculpture. They aren't made to enter the world as an accomplished fact. They enter the world as notations.

AM: And they aren't schematics?

LW: No. The schematics are something else that I do. Schematics, as anybody else does, are in order to show people to help you install. There are people that collect schematics. I don't think mine are particularly exciting.

AM: Is the content of the drawings read as instructional?

LW: It's a proposition about logic. You go for it, then you're fucked and then you're screwed. The whole point is that it's presenting a proposition. You look at it and you think: "That's an interesting composition. This guy missed this and missed that." It has to be composition and has to be a proposition. If I knew what it was I had to say I would have used it in a sculpture.

AM: There's a shape that appears in the drawings that looks like a ship's ark.

LW: There are ships' arks but most of the ones that you've seen are cusps. A cusp is when these lines [demonstrates a helix shape with hands] intersect each other. The whole point of making sculpture and putting it in the world is to intersect with the world as it exists. I don't believe in parallel realities. The idea of parallel realities is connected to basic interpretations of Freudianisms. The trouble with dreams and wishes is that you can only dream about things you already know about. A boy can be a girl, a girl can be a dog, a boy can be a cat; it doesn't matter essentially because all you are doing is fixing the imagination. There's a perception that if you go deeper maybe it's possible for human beings to think of something that hadn't already existed in their own consciousness. Whether it existed and you missed it is beside the point. I believe in simultaneous realities where there's no need for a hierarchy because everything in this world is essentially happening at the same time and at the same place. That's it. Somehow we are involved in a world that's been structured to try and contain this.

AM: I'm in total agreement. I've just recently finished an essay about simultaneity. Do you see Noam Chomsky as a linguist, an artist, or both?

LW: A lot of my thinking was helped by the problem between Jean Piaget and Chomsky. I learned a lot about what to start to question from Chomsky. I also see Chomsky as a concerned citizen, as an educated concerned citizen, who very often is hitting large masses of power.

AM: One of the things I'm interested in is the hieght at which the text begins on the wall, the angles of the text (before reading them as words). I'm interested in these decisions. For instance is the angle of the text 45 degrees from the floor?

LW: No, it's not 45 degrees.

AM: But these decisions aren't arbitrary...

LW: No but they are after the fact. Artists place things within the society. Yes, I try to do it the best that I can. It's being an artist that does that it's not about structure or theory.

AM: I just wonder how you make those choices.

LW: It's intuitive. It is what it is but I call that part of the presentation emotional.

AM: Do you still refer to these pieces as "Statements"?

LW: "Statements" was misunderstood by the art world. A statement is what you send out at the end of the month that tells people [collectors] what you paid for. So the "Statement" would tell them what they got. Three kilos of spray paint etc...it wasn't about utterances. My aggression toward the world - and I think that art is partly about hatred and aggression - is about not liking the configuration that one enters. It isn't on a personal level. I'm not trying to pick anything obtuse. I'm trying to show that it's possible to accept the fact that art is the carrier place within society of the relationship between people and objects.

AM: One time I heard you say, although I might be misquoting: "My job isn't to inspire someone on the way to work it's to completely fuck up their life."

LW: That's a quote from when I did the manhole covers. I said: "My job is not to fuck up somebody's day on there way to work it's to fuck up their whole life." That's the job of an artist. To present a potent structure, a configuration that makes somebody stand still and take stock of their whole entire existence by their relationship to a stone or by their relationship to some steel. This is the reason why people like Carl Andre are such good artists. They're not telling you what to think they're telling you to stand still and watch how your thoughts no longer work.

AM: Is that the experience you had the first time you encountered work by Antoni Tapies?

LW: I like Tapies, how did you know that? He's a hero of mine. I look at people in Spain who say, "My god, we had this problem with Franco..." and think: stop whining. Christ, I grew up with McCarthy. I grew up poor. Hooray. Tapies came from a middle-class family and he built these structures, this work that is absolutely gorgeous. Under Franco he figures out how to get the work in to the world and not only that but he was a success! When I saw the first Tapies, the first Chamberlain, the first deKooning, Pollock - those were people showing me an alternate structure. Anybody that I didn't quite get (because I started so young) I still got the sense that I couldn't enter it unless I stood still and put all the pretensions you acquire coming up to one side and just stood and looked at the thing; not relating it to me as if I was important.

AM: We were discussing certain aspects of logic that exist in your work and the use of language. What is required from the viewer for it to have meaning?

LW: It requires knowing what s-t-o-v-e spells. As far as the work having any double meanings, the work does not present itself as metaphor. I use language with a plus sign and materials are referred to. That's the best I can do if you accept that language is a material as well.

AM: There's a notion that art must contain multiple meanings. I'm interested in this idea that there's a way to close down interpretation and multiple meanings.

LW: Not interpretation but you can close down metaphor. That requires skill. If you create work where there is no metaphor than people have to make metaphor to use it. I've tried to make something that cannot be used in a metaphorical sense. How could you close down meaning?

AM: Is surprise still an element that you would like people to experience with your art?

LW: I like to present awe. Some people go so far as to try and trick an audience. I don't want to trick the audience.

AM: Could I go home and make one of your pieces and put it on my wall?

LW: If you felt like being a thief.

AM: If I found a place to get the vinyl lettering done and simply copied one of your pieces on to my wall would that be considered stealing?

LW: You could but why would you? There's that line: "If it's worth stealing then it's worth buying." As long as you are willing to accept the responsibility to say that it's just art and its art because you think it's art, then you can use it. If you use my name than I have a right to say no. If you don't use my name then it's fine.

Adam E. Mendelsohn

Lawrence Weiner (b. 1942, The Bronx, New York, lives and works in New York and Amsterdam) has exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (2000); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995); the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (1990); and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1990). He has participated in Documenta V (1972), VI (1977), and VII (1982), as well as the 2005 Venice Biennale, and the Biennale Sao Paolo in 2006. Among his many honors are National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1976 and 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1995), and a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999).