- 412
Lawrence Weiner
Description
- Lawrence Weiner
- Back to Back at a Point in TimeIn Relation to a Support System (I.E. a Buttress) And Two Clocks Back to Back at a Point in Time in Relation to a Buttress
- text on a wall: dimensions variable
- sculpture: 12 5/8 by 15 3/4 by 12 5/8 in. 32 by 40 by 32 cm.
- Executed in 1977, this piece was presented with a text on a wall in the same year.
Provenance
Galerie Le Gall Peyroulet, Paris
Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Baudriot, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above
Exhibited
Los Angeles, Claire Copley Gallery, 1977
University of Chicago, Renaissance Society, January - March 1978, illustrated
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Lawrence Weiner: Options 3, March - May 1980
Aalborg, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Albert Mertz + Lawrence Weiner, 1983, illustrated
Washington, D.C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, SPECTRUM: In Other Words, 1986.
Santa Monica, Brendon Walter Gallery, A Bid for Human Rights, 1988
Paris, Le Gall Peyroulet, Drawings for Installations & Projects, 1999
Literature
Lawrence Weiner, Lawrence Weiner: Works, Hamburg, 1977, p. 363, illustrated
Lawrence Weiner, Specific & General Works, Villeurbanne, 1993, p. 439
Exh. Cat., Kobenhavns Kommunes Udstillingsbygning, Albert Merz, Copenhagen, 1999, p. 70, illustrated
Catalogue Note
Early works of art by Lawrence Weiner consisted of placing hand made bowls within a natural setting, meant to be discovered by chance. These early works were the origin of his conceptual works of art.
In 1968, Weiner exhibited Hay, Mesh, String at Windham College, a work of art composed of rope and other materials positioned in the ground. After a group of students destroyed the work, Lawrence Weiner decided to no longer create traditional sculpture, but rather create “Statements.”
Continuing in this new style and tradition, Weiner created his text based art by applying vinyl lettering directly on a wall while maintaining a sculptural quality to his work. Through his “Statements,” which evoke questions about material, color, positioning in space, tension and time, his mature body of work began.
Weiner offers the following truths to the installation of his work:
The artist may construct the piece. The piece may be fabricated. The piece need not be built.
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.
Lawrence Weiner radically calls into question the traditional status of art and invites the public a poetic perception, without any limits. Here, everything is possible, the art work becomes plural and plays off of its ambivalences: visible/invisible; tangible/intangible, sending us back to a cascade of mental and material interpretations.