South of the Border

Lawrence Weiner has always been political— his intent broadly, specifically, empirically civic and cosmopolitan. But the work rarely wears its heart on an activist sleeve. Weiner generally prefers to operate at the level of root values focusing on universalizing fundamentals. On the other hand, he has never shied away from identifying difficult times for what they are, or for confronting them— which makes LAWRENCE WEINER: SOUTH OF THE BORDER sound like a political assertion, and it is. These three new sculptures and a book for Casa Wabi (Oaxaca, Mexico), and the rest of us, are an expression of openness to others and a rejection of nativism in all its forms. In them Weiner transmutes the threat of malignant geography into a one-planet dance.

Weiner sometimes describes his work as an occasion to find one’s place in the sun. Cosmic and non-prescriptive, his sculptures, which he calls empirical existing facts, suggest but do not require that we consider where and how we fit into the natural order of things. Weiner interest is in the matrix of relationships that connect us with the other raw materials that constitute the world. He presents these relationships in order to empower his viewer with a broadly sharable empirical understanding. In them we are invited to join an awareness: to have our theories, and to understand what they mean to other feeling, sentient, wondering beings, too. This is more straightforward than it sounds — but admittedly, it’s not easy to understand or explain how language and the materials referred to Weiner standard media description, make a sculpture.

In the metastatic, double-edged uncertainties of the postmodern era, Lawrence Weiner is a unique reference point, a beacon. Even as language was being tried and convicted as a traitor to objective truth, Weiner was doing something funny. In endless love with the untangleable snakiness of thought, he embraced the instability of language with the empirical satisfaction of a sculptor, and ended up producing work that is transparent, complex, and dependable.

Experiencing Weiner ́ s work: reading and then entering the universe of the language and the materials referred to is consistently ennobling of perspective, in the same way that we have the opportunity to expand watching Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon, to feel lunar dust underfoot, to hear those famous words and to share both the small step and the giant leap.

Curator: Dakin Hart