Lawrence Weiner at Marian Goodman

Since 1968, Lawrence Weiner's chosen medium of expression has been language and its structure. EN ROUTE (2005), a single, complex work in five parts, applied in laser-cut vinyl letters to the gallery walls, introduced his recent exhibition. Each element included the phrase "en route" applied in a highly legible uppercase black sans-serif font, not more than a foot high, bracketed above and below with two bright-blue horizontal bars.

Thus emphasized, the repeated phrase was placed in varying degrees of proximity to five qualifying expressions concerning the existence of simultaneous realities. These phrases were applied in a version of the stencil font that is also a characteristic of Weiner's work. In this instance, vinyl stencil lettering took the form of a silver arc of language. Each arc resembled an entrance to a tunnel; together they evoke a series of lively, spring-loaded arches bounding around the gallery walls, as though physically expressing the nature of being in different places at the same time. Each was serially deployed in relation to the predicated condition. Taken together, the work reads: EN ROUTE: AT ANOTHER TIME, EN ROUTE: TO ANOTHER STAGE, EN ROUTE: IN ANOTHER COURT, EN ROUTE: ON ANOTHER PLANE and EN ROUTE: VIA ANOTHER ROUTE.

A large, multivalent work of 1991 that consisted of four parts when it was installed for Weiner's exhibition at Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1991-92 was expanded by one section in Goodman's south gallery. The piece takes the form of a series of physical or chemical equations, expressed in words that represent the combination of various elements or compounds that together form a kind of broadly conceived sum. The parts were placed in simple boxes, one above the other and connected by an ampersand, or one following the other and connected by a plus sign. The text that follows the "summing up" is multiply referential, an indefinite commentary of the typical Weiner sort. The new, fifth element consisted of the graphic representation--boxes and signs--but with no words. It is the work in its most skeletal form, presented as a paradigm.

Elsewhere in the gallery, Weiner chose the stencil font for the installation of OIL + WATER & WIRE + WOOD (1993). The work consisted of a grid of black lines laid out in the manner of a tic-tac-toe game, with the ampersand in the center box and the words in the corners. The words themselves were dropped out of red banners, the ends of which appeared to have been cut with enormous pinking shears to achieve the zigzag effect associated with rustic signage. Weiner launched his newest monograph, Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner, 1968-2003 on the occasion of the exhibition's opening.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group