Les artistes meurent à 79 ans

Lawrence Weiner a dit son dernier mot

Pionnier de l’art conceptuel dans les années 60, le New-Yorkais est mort jeudi à 79 ans. Avec de courts textes inscrits ou énoncés, il créait des œuvres dont les titres servaient de description et de programme.

par Elisabeth Franck-Dumas / publié le 4 décembre 2021 à 9h16 dans Libération

L’œuvre d’art dont tu es le héros ? C’est Lawrence Weiner qui l’a inventée. Non, ne va pas t’imaginer une toile de toi en Wonder Woman sur un champ de bataille. Ce pionnier de l’art conceptuel américain, mort jeudi à 79 ans, a fait bien mieux qu’un tableau à trou où insérer ta caboche : il t’a rendu entièrement responsable de l’œuvre qu’il créait. Elle devait se réaliser dans ton esprit, sa construction matérielle était tout juste une option. Il suffisait de la lire – Weiner sculptait avec pour matériau le langage, dans de courts textes à l’immédiateté de slogans qui s’inscrivaient en majuscules sur les murs – pour qu’aussitôt elle existe.

Ainsi l’inscription Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole («Morceaux épars réunis pour présenter l’illusion d’un tout»), déroulée non pas d’un bloc mais sur plusieurs lignes, décrit-elle précisément ce qu’elle est, tout en convoquant d’autres possibilités d’actualisation restées à l’état de potentiels. Ou Two Minutes of Spray Paint Directly on the Floor from a Standard Aerosol Spray Can («De la peinture en spray d’un aérosol standard directement au sol, pendant deux minutes»), qui a valeur de fait accompli aussi bien que de mode d’emploi, dessine-t-elle mentalement une flaque de pigments, quand bien même l’œuvre, d’ailleurs réalisée de nombreuses fois, peut aussi rester en puissance. Dans le monde de l’art, il y a donc ceux qui parlent d’économie de moyens, de frugalité, de légèreté, et puis il y a eu Lawrence Weiner, dont les propositions très précises, élégantes, révolutionnaires, drôles, politiques, ont contribué à changer, dans des années 60 marquées par l’essor de l’art conceptuel, la définition de ce que pouvait être une œuvre d’art.

Les mots plutôt que les constructions en dur

Cet art-là, que l’on peut mettre en lien avec les travaux d’un Joseph Kosuth ou d’un Sol LeWitt, était dépendant de son contexte, de l’emplacement où il était vu, et soulignait ainsi la nature toute relative du sens. Pour ses «sculptures», Weiner se plaisait à subvertir des expressions toutes faites, des clichés circulant dans le langage courant. Par exemple To See and Be Seen, «Voir et être vu», formule à l’efficacité publicitaire. Déroulée sur les murs d’un musée, elle devenait une définition a minima du rapport entre l’œuvre et ses spectateurs – ou plutôt ses «récepteurs», terme que Weiner préférait logiquement à celui de «viewer», «regardeur».

C’est la nature de l’interaction œuvre-récepteur qui passionna l’artiste durant sa carrière. Et c’est à dessein qu’il choisit les mots plutôt que les constructions en dur, car ils lui semblaient plus universellement accessibles. Ses énoncés, qui pouvaient également prendre forme dans des livres ou des posters, être dits dans des vidéos, des performances ou des bandes sonores, étaient d’ailleurs traduits dès lors qu’ils étaient exposés à l’étranger ; l’on peut en voir de manière permanente sur les murs de la Collection Lambert en Avignon.

Héritage

Né dans le Bronx, à New York, en 1942, de parents qui tenaient un magasin de bonbons, Lawrence Weiner abandonne ses études à l’université Hunter College pour se consacrer à la peinture. Il se rend en Californie, fréquente les poètes de la Beat Generation, peint et réalise des sculptures en détonnant des charges d’explosifs. De retour à New York, Weiner développe des œuvres dont le titre sert de description et de programme (par exemple une série de pieux dans le sol à intervalles réguliers formant un rectangle…). Lorsque l’une d’elles se retrouva malencontreusement détruite, Weiner eut une révélation : l’énoncé suffit pour que l’œuvre existe. Il rédige donc, en 1968, une «déclaration d’intention» qui déterminera dès lors son travail, et où l’on peut lire l’héritage tant de Bertolt Brecht que de Marcel Duchamp :

 1- L’artiste peut construire la pièce.

 2- La pièce peut être fabriquée (sous-entendu, par quelqu’un d’autre). 

 3- La pièce n’a pas besoin d’être réalisée. 

Chaque proposition étant égale et en accord avec l’intention de l’artiste, le choix d’une des conditions de présentation relève du récepteur à l’occasion de la réception.» Il n’expose à cette occasion qu’un livre d’énoncés, Statements, regroupant des œuvres sans réalité physique.

Dans un monde encore marqué par l’expressionnisme abstrait et son culte du génie, c’est un coup de tonnerre. L’année suivante, il participe, avec d’autres pionniers de l’art conceptuel, à l’expo décisive de Harald Szeemann en Suisse, «When Attitudes Become Form» («Quand les manières deviennent forme»). Des lors, ses lettres-bâtons colorées, jouant d’un humour qui dépend de leur disposition visuelle in situ et s’apparentant à autant de clins d’œil, s’exposent dans le monde entier, s’ornant parfois de traits ourlés ou de courbes. Mais en 2021, son énoncé le plus radical serait peut-être celui-ci, développé non pas sur un mur mais dans une conversation avec l’artiste Ursula Meyer : «Les gens qui achètent mon travail… Ils n’ont pas besoin de l’acheter pour l’avoir – ils peuvent le posséder rien qu’en le connaissant.»

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Mort de Lawrence Weiner, l’un des pères de l’art conceptuel

 

Autodidacte, l’artiste américain Lawrence Weiner est mort à New York, jeudi 2 décembre, à l’âge de 79 ans. 

Par Philippe Dagen  / publié le 04 décembre 2021 dans Le Monde

Né le 10 février 1942 à New York dans le quartier du South Bronx, l’artiste américain Lawrence Weiner est mort dans cette même ville, jeudi 2 décembre, à l’âge de 79 ans. Il avait fait, en 2020, état de sa lutte contre un cancer. Son nom est depuis longtemps inscrit dans l’histoire de l’art de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle comme celui d’un des principaux représentants de l’art conceptuel, au même titre que Joseph Kosuth.

Autodidacte en matière artistique, Weiner racontait en 2019 avoir été saisi par la vision, au MoMA, de l’œuvre d’Alberto Giacometti Le Palais à 4 heures du matin. 

Giacometti, Le Palais à 4 heures du matin 

Selon un autre de ses récits, en 2013, n’étant pas issu d’une famille bourgeoise, son premier rapport à l’art serait passé par les mots sur les murs :« L’art, c’était des inscriptions murales ou des messages. J’ai grandi dans une ville où je lisais les murs ; je les lis toujours. » 

Sans doute cette reconstitution d’une vocation est-elle trop parfaite. Elle dit cependant l’essentiel de la pratique artistique de Weiner : à partir de 1969, son matériau n’est pas la peinture ou les volumes mais les langues et leur écriture. 

Des cratères creusés par des explosions de TNT

Avant cette résolution, sur laquelle il n’est plus revenu, Weiner voyage à travers les Etats-Unis, à partir de 1960, jusqu’en Arctique et en Californie où il réalise ce qu’il considère comme sa première exposition : des cratères creusés par des explosions de TNT dans le parc national de Mill Valley, près de San Francisco. De retour à New York, en 1964, il manifeste son refus de la peinture par sa série des Propeller paintings, qui montrent une mire de téléviseur dans divers formats et selon divers procédés. Il les présente dans la galerie de Seth Siegelaub cette même année. Sans succès.

 

La série des Removals, commencée peu après, est tout aussi ironique à l’égard de la peinture : Weiner découpe un rectangle dans une toile, le peint uniformément à la bombe et lui attache deux bandes en haut et en bas. Le procédé est rudimentaire mais surtout dégagé de toute décision de l’artiste puisque le choix du format et de la couleur est donné au destinataire de la toile. Selon le même principe de stricte réduction minimaliste, en avril 1968, Weiner, invité avec Robert Barry et Carl Andre pour une exposition collective au Windham College dans le Vermont, s’en tient à une installation qu’il intitule, conformément à sa définition matérielle, Staples, Stakes, Twine, Turf (« agrafes, piquets, corde, gazon ») et qui dessine une grille incomplète. Les étudiants, peu au fait du minimalisme, la détruisent.

Plutôt que s’en indigner, Weiner s’inspire de son effacement pour en déduire que « 1 – l’artiste peut construire la pièce ; 2 – la pièce peut être réalisée par quelqu’un d’autre ; 3 – la pièce n’a pas besoin d’être construite ». Chacune de ces propositions a son assentiment et il appartient au destinataire de décider. L’art peut être autographe, délégué ou seulement nommé.

Formulations plus abondantes et plus joueuses

Sur ce statement (« énoncé ») – mot fétiche de Weiner – se fonde sa pratique artistique ultérieure : des inscriptions murales rédigées dans la langue du lieu où il intervient, avec ou sans traduction. Elles sont tracées avec une attention minutieuse aux caractères, aux cartouches rectangulaires qui enferment les mots, aux couleurs des lettrages et à la meilleure manière d’occuper la surface, en écrivant à l’oblique, à l’horizontale ou selon des courbes. Elles peuvent être énigmatiques (« How much is enough »), contradictoires (« Put where it was left where it is not ») ou très simples (« As far as the eye can see »). Progressivement, son style passe du très elliptique des années 1970 à des formulations plus abondantes et plus joueuses.

La liste de ses expositions est interminable. Les premières marquent les débuts de la reconnaissance internationale de l’art conceptuel : à Berne (Suisse) en 1969 dans « Quand les attitudes deviennent forme », d’Harald Szeemann, et à Kassel (Allemagne) en 1972 dans « Documenta 5 ». Devenu par la suite une figure historique, invité à d’innombrables biennales et participations muséales, Weiner écrit ses aphorismes un peu partout dans le monde, aux Etats-Unis, où le Whitney Museum et le MoCA de Los Angeles lui consacrent une rétrospective en 2007-2008, mais aussi fréquemment en Europe, avec, en France, une mention particulière pour le Nouveau Musée de Villeurbanne – l’Institut d’art contemporain aujourd’hui –, qui l’a plusieurs fois accueilli.

Lawrence Weiner, en quelques dates

10 février 1942 Naissance à New York, dans le quartier du South Bronx

1960 Réalise sa première œuvre créée par une série d’explosions au TNT dans le parc national de Mill Valley, à San Francisco

Avril 1968 Lawrence Weiner est invité, avec Robert Barry et Carl Andre, pour une exposition collective au Windham College, dans le Vermont

1969 Expose à Berne (Suisse) dans « Quand les attitudes deviennent formes », d’Harald Szeemann

1972 Exposition à Kassel (Allemagne) dans « Documenta 5 »

2007-2008 Le Whitney Museum et le MoCA de Los Angeles lui consacrent une rétrospective

2 décembre 2021 Mort à New York

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Ci-dessous l’interview que Lawrence Weiner accorda à Benjamin Buchloh il y a cinq ans – et que Philippe Dagen a manifestement relue pour écrire son papier…

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"Art Is Not About Skill"

Benjamin Buchloh Interviews Lawrence Weiner On His Sensual Approach to Conceptual Art

By Artspace Editors / FEB. 16, 2017

Lawrence Weiner at home.

Lawrence Weiner began his career at the young age of 19 when he simultaneously detonated four explosives on the corners of a field in Marin County, California in an artwork he called Cratering Piece. The heated gesture skyrocketed Weiner on a trajectory that landed him a key role in the conceptual art movement in the 1960s, when his work largely involved writing about hypothetical projects without actually making them, allowing his work to exist solely in the minds of his viewers. In 1968 (the year Sol LeWitt wrote Paragraphs on Conceptual Art), Weiner wrote Declaration of Intent:

1. The artist may construct the piece.

2. The piece may be fabricated.

3. The piece need not be built.

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests within the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

In the decades that followed, Weiner produced sculptures, films, artist books, and even CDs. Here, in an excerpt from Phaidon’s Lawrence Weiner monograph, Benjamin Buchloh speaks with the artist about design as a power system, sculpture as a gesture, and art as sensuality.

Benjamin Buchloh: I was always puzzled by your insistence that you executed Cratering Piece as early as 1960. Thinking in terms of historical context and frameworks, of models and paradigms, it seems almost impossible to imagine that anybody in 1960 could have gone out in the desert and would have set off a series of small TNT explosions declaring them to be a sculpture as you did in that work.

Lawrence Weiner: It was not in the desert; it was a national park. I wish I were as radical and revolutionary as historians would like to make out, but I was an eighteen year-old kid. I found myself in San Francisco around the City Lights bookshop and the Discovery bookshop and I was working around people like John Altoon, Bruce Connor, and others. Here I was, reasonably intelligent, with an enormous knowledge of what was going on, I must say. There were artists performing all over the place, doing happenings, performances, other things. My deciding to make sculpture by blowing holes in the ground, yes, in the light of my history, it is a big deal. In the light of what the hell was going on, it was just another artist out there, doing another sculpture park thing, using explosives, using performances, using tons of steel. This was all normal.

I had gotten to California by hitchhiking my way across the country, building structures, and constructing things everywhere I went, leaving them on the sides of the road. The Johnnie Appleseed idea of art was perfect for me: Johnnie Appleseed spread apple seeds across the United States by just going out on the road and spreading apple seeds. I do not know if this is true, but I would love it to be.

Benjamin Buchloh: The next phase of your work was the early paintings, particularly the Series of Propeller Paintings (1960-65)?

Lawrence Weiner: I was making the strangest kind of paintings. I was in a very distressed state about the political relation of the artist to society and I knew that the artist’s lifestyle was something that I was determinedly going to hold on to because in fact it was a better lifestyle than that of the lower middle class from which I had come. It left me a little bit more freedom to function as I wanted to. I had gone to Europe in 1963, trying to collate where I was going to stand, whether I was going to do this or do that. A lot of things led up to these paintings. I began to understand things that were being discussed in the context of the painting of emblems. I had an old television set which only had one channel, with signals that I watched all night. That became my modus operandi. I began to make these paintings, all in different sizes and all in different shapes and all at the same price. As if that really mattered, but I thought it did at the time.

Benjamin Buchloh: And you used commercial enamel paint for all of them, like Frank Stella did at the time?

Lawrence Weiner: Whatever. Silver paint, aluminum paint, sculpmetal, commercial enamels, crap I found out on the street, paint that I invented myself. Anything. Impasto. I was using all the things that people use to make paintings. You can spray it, stripe it. Name me all the painting conventions you can think of. All the things your parents ever taught you. These paintings then led to the cut-out sculptures from 1966 and they led to this other stuff, the notched paintings. They are paintings that can lie on the table. Some of them are made out of wood.

Benjamin Buchloh: So these paintings were really reliefs and objects and that is where the traditional categories break down?

Lawrence Weiner: Those categories just completely collapsed on me. I wanted them to collapse but I was not going to hasten their collapse. I was going to follow it through and I followed it through to where it collapsed. The bridge no longer supported me. Great. Got me across the water to here. I am a happy immigrant.

Benjamin Buchloh: Did you know Stella’s “black paintings” at that time?

Lawrence Weiner: I remember seeing them when Frank Stella had his first one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art. I thought they were absolutely fabulous. I remember a PBS broadcast of Henry Geldzahler interviewing Frank Stella in the early 1960s. Stella looked plaintively at the camera and said, “My god, if you think these are boring to look at, can you imagine how boring they are to paint?” I was very impressed. I mean it. Extremely impressed.

Benjamin Buchloh: What about Robert Ryman; were you aware of him? He appears to have been such an isolated figure. People seem to dismiss Ryman as somebody who was inarticulate and not reading the same books as everybody else.

Lawrence Weiner: Bob Ryman had a studio on the Bowery. He was a great person for me to go to talk to. I dropped by every once in a while and he was a very friendly man.

Benjamin Buchloh: But unlike Stella’s, his work was not well-received in New York throughout the early and mid 1960s. Did you not think of Ryman as somebody who was important in deconstructing the conventions of painting?

Lawrence Weiner: No. In adding to painting: making it a viable thing that had something to do with our own sense of ourselves. I thought Ryman’s work was really, I don’t know about important, but absolutely marvellous. But at that time he did not have that kind of success. It took me a long time to be able to make a living as well. Those things happen.

Benjamin Buchloh: Obviously there are many trajectories in your work, but one of them is painting, and the dialogue with Jackson Pollock. But it is a dialogue mediated through looking at Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly and these two positions had already transformed painting when you started. I would like to talk about the relationship of language to painting. Language re-emerges in the painting of the 1950s in the work of two very different but closely related artists—Johns and Twombly—and I think they were both important in that sense for you. Their emphasis on language within the conception of painting itself seems to criticize Modernism’s foundational definition of an exclusive visuality. Formally organized visuality is of course still an element of your work but it is no longer the work’s primary foundation. This critique of modernist visuality and then simultaneous critique of representation and narrative become two central strategies of your work.

Lawrence Weiner: The Leo Steinberg article probably made me realize where Johns stood in my existence: this idea of how he placed the studio, not as a metaphor for the outside world but as an arena outside of the personal angst of other people whom I respected like Pollock or Kline or especially de Kooning. He was perhaps the coolest of all of them. He figured out that his life had more value than his place within society. Kline was not interested in that. Pollock—God knows what he was interested in.

I have always considered Twombly a beautiful painter. I thought that his work was absolutely exquisite: this was the life of a human being. This was class, without placing it within the context of modern art, without making it look important, but making it the way it was supposed to look. That is what made Ryman also such a fabulous painter for me: he was able to make it look the way it was supposed to look. Jasper Johns was doing that too. He did not ask me to be transcendental … he did not have to tell me that his found objects were a bridge.

I think that Rauschenberg in the end will turn out to be a far more important artist, because Rauschenberg did prat-falls, he took chances; Johns never took a risk in his life. What if we step aside for one second and then substitute one word “lifestyle,” public placement within our society, for “narrative.” You are talking about 1955 and narrative was not the problem, the problem was lifestyle.

I did not have that advantage of a middle-class perspective. Art was something else; art was the notations on the wall, or art was the messages left by other people. I grew up in a city where I had read the walls; I still read the walls. I love to put work of mine out on the walls and let people read it. Some will remember it and then somebody else comes along and puts something else over it. It becomes archaeology rather than history.

Benjamin Buchloh: After you moved away from painting, you made work that looked as though it was closely related to minimalsculpture.

Lawrence Weiner: I worked damn hard on this too. I mean, we are of our times as we are trying to find out who we are.

Benjamin Buchloh: So between 1966 and 1968 you redefine the painterly or sculptural object, its material structure, and its production process. You move on to a textual proposition that seems to be either the “mere” description or the theoretical definition of a material process, rather than its actual execution. From that moment onwards, you introduce a totally different set of terms for thinking about sculpture and I think its ramifications are hardly understood up to this very day. Rather than considering the conflicting genres of sculptural production (eg. artisanal or construction sculpture versus the ready-made object), you seem to address the process of sculptural conception and reception in contemporary audiences.

Lawrence Weiner: The audience is a hairy problem, but I must say I disagree. This has more to do with my politics than my aesthetics.

Benjamin Buchloh: There seems to be a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, you insist that sculpture is the primary field within which your work should be read, yet at the same time you have also substituted language as a model for sculpture. Thus you have dismantled the traditional preoccupation with sculpture as an artisanal practice and a material production, as a process of modeling, carving, cutting, and producing objects in the world.

Lawrence Weiner: If you can just walk away from Aristotelian thinking, my introduction of language as another sculptural material does not in fact require the negational displacement of other practices within the use of sculpture.

Benjamin Buchloh: But why would it even have to be discussed in terms of sculpture, rather than in terms of a qualitatively different project altogether?

Lawrence Weiner: What would I call it? I call them “works,” I call them “pieces,” I called them whatever anybody else was coming up with that sounded like it was not sculpture. Then I realized that I was working with the materials that people called “sculptors” work with. I was working with mass, I was working with all of the processes of taking out and putting in. This is all a problem of designation. I also realized that I was dealing with very generalized structures in an extremely formalized one. These structures seemed to be of interest not only to me but to other artists at the time. I do not think that they were taken with the idea that it was language, but we were all talking about the ideas generated by placing a sculpture in the world. Therefore I did not think I was doing anything different from somebody putting fourteen tons of steel out. I said it was possible that I would build it if they wanted, I said it was possible to have somebody else build it, and then I finally realized that it was possible just to leave it in language. There was not a skill; art is not about skill.

In the post-war American context, the strategy of de-skilling responds first of all to the cult of gesture and of the artist’s hand in Abstract Expressionism. That is in fact one of the most crucial strategy changes within artistic practices re-emerging in the 1950s with Jasper Johns.

But I am questioning whether the skill of making the spoon is the point of being an artist, or whether the spoon that holds water is the point of being an artist. I am still vying for the fact that it is the thing itself that makes you an artist, not your acquired skills, not your special insights into the world or anything else.

Benjamin Buchloh: So what defines the functional quality of the work if it is not its dimension to communicate most adequately with a certain type of audience?

Lawrence Weiner: For me, the making of sculpture, the placing of sculpture within cultural environments and in the public, is about allowing people to deal with the idea of mass, of other materials, the dignity of other materials, and to be able to figure out how to get around them if they are dangerous, get over them if they are easy, and lie on them if they are sensual. My use of language is not in any way designed and it has never been. I think that I am really just a materialist. In fact I am just one of those people who is building structures out in the world for other people to figure out how to get around. I am trying to revolutionize society, not building an new department in the same continuum of art history.

Benjamin Buchloh: I want to spend a moment discussing the question of materials, from STATEMENTS to now. I think there is both continuity and change. If one looks at STATEMENTS and the work that you did around that time, you selected a rather circumscribed number of materials that are very diverse and yet have a strange homogeneity—materials that are not manifestly industrial such as steel or lead (ie. in works by Carl Andre and Richard Serra), but that are not manifestly pop-cultural like formic or vinyl (ie. Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, or Richard Artschwager). You, by contrast, use materials that share a certain subtle commonality, such as nails, pieces of string, cardboard, brown wrapping paper, or plywood. And then there is yet another type, strangely suspended between function and object, as for example the dyemarkers or a flare or firecrackers, which are rather peculiar objects, relating to both the elements of water and fire and to the functions of signaling and sending signs. That is the first group of materials listed in STATEMENTS. Your works at that time approach the limits of ephemerality; they push the definition of sculpture away from its mythical involvement with industrial production, away from the spectacular deployment of industrial materials and processes. 

Lawrence Weiner: With STATEMENTS I attempted to pull together a body of work that concerned itself with traditional 1960s art process and materials. It was not anti-minimal sculpture; I was trying to take non-heroic materials—just pieces of plywood (nobody thinks about plywood), industrial sanders (everybody has one)—trying to take everyday materials, and give them their place within my world of art, with the same strength and the same vigor, but without the heroics. These works are decidedly non-macho, but they turn out to be the tough guy in the bar. 

I wanted people to accept the value of these sculptures because they were functioning as sculptures, not because they were associated with the factory, the foundry, the quarry, the man-things that in those days seemed to mean something. Then I got to TERMINAL BOUNDARIES (1969), which was the next book, the one that did not get published. It is a body of work that has been published in different places that had to do with my being a traveller, that I was a wandering sort of person since I had been a kid. The works in TERMINAL BOUNDARIES were all about materials like quicksilver and lead and all of these other materials that I could use without being heroic, because they were the normal things that people on a road trip would come across.

Benjamin Buchloh: At the same time, the materials that you chose seemed strangely suspended between an aesthetic of the readymade and that of production. One would certainly not refer to your materials as descending from a readymade tradition; quote the opposite, the emphasize process and production.

Lawrence Weiner: But you had to do something with materials. For me it was my approach to dialectical materialism: it was things that you had control over in terms of their production, therefore you would have a sense of their value outside of their monetary value. My work is not Duchampianor anti-Duchampian. I had other concerns at that moment and I still probably do. Duchamp continues to stand as a very important, interesting artist.

Benjamin Buchloh: If one looks at works such as A SQUARE REMOVAL FROM A RUG IN USE (1969) or A 2” WIDE 1” DEEP TRENCH CUT ACROSS A STANDARD ONE-CAR DRIVEWAY (1968), one sees how the issue of place, another and equally important aspect of your definition of materials, enters the work at a very early moment. Some works are clearly independent of place: very important works of that moment are operating in an undefined place and yet others reflect very specifically on the site and context. So did site, context, and location become central concerns that led to more complex reflections later on?

Lawrence Weiner: Well, a wall is not really that site-specific.

Benjamin Buchloh: But the driveway work is an interesting piece in that it selects a very peculiar detail of functional, vernacular, domestic architecture.

Lawrence Weiner: The driveway, again, is not a specific driveway: a driveway is a material.

Benjamin Buchloh: Yes, but it is a space that is pointing to private property, it points to the home, it points to a location outside of the museum. There is another dialectic that emerged at that time, which is the one of removal and addition: some pieces in STATEMENTS are works that proposed the adding of a sheet of plywood to the floor, for example, or the emptying of a spray-can of paint on the floor, which seems to conclude the eternal dialogue with Pollock. Other works define themselves by the removal of material from existing structures, functional structures. They not only interfere in the visual surface and continuity, but also address another question: to what degree is an object not only defined by language conventions but also by property relations? For the first time they bring the socio-economic factor into the production of the work of art.

Lawrence Weiner: That is just what it was: the attempt to reconcile my politics internally—my emotional politics as well as my real politics—with what was becoming my lexicon or my aesthetics, my means of communicating with the world. The funny point is that there was one piece that had to do with Jackson Pollock and it was not that one. It was the piece that was up in Nova Scotia—it was the piece where five gallons of tempera paint were just poured on the floor…

Benjamin Buchloh: There is something about your usage of the spray-can as both a tool and as a material that makes it rather peculiar and at the same time it refers to a whole range of vernacular and daily usages.

Lawrence Weiner: The spray can is an object that contains a whole range of chemical and physical compounds and vernacular and daily usages. It was the looked-down-upon thing, it is about the not-skilled.

Benjamin Buchloh: Do these strategies and materials not add up to an internal criticism of the false heroicization of even the last layer of industrial materials that was still dominating the aesthetics of minimal and post-minimal sculpture?

Lawrence Weiner: Exactly, but that was my role, my own chosen role. I had come from a situation where in order to survive I had to practice, though not necessarily accept, a heroic scale of misunderstanding of the place of the male artist within our society. I then looked at artists whom I really respected, like Pollock, Kline, and Mondrian, who had doubts about this and at the same time did not let that come into their work. They let it into their private life—they had doubts whether they really were David [Roland] Smith… whether they were still the he-men that they started to be, even though they were making art about their soul, even though they were trying to save their soul by making art. I realized that you did not have anything to prove to them any more, that by making art you fulfilled whatever your gender role was, indeterminate or otherwise within the society.

Benjamin Buchloh: It seems that by the late 1960s you had recognized that the usage of sculptural forms and materials (e.g. the steel cube or metal plate) even in their most rigorously serialized form as in Minimalism, or even in their most scientistic-industrial presentation as in Andrew or Serra, represented a model of sculpture that was largely based on traditional spatial definitions of communicative and perceptual experience. You detached sculpture from its mythical promises of providing access to pure phenomenological space and primary matter by insisting on the universal common availability of language as the truly contemporary medium of simultaneous collective reception.

Lawrence Weiner: A universal common possibility of availability. The whole problem is that we accepted a long time ago that bricks can constitute a sculpture, we accepted a long time ago that fluorescent light could constitute a painting. We have accepted all of this; we accept a gesture as constituting a sculpture. The minute you suggest that language itself is a component in the making of a sculpture, the shit hits the fan. Language, when it’s used for literature, when it’s used for poetry, when it’s used for journalism, constitutes an assumed communicative pattern. That implies a belief in God. Without that implication there’s no way that words like love and hate and beauty would have any significance.

Benjamin Buchloh: If I understand at least aspects of what you say, I would interpret it as a statement about a model of language that precludes both transcendentality and representation, a model of language that insists on its condition of self-referentiality. You seem to be suggesting that the deployment of a particular type of language game that has its origins in the pictorial models of Modernism. I still think, however, that early sound poetry in the context of Dada and Russian Futurism approached an equally critical stance, an equally radical anti-narrative, anti-transcendental, and anti-representational conception of language.

Lawrence Weiner: I am not arguing that language is not representational. It represents something. I am interested in what the words mean. I am not interested in the fact that they are words. I am capable of using words for their meaning, presenting them to other people. I hope that the vast majority will read the words for their meaning and that they will place that meaning within the sculptural context of their parameters and how they get through the world. I cannot seem to find the historical precedent for this. Maybe the reason I spend so much time trying to explain that art does not require a historical precedent in order to function as art, is because for many of the things that I’ve found myself doing I cannot find the historical justification.

Benjamin Buchloh: Let us look at the second phase of your work—even though I am aware that it is problematic to divide it up into phases—announced by the publication of STATEMENTS, a work which not only suggests the possibility of abandoning materials altogether, but also the inevitable resulting reflections on site and placement. With STATEMENTS a new set of presentational problems emerge that you resolve quickly by designing books. The book becomes for a while one of the key carriers of the work, both in terms of its presentation and its distribution.

Lawrence Weiner: I still prefer books and catalogues.

Benjamin Buchloh: Initially at least, it seems there was relatively little design work implied in the presentation of the books. The books seem to emphasize neutrality and conceptualist purity, but there is an explicit denial of traditional artistic book design (e.g. typography and other design choices).

Lawrence Weiner: I disagree with that absolutely, totally down the line. Those early manifestations—they are not early, but from the late 1960s, when I had the opportunity to make posters and books and things—are so highly designed you cannot believe it. I mean, take STATEMENTS: there is a design factor to make it look like a $1.95 book that you would buy. The type-face and the decision to use a typewriter and everything else was a design choice.

Benjamin Buchloh: But still, your arrangement of design features opposed the design culture of the 1920s and 1930s, since the design that you developed in the context of the 1960s Conceptual Artis distinctly different from the heroic moment of avant-garde design. Your book design positions itself in an almost utilitarian context: the book is small, the book can be carried anywhere, the book is totally unpretentious, it does not have graphic intricacies, it is the most functional object imaginable.

Lawrence Weiner: I found El Lissitzky’s work fascinating when I was a kid, and then Piet Swart was the next logical thing. My tendencies are towards people who sold themselves on the left rather than people who sold themselves on an authoritative right. But those are my tendencies, those are my politics.

Benjamin Buchloh: So you define design as a communication that inserts itself within public life, without imposing itself?

Lawrence Weiner: It presents itself, it cargo-cults itself, it attempts to entice people to understand that you could talk about universal ideas using simple basic concepts.

Benjamin Buchloh: But that approach to design among the 1920s avant-garde artists was one thing, whereas in the meantime something had happened to design culture, specifically in America after the Chicago Bauhaus. Here design had been increasingly aligned with ever more rigorous commercial interests and design…

Lawrence Weiner: …and power…

Benjamin Buchloh: Exactly. Design became a power system of the first order, where no modernist benevolence was appropriate any more. So it is in the withholding of a manifest design in the 1960s work that you stage an opposition to commercial graphic design.

Lawrence Weiner: It was in opposition to what was considered chic design: that you could have a class association with design when design essentially was supposed to cut across class.

Benjamin Buchloh: I think it is important to recognize that you work on both tracks. For example, graffito and tattoo seem to be two graphic forms to which you refer quite often as the opposite extreme of design culture, which is as far removed from the immediacy of bodily experience as one can possible get. On the other hand, designers have assimilated your presentation of language and sometimes you are explicitly sought after as a designer.

Lawrence Weiner: I seem to have a place within the design community.

Benjamin Buchloh: But a minute ago we agreed that design in certain ways is also the manifestation of power and interest.

Lawrence Weiner: So is art.

Benjamin Buchloh: Both the tattoo and the graffito are for you fundamentally related to a primary relationship to the body?

Lawrence Weiner: I am a sensual artist. I am involved with the sensual relationships of materials. That seems to be the nature of art and I don’t think curtailing that nature is going to make it any more rigorous per se, because essentially it is still about the communications of one human being’s observations to another human being with the intent of bringing about a change of state. At the same time I see myself as working in terms of graffito and in terms of drawing, as if it were a tattoo on whatever part of the body it fits. This is what it should look like; it is an emblem.

Benjamin Buchloh: Do you remember what you thought when you saw Ed Ruscha’s early books such as Every Building on the Sunset Strip or Twenty Six Gasoline Stations?

Lawrence Weiner: Oh that was fabulous, because this was somebody who understood America. This was American art. This was about America.

Benjamin Buchloh: What was American about it? The focus on vernacular architecture?

Lawrence Weiner: No, it had to do with the way Americans saw the world. You had reference points—Mondrian, Pollock, Picasso, anything you want, and they can also be gas stations on Route 66. That is how you knew where you were in the world. I walked into Documenta in 1972 with the intention of making a book and there was my colleague and good acquaintance Ed Ruscha building this structure with Konrad Fischer and it looked fabulous. He just took his books and he hung them up: they want art, they can have their art.

Benjamin Buchloh: Looking at your book STATEMENTS, one realizes that there are several language games taking place simultaneously. I think that it is only the beginning of an increasingly complex diversity of language operations that you eventually employed in your work. Some of them appear to be purely “descriptive,” they are explicitly directed against the inherently metaphorical potential of language. But there are already indications—and these will become much more obvious later—where the purely process-oriented description of a sculptural project is displaced by an explicit acceptance of a found idiom, i.e., language as a proverb or as a cliché. Is your deployment of the analytic proposition or the performative directed against both visual representation in painting and narrative and metaphor in literature?

Lawrence Weiner: I think what I am doing is reasonably pure, even though it might not fit into a language system. Just because I use language, it does not give me the inherent responsibility to be a grammarian, or a linguist.

Benjamin Buchloh: Could one compare your introduction of language into the field of representation to a situation in the late 1910s, when photography was introduced as a strategy to displace the mythical and feitishistic residue inextricably inherent in painting and sculpture? Photography at that time was an infinitely more communicative medium, as we recognize now that it is within language that ideology and identity are constructed and that it is within language (rather than in volumes) that public communication is possible. I am obviously speaking of your conception of language as one that operates outside of literature and outside of poetry.

Lawrence Weiner: This may leave me with egg on my face, but I would say that the introduction of language as a sculptural material as had the effect of incorporating a larger audience into the same questions and the same world as photography did. However, I would also venture that the people who brought in photography were bringing it in for the same reasons that I brought in language. They had no other way to question the answers that had been presented to them but to use this other material. They brought about a revolution. If I was part of this process of bringing about a revolution in comprehension, in making art, and a rational occupation within society, then I would take the credit for it. It is a barricade that I would like to be on and I feel quite comfortable with it, but let us not think that I sat down and figured it all out. Everyone wants to make sense out of the body of an artist’s work but in fact it’s not supposed to make sense, it is supposed to have meaning.

Benjamin Buchloh: The most evident case of an artist criticizing narrative and metaphor in the early 1960s was Andy Warhol, specifically in his films. Looking at your own filmic work, I always thought that Warhol must have been an important figure for you. Did you think that his critique of narrativity in film and language should be radicalized and extended into other practices, such as painting and sculpture?

Lawrence Weiner: Warhol. That is a real question. Warhol was a real artist. I always had great respect for him, which everybody seems to have always attacked me for. I got a great deal of pleasure from his work.

Benjamin Buchloh: From the films or from the paintings?

Lawrence Weiner: From the work, as I saw it as an oeuvre. If I learnt anything from Andy Warhol, it was how to use a structure to bring about what you wanted, rather than having to use a heavy hand to bring it about. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew how to do it, but he was not that big of an influence. Historically, yes, people accepted artists making films after Warhol, but they accepted artists making films before—Kenneth Anger, Joseph Cornell. Warhol was just another person in that line and I think he just stepped into it because he saw that people he admired, like Cornell, were making movies. Maybe I stepped into it because I finally saw people whom I admired, like Godard, like Warhol, making movies, so I just stepped in and made my movie.

Benjamin Buchloh: You discovered Godard at the same time as Warhol, in the early 1960s?

Lawrence Weiner: I saw A Bout de Souffle (1960) when it came out. It influenced me very much.

Benjamin Buchloh: I saw it recently again and it struck me as the first real work of French Pop Art.

Lawrence Weiner: Yes, that’s what it is; the first real work of Pop Art in film.

Benjamin Buchloh: I always thought that your work was critical towards Pop Art, specifically with regard to the affirmative dimension in Warhol’s work. There is an implicit political radicality in your work that Warhol never had because he is ultimately a profoundly apolitical artist. In that sense you have in fact a much closer affinity to Godard’s project of a critical political film.

Lawrence Weiner: I don’t see Andy Warhol as an apolitical artist. I don’t see a conservative acceptance of historical precedent as apolitical: it is extremely political. Warhol’s idols were people like Yves Klein and as such he would have been forced to acknowledge and support things that I would not choose to support and endorse, then or now. That is what a capitalist system is about. They forget to talk about “each to their needs and each to their abilities.” They forget to talk about how much is enough. It seems to be endemic in all classes. But they leave the other part out. I would like not to leave the other part out. That’s the difference. Godard would have liked not to leave the other part out. Fassbinder would have liked not to leave the other part out.

Benjamin Buchloh: What about the usage of language in your first film, A FIRST QUARTER (1973)?

Lawrence Weiner: It is a pretty movie; it is my Godard movie.

Benjamin Buchloh: What would you say is happening in this film, in terms of my question concerning the traditional narrative framework? The actors are placed in various social and erotic situations and—rather than speaking dialogues—they suddenly pronounce your statements. The radicality of that approach—while indebted to him—exceeds Godard.

Lawrence Weiner: That sounds sexy. What if we now take it out of an aggressive stance to radicalize cinema? My major dialogue was existential: I decided to make a mise-en-scène that was closer to where my work could exist, and, in fact, cheapen its value within the society. I was making sculpture to cheapen it to the point that it would infiltrate society and its children’s lives. It had to become a norm within children’s lives. That is all that art is, it is a point of observation for other human beings to notice.

Benjamin Buchloh: You might not agree, but could one say that A FIRST QUARTER is as distant from Warhol as it is from Godard?

Lawrence Weiner: I would absolutely agree. The only thing I learnt from Warhol was that if you wanted to do something, you just pulled it together.

Benjamin Buchloh: The first difference is that Warhol’s conception of dialogue insists on language in its most common condition, whereas your dialogue is totally scripted and artificially staged. The actors in your films perform very complicated linguistic statements, whereas Warhol prides himself on constructing this endless flow of mundanity.

Lawrence Weiner: It seems that in some of the subsequent films and tapes, you criticize your original emphasis on the exclusivity of the linguistic in the work of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Your early work had systematically excluded matter and materials (except for their naming) and the whole plenitude of bodily experience, or the non-linguistic dimensions of subjectivity, narrative and the representation of historical experience had been excluded from your work and from Conceptual Art at large. Suddenly, in works such as DO YOU BELIEVE IN WATER? (1976) there is a repositioning of subjectivity between the linguistic and the psycho-sexual. Here again there is a tension between the erotic performances and the linguistic performance that seems almost programmatic.

Lawrence Weiner: It is very programmatic; it is a very structured tape. It is about playing games, about the basis of games. I put in an actor, a homosexual performer, who was nervous around lesbian women for some reason, together with two lesbian women who had never said publicly that they were lovers until then. And that set up tension. What can I say? Nice tape, a little long, but a nice tape. I will be damned if I ever wanted to exclude any sensual function from art. I am just an artist, you know, I do not have to be right all the time. I am not giving out medical prescriptions to people and I am not flying an airplane, I am just this person putting things in the culture.

Benjamin Buchloh: Another important example in that context would be the so-called pornographic videotape from 1976, entitled A BIT OF MATTER AND A LITTLE BIT MORE where you confront the viewer with actors who pronounce your work and at the same time perform sex acts—what might be perceived as the opposite of a linguistic operation.

Lawrence Weiner: It is not grammatic but it’s not anti-linguistic. The porn tapes were done for political reasons. They were done because the United States government was putting people who made pornography in jail. Now I do not get off on pornography, but I do not like them putting people in jail just for making pornographic films.

Benjamin Buchloh: We talked about the various language models that are already evident in STATEMENTS, but there is another language model entering your work later, where you insert statements that explicitly refer to specific historical conditions. I am thinking of the installation in Vienna for example, SMASHED TO PIECES (IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT) (1991), where the statement itself seems inextricably bound up with the historical context of the city and the site where you installed the work—even though one can read the statement in a variety of other ways.

Lawrence Weiner: It found an immediate metaphor when it was placed within that structure. If they have been objectified culturally, then historical references are usable as materials, because that is an objectified cultural entity the same as time and sound and remembrance.

Benjamin Buchloh: Would you really say that all the resonances of these works with their sites are as uncalculated as you claim now?

Lawrence Weiner: When I was invited to Vienna, I was involved with the sound of things in the night and the sound of things in the day because I had been working through projects where I had been awake all day and all night. Things sound different at night from in the day, especially in cities…

Benjamin Buchloh: Can one really read the work, when installed on the Vienna Flakturm, outside of the Holocaust history of the city?

Lawrence Weiner: I am interested in the difference in sounds between night and day. The offered me this Flakturm, this anti-aircraft defense tower; I chose that piece to put on it. I knew damn well it had a metaphor. It was the work that was coming out at the time, maybe at that moment I was thinking about those things. Art is fabulous because it starts off as one thing and becomes something else for somebody. That is its whole function. In fact this is not the metaphor of this particular work. If I put it in another context, which I often do as you know, it has a totally different metaphor. You put that piece in the South Pacific and all night you will hear coconuts falling, all day you hear coconuts falling.

Benjamin Buchloh: Your work for Skulptur Projektein Munster in 1997, DRY EARTH & SCATTERED ASHES… could be another example. It is by no means the only piece that focuses on those questions concerning the relationship between text and material and between text and placement. Would you want to differentiate the function of writing from the function of the object in your work, since the writing does not in all instances take on a material, sculptural form of presentation; it can also take on a merely typographic, scriptural form. Are there specific criteria according to which you decide that one work should appear solely in writing and another work appear in a material structure?

Lawrence Weiner: The criteria are totally non-hierarchical. The work gains its sculptural qualities by being read, not by being written. Each work itself is the result of material experimentation, material building, translation—translation into language and then the presentation is whatever affords itself. In Münster, I was in a dilemma, I was confronted by a social paradigm that required that I question what is public sculpture, because in fact the carnival atmosphere of these shows does not necessarily have anything to do with public sculpture. So I used the steel plates that they put over holes in the ground. But there is no real hierarchy about how a work is presented. If somebody wants a tattoo they get a tattoo—it all has to be basically the same to me.

Benjamin Buchloh: Does this mean that the same statement that was shown in Münster could theoretically be shown somewhere else?

Lawrence Weiner: It was initially shown in Munich and there is a little book of prints that were also made into posters to be given away in Munich.

Benjamin Buchloh: So the work was neither specific to its context nor specific to its presentational and distributional support system?

Lawrence Weiner: It was not specific to Münster, the work is never specific to any place. I have a feeling about work that one does, because it is the dance to the music of your time. That is the problem for me with work that is specific and journalistic: it serves its function in its first performance, but it is never allowed to live a full complete life as a work of art, which is to find its own metaphor. I mean, the Giacometti state-set The Palace at Four a.m., (1932-33), found its metaphor in the Museum of Modern Art—that made more sense to emerging New York City kids than it did when it was shown for the first time—it had no metaphor there. It was very important for me as a young person. It was not about alienation. It was about survival, very much like my youth. Forty-second Street and places like that at four o’clock in the morning. Coming out of the movies having seen Général de la Royère, I began to understand what people were trying to do—they were trying to build a mise-en-scène.

Benjamin Buchloh: Let me put the question in a different way, or expand on it: what language model underlies your critique of metaphor as a pre-established fixed meaning, as a pre-established system? Are you establishing with your own means a critique of language that would have parallels in poststructuralist deconstruction, from Lacan to Derrida?

Lawrence Weiner: It is pre-Derridian and it is certainly non-Freudian. The argument between Piaget and Chomsky provided me with my definition of the language model. My discovery of the original Chomsky in the Mouton edition as a kid helped me comprehend that there was a whole understanding of generative grammar and a kind of genetic imperative. Piaget was dealing with shell-shocked children; his realization was that children are in need of “nomering” something, and in “nomering” it, they do not always have to accept why it is called pomme de l’air or pomme de terre—an apple is called an apple because the name apple is written down inside it. All children determine that, so why do artists have to be made into romantic souls because they bring the soul out of the material and make the material acquire its real name?

Benjamin Buchloh: I was wondering whether we could establish a certain continuity between the film work and your recent music. There is a similar juxtaposition between your statements and the given system, in this case the peculiar lyrics and the specific musical conventions, ranging from reggae to country western. Are they, like Pop Art, addressing pre-existing systems of representation? Could one say that you use musical structures in the way that Roy Lichtenstein used a comic book structure as the point of departure for a painting?

Lawrence Weiner: The entire concept for me of using a musical structure as a means to present work is not new. I made my first record, SEVEN with Pierre-Yves Artaud and Beatrice Conrad Eybesfeld around 1972. Later I worked on the soundtrack for my film A FIRST QUARTER with Dickie Landrie and on soundtracks with other musicians like Peter Gordon. Putting the work in the context of the music cheapens it and at the same time heightens the fact that it has a relevance to our society. It is not just that it can fly that makes it interesting, it is the fact that it can walk as well, and that is why I use the songs. I have retained the privilege of being an artist who makes films, an artists who makes music. I do some arrangements, but essentially I am a lyricist for musicians. You have to write lyrics that place the work within the context in which you would like it placed. Again, without a metaphor.

Benjamin Buchloh: What happens, however, is a radical transformation of the musical structure. One model that comes to my mind would be the Situationists’détournement. That really seems the closest comparison that I know: using an existing structure of signification within the culture and overturning its reading.

Lawrence Weiner: No, I don’t turn it upside down. I take it out of its context. I don’t say this in the lines of Chuck Berry but that this is something using what he would use, but with an artist collaging something in. It is not done in a Situationist manner, it is not the détournement.

Benjamin Buchloh: What about the CD you did with Ned Sublette, MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP (1997)?

Lawrence Weiner: I wanted to deal with a spectrum of music, a reconstructive aspect that I had been interested in from early techno, but at the same time I did not want to find myself doing retro things. So we went and found Kim Weston—who really sings like that to make a living—J Otis Washington, Red Fox, Lenny Pickett. This is the music they play every day of their life. We gave them a slightly different rhythm and different words.

Benjamin Buchloh: What interests me here is the relationship between your writing as work and your writing of the songs. Can we talk about the content of the lyrics versus the commonality of the music? Why do you inscribe these rather esoteric lyrics into popular forms of music and how are these songs different from your other writing, if at all?

Lawrence Weiner: You mean the work? They have nothing to do with the work even though often the songs will incorporate works.

Benjamin Buchloh: How does that relation function then?

Lawrence Weiner: They are shown within the context. Look at it as a mise en scène—they set the mise en scène for the previous collection of work.

Benjamin Buchloh: You keep using the term mise-en-scène and I do not think that it is as clear as you imagine it to be.

Lawrence Weiner: It is the stage-set. I made a small-scale sculpture edition in Japan, STAGE SET FOR THE KYOGEN OF THE NOH PLAY OF OUR LIVES (1995). It is a stage set for the Kyogen that has Madame Butterfly talking about contemporary problems at this particular moment that never existed before. They do that in the middle of the Noh plays—they have little political things that they hit the drum for and then they make these jokes.

Benjamin Buchloh: The work as language is then inscribed into the song as a given, pre-existing language structure?

Lawrence Weiner: As a given language structure that relates to something else. The piece from Münster appears in a song in MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP—it is just presented within that other context. Everything has a double context, you know—a Carl Andre brick sculpture can also be used to stop the levee from going over the side. A brick remains a brick. There is no question of transcendence. I don’t see any reason why if they can take a work of art and put it on a record cover, you cannot put it inside the song.

Benjamin Buchloh: But when you say that the songwriting has nothing to do with the work, I still think that this distinction between statements as sculpture and “mere” lyrics for the songs is not as easily made, at least not from the outside, because the transitions between the two seem very fluid.

Lawrence Weiner: It is collaged.

Benjamin Buchloh: So you would argue that the texts of your works inserted into the lyrics function as sculptures?

Lawrence Weiner: The works are always sculptures, so what everybody calls texts and sentences and wall-tattoos and this and that—it is not for me to give them a name, it is art—are functioning as art. That was my job as an artist, to say that was art.

Benjamin Buchloh: So when Kim Weston or Red Fox now sing your famous STATEMENT OF INTENT from 1969, when they now sing it in their different intonations and one flashes back to 1969, when the STATEMENT was presented as a radical promise, does it not sound as though the contemporary musical presentation had acquired a certain farcical dimension and that you cannot take that original revolutionary aspiration of the STATEMENT OF INTENT quite as seriously any more?

Lawrence Weiner: Yes, but then if you go from being a revolutionary who will only fight in causes they believe in to being a soldier, you cannot really consider yourself a revolutionary anymore, can you? You may as well do it with some aplomb. Why, in heaven’s name, when something is taken off its pedestal, why does it have to be less important than it was before?

____________________

DISPARITIONS / ARTS

Dan Graham, artiste et théoricien, est mort

L’Américain, qui avait intégré l’expérience du spectateur dans ses œuvres, s’est éteint le 19 février à 79 ans.

Par Philippe Dagen /Publié le 21 février 2022 dans Le Monde

Il avait fait de la place du spectateur face ou dans l’œuvre son sujet essentiel. L’artiste et théoricien Dan Graham est mort à New York, le 19 février, à 79 ans, sans que les causes de sa mort aient été révélées. Il était né le 31 mars 1942 à Urbana (Illinois). Ecriture, photographie, installation, vidéo, film et architecture ont été tour à tour ou simultanément ses modes de création.

Se destinant à la littérature, Dan Graham ne fréquente aucune école d’art, mais lit aussi bien l’anthropologue Margaret Mead que Jean-Paul Sartre et Claude Lévi-Strauss. Il pénètre dans le monde de l’art new-yorkais en galeriste. En 1964, il fonde avec deux amis la John Daniels Gallery, qui ferme l’année suivante, faute de ventes, mais a montré en un an Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd et Robert Smithson. Rétrospectivement, Graham tenait cette tentative pour décisive : « Quand la galerie a fermé, disait-il en 1987, je me suis mis à faire des expériences, des œuvres qu’on pouvait considérer comme des réactions à l’expérience que j’avais eue dans la galerie, des réactions contre ce que j’appellerais “l’art de galerie”. J’ai voulu personnellement critiquer non seulement “l’art de galerie”, mais aussi le statut économique de la galerie. »

Pour échapper à ce système, il prend pour support des revues, Aspen Magazine et Arts Magazine, et y publie des constructions verbales et, en décembre 1966, sa première intervention à caractère sociologique, « Homes for America », étude sur l’habitat standardisé des banlieues américaines qu’il présente au même moment dans l’exposition « Project Art » au Finch College à New York. Les photographies en noir et blanc sont neutres, accompagnées de textes dactylographiés ou manuscrits. Quant aux pages intitulées Scheme ou Schema, ce sont des grilles de lettres et de nombres ou des informations tautologiques sur le texte publié : « 59 mots, 2 lettres capitales, 0 mot en italique », etc. Ces travaux ont été classés du côté de l’art conceptuel, classement que Graham a fini par rejeter, le jugeant simpliste.

Dispositifs géométriques complexes

Il est vrai qu’il s’applique mal à ce qui devient dès la fin de la décennie son travail : le film et la vidéo d’une part, l’architecture de verre et de miroir d’autre part. Chaque fois, il détourne ces techniques de leurs emplois ordinaires pour en rendre mieux perceptibles contraintes et effets. En 1969, Two Correlated Rotations montre deux films super-8 dans lesquels deux personnes se filment l’une l’autre en mouvement, les deux visions du même moment étant évidemment divergentes. En 1970, la vidéo Roll projette en parallèle des images de l’artiste dévalant une colline et celles qu’il capte avec la caméra qu’il a en main.

Ainsi le spectateur est-il averti qu’aucune image ne peut se prétendre complète et juste. Il l’est d’autant plus nettement qu’il est lui-même soumis à de telles expériences. Dans Performer/Audience/Mirror (1972), Graham l’assied devant un miroir. Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), Two Viewing Rooms (1975) ou Public Space/Two Audiences (1976) répondent à ce même projet de confrontation du spectateur à sa propre image, statique ou mobile, et aux réactions physiques et psychiques que cette situation suscite. Ces dispositifs exigent l’alliance de la caméra, de la vitre et du miroir dans des dispositifs géométriques et techniques que Graham rend de plus en plus complexes.

Il en est de même des constructions qui jouent de la transparence et du reflet. En plein air ou en intérieur, elles perturbent la perception de l’espace et du temps et, de nouveau, l’image que le spectateur a de lui-même. Two Adjacent Pavilions (1978-1981), Pavilion/Sculpture for Argonne (1978-1981), Two Cubes, One 45° Rotated (1986), Octagon for Münster (1987) sont parmi ses réalisations les plus connues dans ce genre d’architectures-sculptures. D’abord fondées sur l’angle droit et le cube, dans une filiation minimaliste, elles ont ensuite joué de la courbe, jusqu’à des exercices virtuoses. Ces « pavillons », terme choisi par l’artiste, ont été très largement montrés, à la Documenta de Cassel en 1982, trois fois à la Biennale de Venise, à la Biennale du Whitney – trois fois aussi –, à deux reprises au Skulptur Projekte de Münster et, régulièrement, dans des musées aux Etats-Unis et en France, où Graham a été souvent présenté, de l’ARC à Paris en 1987 à l’IAC de Villeurbanne en 1992, et à la Cité radieuse à Marseille en 2015.

Leur notoriété a quelque peu éclipsé une autre part de la réflexion de Graham, d’ordre sociopolitique. En 1984, il achève Rock My Religion, long-métrage de cinquante-cinq minutes commencé en 1979. Par le montage de séquences et la bande son, il étudie les liens, essentiels selon lui, entre le rock et les musiques religieuses des différentes églises et sectes des Etats-Unis, établissant que le rock serait devenu à son tour une religion, avec Patti Smith, Jerry Lee Lewis, les Rolling Stones et bien d’autres comme officiants. C’était pour lui une autre manière de placer ses contemporains face à eux-mêmes.

Dan Graham en quelques dates

31 mars 1942 Naissance à Urbana (Illinois)

1964 Création de la John Daniels Gallery, à New York

1966 Premières publications dans des magazines

Disparition

Mort de Dan Graham, en toute transparence

L’artiste américain, pionnier de l’art conceptuel et critique rock, est mort samedi à 79 ans. Le vidéaste, photographe et architecte avait notamment bâti les «Pavillons», exposés dans les années 2000 au centre Pompidou.

par Judicaël Lavrador pour Libération

publié le 20 février 2022 à 18h09

Il était de ces artistes contemporains pour qui cette qualification, même vague, reste encore trop étroite pour permettre d’englober l’ensemble de son travail. Artiste, théoricien (de tout et de rien, du rock indie et de l’urbanisme pavillonnaire), photographe, vidéaste, architecte, Dan Graham est mort samedi en laissant une œuvre, ou plutôt des formes de pensée conceptuelles, qui rejoignent dès leurs premières occurrences, au mitan des années 60, l’orbite contestataire de la contre-culture américaine. Un cocktail de haute volée dont s’abreuveront artistes et musiciens de haute comme de basse culture.

Né en 1942, à Urbana, dans l’Etat de l’Illinois, Dan Graham entame, à 24 ans, une brève carrière de galeriste. Dès 1964, il montre à New York les pionniers de l’art conceptuel les Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Don Judd ou Robert Smithson. Il abandonne la John Daniels Gallery au bout d’un an pour arpenter avec son appareil photo des cités pavillonnaires de la banlieue new-yorkaise. Hors de question pour lui de faire une simple exposition, ou même un atlas, à partir de ce corpus d’images d’un mode de vie standardisé. Il le publie en effet sous la forme d’un article illustré, publié dans la revue spécialisée Arts magazine avec le désir de «contourner le système de la galerie pour proposer un mode d’appréhension direct, prêt à consommer sur place» soit «de l’art directement ‘informé' par les supports d’information». En d’autres termes, l’œuvre ne se suffit pas de documenter, ni de critiquer l’uniformisation des manières d’habiter aux Etats-Unis dans l’après-guerre, elle veut aussi maîtriser ses conditions de monstration dans le cadre tout aussi normé et borné des pages d’un magazine.

Art buté et renfrogné

On comprend dès lors que Dan Graham choisisse à la même époque de publier des textes poétiques, répandant les mots et les vers, libres, sur la page, comme Mallarmé des décennies auparavant, mais dans une langue plus terre à terre, plus concrète. Ainsi, Scheme (1965) et Schema (1966) publiés dans divers périodiques, se contentent de décrire les propriétés physiques de leur objet : qualité du papier, taille des caractères, nombre de mots… ces données font-elles poésie ? Ni plus ni moins finalement que ce qui se donne à voir et à lire pour telle quand l’artiste se mêle de livrer ses états d’âme de manière expressive.

Mais cet art buté et renfrogné, Dan Graham en assouplit les formes dès lors que, dans les années 70, bâtit ses Pavillons, structures à échelle humaine mais de dimensions modestes. Implantés en ­extérieur, dans des jardins, ou en intérieur, au centre Pompidou notamment au début des années 2000 et dans une exposition de la collection du Consortium de Dijon, ces dispositifs qui se laissent pénétrer et traverser comme des mirages, jouent de la transparence et de l’obstacle. Les vitres reflètent le paysage ou le corps du spectateur de manière troublante selon que celui-ci se tient à l’intérieur ou à l’extérieur. Les ouvertures qui y sont pratiquées font coulisser bizarrement les césures qui pouvaient exister entre le dedans et le dehors si bien que ces architectures figurent l’impossible : des espèces de non-lieux à toit ouvert et à cloisons ajourées concrétisant un idéal (ou un cauchemar) de vie à la fois privée et publique, nue et couverte, auxquels il est arrivé que l’artiste Jeff Wall, expert en trompe-l’œil, lui prête main-forte. Ces installations spéculaires et mirifiques, Dan Graham les avait testés et mises en œuvre, dès les années 70, à travers des dispositifs vidéo ou scénographique, mettant le spectateur face à son aura fantomatique ou sa silhouette démultipliée, comme dans l’installation intitulée Public Space /Two Space.

Liberté conceptuelle

Enfin, Dan Graham aura dressé au rock indépendant sa bible apocryphe, sous la forme d’abord d’un documentaire vidéo, pétri d’images de concerts, d’interviews et de clips, puis d’un recueil de textes théoriques Rock My Religion (publié en français aux Presses du réel) où l’auteur interprète l’émergence du rock et de ses figures pionnières de Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley à The Doors comme celle d’une nouvelle croyance spirituelle augmentée d’une dimension physique et sexuelle. Il était également proche de Sonic Youth, groupe emblème du rock alternatif, qui lui devait énormément de sa liberté conceptuelle, voire de son existence puisque c’est lui qui encouragea un beau jour sa voisine étudiante en art, Kim Gordon, à se lancer dans la musique, et qui lui présenta Thurston Moore. Si son nom est moins connu du grand public que ceux de ces free rockers impétueux, il ne leur en voudra jamais. Il réalisera même une œuvre dédiée à leur musique, le Sonic Youth Pavilion.

1969-1970 Vidéos expérimentales suivies des premiers dispositifs en miroir

1978 Début des « pavillons »

19 février 2022 Mort à New York

Smashed to pieces (in the still of the night) on the façade of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria. 

The Oskar-Kokoschka-Prize 2022 is awarded to Lawrence Weiner

(1942–2021) for his artistic contributions to the public spaces of Vienna