What Falls Offside

Lawrence Weiner became one of the most influential artists of the 20th century because he had the strength to retain an offside position. In order to understand how he developed his extraordinary vision of art it is indispensable to elucidate an incident that occurred in April 1968, when Weiner was twenty-six years old. Although he had not undergone formal training at an art school, he began to exhibit paintings as early as 1964, when he showed a number of boldly simplified pictures of television test images that he called propeller paintings at Seth Siegelaub's gallery on 56th Street in Manhattan. Because he was acquainted with some of the pioneers of minimalism, he was invited to participate in an exhibition at Windham College in Putney, Vermont, together with Carl Andre and Robert Barry. The invitation came from a professor of sculpture with the caveat that there were almost no financial resources.

Weiner decided to create an outdoor installation. On a patch of lawn, he drove thirty-four wooden stakes into the ground, each at a distance of one foot, forming a rectangular grid of seven by ten feet. Cords of twine were then tacked to the stakes that lay on the ground like a net. The deadpan title of the work simply itemized the materials used: Staples, Stakes, Twine, Turf. The strict geometrical structure of the work was somewhat undone because Weiner detached two of the one by one foot squares at one of the corners of the large rectangle. He had already experimented with such a removal in some of his paintings to emphasize the conventional character of their shape.

On April 30th, the day of the opening, Weiner discovered that students had damaged his work and, to some extent, even demolished it. They had been upset because they could no longer use the lawn for their ball games. It would have been understandable to condemn it as coarse vandalism. However, Weiner tried to understand the reasons that had led the students to their blatant dismissal of his work. In this way, he eventually developed a new strategy of art that he subsequently relied on for the rest of his life.

As a consequence, it is even now, more than fifty years later, still possible to get an accurate impression of Weiner’s work by means of descriptions and photographs, although it has long ceased to exist. From this, it could be concluded that the conception of a work is much more important than its realization. This is a view that already applied to the works of the old masters. When a painter like Raphael received a commission for an altarpiece, it was first determined (and usually recorded in contracts) what should be shown on it. So, the problem that Weiner had to deal with was an old one; his solution, however, was new.

He presented it nine months after his sojourn in Vermont in a short, programmatic text published in the catalog of a group exhibition in New York. The text was printed on an otherwise blank page without a title, but is usually referred to as his Statement of Intent.

The text consists of two parts subtly differentiated by the typographic layout. The first half is composed of three sentences printed on three numbered lines, each with a dot after the number, but no dot at the end of the sentence:

The artist may construct the piece
The artist may construct the piece
The piece may be fabricated
The artist may construct the piece
The piece may be fabricated
The piece need not be built
The piece need not be built

These three options are all well known from the art of the past. The first possibility—that a piece be executed by the artist without co-workers—is generally considered to be the most appropriate. The second possibility—that the piece be fabricated by other persons—is not highly esteemed, although it is well known that painters like Raphael had workshops with apprentices and assistants who were involved in the production of their works. If the same occurs today, however, it is not so readily acknowledged. While some artists (such as Cindy Sherman and Gerhard Richter) still produce their work entirely on their own, many others have a staff of employees and some even have their works regularly produced entirely by others. The third option—that the piece not be realized at all—seems either trivial or a bit odd, but it was also already taken into account by traditional theories of art.

In Lessing's Emilia Galotti, the question is raised whether Raphael would not still have been “the greatest painterly genius if he had unfortunately been born without hands.”

So far, Weiner’s observation that a work of art can either be realized by the artist or by somebody else or not at all, still remains within the conceptual framework of traditional art theory. But then a change occurs. Weiner adds a fourth and final sentence that has no number at the beginning, indicating that this is a comment on the situation described above. It reads: “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.”

Here it is asserted that all three possibilities mentioned are equivalent and none is incompatible with the intentions of the artist. At this point, Weiner switches from description to an overt act of prescription. The task to choose one of the three options is delegated to a figure introduced under the name of the receiver.

Who is this receiver and what might he or she receive? The choice of words suggests that he or she receives a message, a piece of information, or perhaps a suggestion that allows him or her to decide about the work of art at stake. This decision, to be sure, does not concern the interpretation of the work, but rather the question of whether it has a right to exist or not.

Artists might normally conclude that they must realize their conceptions simply because it is, by definition, art they produce. Thus, Weiner himself had mindlessly and selfishly proceeded from the assumption that he had a license to do whatever he wanted at Windham College. But then it turned out that his well-meant installation had been perceived as the hostile intrusion of an arrogant New York artist who ruthlessly occupied and confiscated common property in the name of his obscure ambition. Weiner must have been deeply afflicted by the insight that his work might have had harmful effects on others whose needs had not been taken into account. Something like this should not happen again.

As a consequence, Weiner no longer tried to understand the situation in terms of conception and realization. These categories only work within an immanent view of the artwork. Required was a broader perspective that would place the artwork not only in relation to the artist who invented it. The final decision had to be granted to the receivers. The artist had no right to force them to accept his work. Art, just like other goods, cannot be understood if only seen under the aspect of its production; it must also be considered in relation to its consumption.

On the most general level, the public is not only invited to judge art—it is also invited to create art. Just like Beuys, Weiner believes that everyone can be an artist. This does not mean that everyone is able to paint a Madonna with the same virtuosity as Raphael, but it is pretty safe to assume that countless people would be able to fabricate a piece like Weiner’s installation in Vermont. A special training or talent is not required.

Possible results of such interventions were described in a book published by Weiner in December 1968 shortly before his Statement of Intent. The book was printed in one thousand copies; it was sold for $1.95 and contained sixty-four unpaginated pages with only a few printed lines, in which the words were often unorthodoxly hyphenated from one line to the next.

The title of the book was Statements. This is surprising because it contains no statements at all. Every entry describes objects and their properties, but—with only one single exception—this never amounts to a complete sentence. A typical example is: “One piece of plywood secured to the floor or wall.” Ten words contain the information that a sheet of plywood of unspecified size has been screwed or glued to some floor or wall in an unidentified place. Time and space are not determined, and they do not change because nothing happens. The board of plywood was attached a long time ago; it is over and done with, and nobody knows whether anything will ever happen again. The description gives the impression of a situation that does not call for action, but rather contemplation. The world is at rest, but that entails that all possibilities are still open so one may wonder whether a song might still be sleeping in all the things.

Weiner's information is intentionally incomplete. This marks a fundamental difference from Sol LeWitt's notion of conceptual art, where everything is strictly specified, even that which is not specified. In Weiner's work, there are no right or wrong realizations of his conceptions. This means that ultimately everything is possible, so someone who does not wish to put wooden stakes in a lawn or attach plywood to a wall might just as well bake a cherry pie.

There is one respect, however, in which Weiner kept an uncompromising attitude. Regarding the typographical design of his texts, he does not allow anyone to interfere. He publishes his texts in a highly sophisticated form that serves as a permanent reminder that everything we do can be done in a careful and meticulous way.

This admonition is of special relevance to those who would decide to follow Weiner’s paradigm by creating objects according to his descriptions. A closer inspection reveals that this has hardly ever happened. In the beginning, the artist himself sometimes took a clue from his own descriptions by removing a piece of plaster from a wall, but this happened less and less. Thus, we may conclude that very little of what Weiner envisioned has actually been realized. This, however, cannot compromise his strategy in the slightest. The general aim of all of his proposals is the admonition to stay in close contact with the material world and to hold manual work in high esteem. This attitude usually does not lead to the creation of spectacular objects suited for the art market. Weiner defends the dignity of ordinary activities such as screwing a sheet of plywood to the wall.

Giving shape to one’s own life is, for Weiner, much more important than creating works of art. Therefore, all his inventions can only be examples, and nobody can be urged to take notice of them. Each person is responsible for themselves, and whether someone is susceptible to Weiner’s offerings depends on the kind of life they lead.

It is well-known that Weiner often quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remark that “an expression has meaning only in the stream of life.” In 1958, at the age of sixteen, Weiner attended courses in literature and philosophy at Hunter College, and it is easy to imagine that he was fascinated by Wittgenstein's late work, which was posthumously published in 1953 under the title Philosophical Investigations. Here was a philosopher who found it interesting to think about how to deal with a piece of paper inscribed with the words "five red apples".

Weiner's stance represents a departure from Duchamp, who deprived things of their authentic materiality by transforming them into mere bearers of arbitrary meaning. Weiner pleads for cherishing the physicality of things and their concrete materiality. Defending such a position might prove more valuable and meaningful than its opposite. We should be grateful to Lawrence Weiner for his tireless insistence on the belief that everything that falls offside must find a place to rest.