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| ONE DEAD
ONE Canvas body bag with aluminum painted text 180(l) x 80(w) cm £6,000 - £8,500 SOLD |
lawrence weiner
(b. 1942 South Bronx, New York. Lives and works in New York and Amsterdam)
Lawrence Weiner is one of the most important and influential members
of a generation of artists who began adopting a new creative media in
which language dominated due to the possibilities contained in its abstract
and virtual reality. For this reason Weiner is associated with the origins
of Conceptual Art, but his significance as an artist lies in the fact
that his adoption of language as a plastic medium is joined to a materialist
concept of work.
Lawrence Weiner and other artists of his generation were no longer concerned with the question of how art should look, but rather what art is, how we - society - even know that art is art. Weiner's work is not orientated towards the production of objects, is not particularly attractive, or a source of easy pleasure, but on the contrary, it demands the involvement of the viewer and makes demands on their intelligence by asking some direct questions about art and life.
The works exist primarily in the form of language, visual or oral. They do not, however, encompass a literary aim, but instead are a vehicle for rendering insight into perceivable reality without the intervention of authoritarian or arbitrary personal gesture or expression. The work itself is self-referential even when it is not literally redundant. It is circumstantial and broadly referential, and its condition of existence is emblematic of our time.
Developing originally as a painter from the tradition of 'Abstract
expressionism' Weiner started to work on whether the appeal to emotion
was important in art, and if the value of artwork was based on being
unique. By eliminating the hand of the artist and its expressiveness,
he arrived at the use of modular, reiterative forms and the diminished
use of imagery. His paintings were a way to transmit information by
means of materials which had nothing to do with the kind of information
involved or with its presentation. This differentiation between the
content of a work of art and its presentation is at the heart of Weiner's
work.
Links to Other Artists