Laurence Weiner

Interview by Liam Gillick

from Audio Arts Volume 14, Number 2, 1994

Transcript

Liam Gillick: I’m speaking to Lawrence Weiner at the Fountains Hotel near the Serpentine Gallery.

Lawrence Weiner: Oh, it’s pretty obvious what you see, what you read, is what you get. It’s about time that it became clear within a so called institute, a so called institutional situation that if there is content all work that doesn’t have it’s own support structure and requires the support structure of the society, be that on media, painted or etched directly into a wall, function essentially as graffiti. And graffiti only functions when the message is something past. ‘Me, I exist,’ when the message is the basic content of all messages, ‘John loves Mary’ or as we’ve come to have it ‘John heart Mary’, then any situation that you find it will do quite nicely. And I was going to etch the entire piece into the wall and then realized that one of the walls was a false wall and I have a personal dislike of etching into false walls. They have a tendency to exist then as half an object. And nothing against objects but they do exist as half an object. So, I etched until we came to the end of the real wall and then moved on to the false wall, which we painted on. The work itself is about basic relationships of materials to materials, which again will be in relation to human beings. All materials can only be known and dealt with by virtue of the acknowledgement that there is a gesture, either in the looking, the seeing, or the using. And the piece is concerned with what you do with cables and threads. It’s really rather simple. I’m basically a sculptor and as we know the society then comes to see this as sculpture which is totally non-metaphorical. And in order to be able to use it to make a metaphor, the metaphor becomes quite obvious in a mercantile empire situation, especially as in the middle of Kensington Park. I’m not in the habit of making work specifically for an exhibition. The work that I end up showing in any exhibition is invariably the culmination of whatever work I was working on at the time. It’s a piece that’s been in various forms kicking around for a while. It’s never been publicly shown. And the installation was designed for the situation.

LG: This work is a sort of bringing together of a group of people there is a general feeding back and forth across generations.

LW: Yeah, I don’t like the term generations to begin with. Everybody can’t be born at the same time. That might be a British attitude but it’s not mine. If you’re going to have a real life as an artist everybody’s born when they’re born. I had nothing to do with organizing this show, but I would honestly say that I’m pleased to show with all the people that are here with me, in this building in the middle of Kensington Park. But on the Wall doesn’t mean anything: your first cave paintings that we know of, Lascaux, that’s something else. Being on the wall is nothing; it’s what the content is.

I have a genuine relationship with the work and the aesthetics, I’m not the same and I don’t agree with some things, but I have an historical relationship with Sol le Witt, and with Daniel Buren. As well as with people like Georgia Rockburn whose been working on the wall for years as well. I work on the wall as a matter of convenience. I’ve been working on the wall in London since the first time I made a show in London.

I don’t see the generational thing that you’re talking about existing, except for a commercial venue. If we talk in terms of the so-called market, if we talk in terms of the so-called listings in Sotheby’s and things like that, of course, I’m fifty-two years old somebody else is thirty-five years old. I’ve been showing for the last thirty years and somebody else has only been showing for the last fifteen. But because we all have to eat, it’s become the conversation for the last twenty years, where they’re trying to rank things and I don’t see the necessity for that within the context of this show, when every single person in this show is standing up, taking responsibility for the position that they feel art is in. My problem, as a fellow artist, is the means that one uses to succeed or fail. When those means are politically viable, and not based upon a precedent of history, but based upon a necessity of the artist, more power to them. My fight with any other artist is about the content of the work. And I don’t really care if they sing it in a basso profundo or if they sing it in a soprano. It’s not my problem. What you’re addressing perhaps at this particular moment is another point. And you the so-called audience, is interested in that point. I mean I go up and down as far as audience interest. The people in the show are all on the same side of the barricade. They’re all emphasising the fact that art is used by this society as a positive metaphor, even if it’s about destruction.