Photo: Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art

propose that Lawrence Weiner’s retrospective entitled ‘AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE’, currently at the Whitney Museum and traveling to MOCA Los Angeles, will undoubtedly mean different things to different people. Co-curated by Donna De Salvo and Ann Goldstein, it has been applauded for being overdue, which it is, and cautioned for its over-crowding on one floor of the Whitney, which it is. That being said, the show feels unexpectedly heroic in these giddy, bloated times. Who knew?

Weiner is a materialist, who pushes around displays of language as a preface to (maybe) pushing around the materials themselves. He is not a Fluxus-mystic, visual poet, or idea artist. The appearance of his art – words, color, and some symbols, is comprehensible and carries an immediate recognition factor. Acceptance of his practice (and Weiner was the first artist I ever was aware of who referred to himself as a ‘practitioner’ in an interview with Willoughby Sharp, Avalanche, Spring ’72) remains controversial to those audience members who require the comforting presence of the physical, or handmade art object . And those are many.

Born in 1942 and on the road until the early 60’s, Weiner, a public school educated New Yorker, appeared less interested in Pop Art, and more in the party-crashing systemic reasoning that led out of Frank Stella’s ‘black’ paintings. I suspect that Weiner, whose first documented work was of a planned explosion (1960), had a penchant for ‘removing’ (Stella’s canvases notched corners and absent centers) than for ‘adding’ (beatnik/pop assemblage). Increasingly dubious with filling in shapes on canvas, the artist formed a militant indifference to the presentation of his art. In a group of paintings from 1965, shown at the Whitney for the first time together (at least for me), Weiner shifted responsibility for the paintings scale, shape, and color to whoever commissioned/purchased a work. The pieces themselves are not startling and look of their time, like ‘do-it-yourself’ versions of Robert Mangold’s later paintings. By 1968, Weiner dispenses altogether with the making of things, intersecting with Andy Warhol’s own ambivalence, feigned or otherwise, in his decision-making process. Weiner appreciated Warhol; both artists were socially ubiquitous and both cast attractive members of their milieu in their films.

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