Lawrence Weiner: In the Realm of Relative Form, Lisson Gallery Beijing, 2023. One of the most important founders of contemporary conceptual art, Lawrence Weiner made works in language that appeared on building facades, public floors and walls, cars, and towers around the world. Lawrence Weiner, One for Many Benefits / Two for Great Performance / Three Get Ready & Four Run Forward, Gallery Weekend Beijing Public Art Program, Airmate Plaza, Beijing 798 Art District, 2023. Photograph: Yang Hao. Lawrence Weiner, To Invite Light, at the opening exhibition of UCCA, 2007. Image courtesy of UCCA. Weiner was born in 1942 and died in December 2021. Over a career of more than sixty years, he exhibited four times each at documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the Venice Biennale in Italy, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis from Museum Ludwig, and the Roswitha Haftmann Foundation Award.
Lawrence Weiner was also one of the earliest pioneers to influence Chinese contemporary art. In 2007, the opening exhibition of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing presented To Invite Light, a collaborative site-specific project made with Weiner. Lawrence Weiner and Alice Weiner at home. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. This summer, Lisson Gallery’s Beijing space is presenting the artist’s first solo exhibition in China since 2008.
The works date from 1972 to 2013, spanning the high point of his career. We spoke remotely with Weiner’s widow, Alice Weiner, about his work during his lifetime and the little-known love story they shared. She also told us about the five-story townhouse on a Manhattan street, whose design they helped shape themselves and where they lived for more than a decade, a home that held countless happy memories.
Lawrence Weiner: In the Realm of Relative Form, exhibition view, Lisson Gallery Beijing, 2023. Photograph: Yang Hao. Anyone who has seen Weiner’s works in language is unlikely to forget them. The words appear in bold capital letters, accompanied by geometric forms, symbols, and vivid colors, with the frontal, poster-like force of advertising. The language in Weiner’s work can be poetic, humorous, or thought-provoking.
The four textual works shown at Lisson Gallery produce an unexpected effect when translated into Chinese. Lawrence Weiner, AT THE SAME MOMENT, beside the ferry terminal on the Manhattan side of Long Island, New York, 2009. Photograph: Librado Romero. From the 1970s until his death in 2021, the central principle of Weiner’s practice remained unchanged: he made art with words.
This was also the point his widow, Alice, emphasized to us.
“The form of Lawrence’s work is language. Its colors, shapes, and proportions may change; the materials—wood, steel, glue, cement—may differ, but the consciousness contained within it does not change,” Alice said. Lawrence Weiner, A TRANSLATION FROM ONE LANGUAGE TO ANOTHER, 2015. Lawrence Weiner, IN THE MIDDLE OF, at documenta 13, 2012. The “Weiner typeface” we see today is a slender, cartoonlike font called “Margaret Seaworthy Gothic.” It is entirely uppercase, neither excessively bold nor dependent on neon, projection, or other media. It simply appears on walls, books, towers, cars, and other public surfaces.
Lawrence Weiner, One for Many Benefits / Two for Great Performance / Three Get Ready & Four Run Forward, Gallery Weekend Beijing Public Art Program, Airmate Plaza, Beijing 798 Art District, 2023. Photograph: Yang Hao. Vivid color gives these otherwise unremarkable words a reliable visibility. During this year’s Gallery Weekend Beijing, Weiner’s work appeared on the ground at Airmate Plaza, recalling the childhood game of hopscotch. Yellow, green, and red blocks, paired with black lettering, invited viewers to “run forward.”
Lawrence Weiner: In the Realm of Relative Form, exhibition view, Lisson Gallery Beijing, 2023. Photograph: Yang Hao. Weiner also used other visual forms to express language, including film. The eighteen-minute video SINK OR SWIM, shown in the exhibition, combines live-action footage, animated drawings, text, and patterns. Images of water and sky recur throughout, as if the artist were speaking directly with the viewer.
Lawrence Weiner, exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 1969. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. “Lawrence’s work isn’t like a recipe that gives the audience instructions step by step. He cuts into walls, throws ammunition, throws paint. The work may be printed on paper or written directly on a wall.… He also made sound works, films, and cartoons. He wanted to use every visual and auditory form available to express himself,” Alice said. Lawrence Weiner, WHAT IS SET UPON THE TABLE SITS UPON THE TABLE, 1962. She was referring to the strange and violent act of “throwing ammunition,” which marked the beginning of Weiner’s artistic career and became his breakthrough work.
In 1960, at the age of nineteen, Weiner and a friend placed explosives at the four corners of an open field in a national park in Marion County, California, blasting four holes in the ground. He called the resulting craters “sculpture.” He considered it his first solo exhibition and titled the work CRATERING PIECE. Lawrence Weiner participated in the group exhibition Live in Your Head—When Attitudes Become Form, presenting A 36″ X 36″ Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969. Photograph: Shunk Kender. Lawrence Weiner, A 36″ X 36″ Removal to the Lathing or Support Wall of Plaster or Wallboard from a Wall, 1968. The year 1968 was of extraordinary importance to Weiner.
He made two works that would become highly important in the history of conceptual art. One was titled A 36″ X 36″ REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD FROM A WALL.
The title says exactly what happened: he removed a thirty-six-inch-by-thirty-six-inch section of wall and relocated it elsewhere. Weiner defined the work as pure sculpture; he wanted to return to viewers the space artists usually occupied. Lawrence Weiner, A Series of Stakes Set in the Ground at Regular Intervals to Form a Rectangle—Twine Strung from Stake to Stake to Demark a Grid—A Rectangle Removed from This Rectangle, Windham College, Putney, Vermont, 1968. The other work was made for an outdoor exhibition Weiner organized at Windham College in Putney, Vermont.
It was titled A SERIES OF STAKES SET IN THE GROUND AT REGULAR INTERVALS TO FORM A RECTANGLE—TWINE STRUNG FROM STAKE TO STAKE TO DEMARK A GRID—A RECTANGLE REMOVED FROM THIS RECTANGLE.
Again, the title makes the action legible. Thirty-four stakes and lengths of twine formed a succession of squares along the main passage between two dormitories at Windham College. Students who used the passage for soccer practice were unhappy and dismantled the work. Weiner was initially angry that it had been destroyed, but he soon realized that the work remained valid even if it existed only as text. That is the particular power of making “sculpture” with words.
Lawrence Weiner, Statements, book cover, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Once Weiner understood that the value of his art lay in language itself, he established, in 1968, three “use guidelines” for the presentation of all his subsequent works. The Statement of Intent was included in Statements: 1. The artist may construct the piece; 2. The piece may be fabricated; 3. The piece need not be built. Each piece is equal and consistent with the artist’s intent; the condition of the piece is determined by the viewer upon receiving it.
These three guidelines established his position as a pioneer of conceptual art. Lawrence Weiner in an interview with CBC Television, April 1969. Before the interview, Weiner completed One Standard Dye Marker Thrown into the Sea. Lawrence Weiner: In the Realm of Relative Form, exhibition view, Lisson Gallery Beijing, 2023. Photograph: Yang Hao. “Lawrence was very committed to his working principles, and his principles were extremely strict.”
Alice said. In the performance segment of his CBC interview, Weiner followed those principles with almost absurd simplicity: he threw a dye marker into the sea. The work was titled ONE STANDARD DYE MARKER THROWN INTO THE SEA.
“My view of Lawrence is that he was an alienated person who grew up in a big city and was trying to find his voice. He wanted the work to interact with viewers more directly, to speak with them, and that interested me very much,” Alice told us. Lawrence Weiner, Germany, 1980s. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. In 1968, at Max’s, the fast-food restaurant he often visited, Weiner met the love of his life: Alice.
“In the 1960s, you couldn’t enter a good restaurant without a suit and tie. If you weren’t white, you were stopped at the door. Max’s was for artists, filmmakers, musicians, and street crazies. Any clothes, any race, any income could come in.” That was how Alice described the restaurant where she and Weiner met. She was working there as a server, and art was a subject almost everyone discussed.
“As we talked, I found myself deeply attracted to Lawrence. He was a little sexy, both mentally and physically—ha,” Alice said. Lawrence Weiner at the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, 1993. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. Alice said she has never forgotten the “fatal night” when Weiner declared his feelings.
“If you want to know the truth, that night Lawrence was with his friend John. He was drunk and said he wanted to count my freckles in the moonlight, and then he said, ‘He loved me.’ I told him he might love what I brought him: tequila. Love and reality. Him and her. And two lifelong friends.” Alice recalled that young time as if it had happened yesterday, though with evident feeling. Lawrence Weiner’s studio, 2011. Photograph: Alyssa Gorelick. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. Compared with Weiner’s standing in the art world today, he was not exactly a globally famous artist then. But in his own view, he already was famous.
“Fame is relative, isn’t it? He certainly knew a lot of people, and people knew him.… In the art world, is that fame? I suppose it is,” Alice said. Lawrence Weiner gave a lecture in Beijing in 2007. Although Weiner did not care much about that kind of fame, he cared deeply about having serious conversations with anyone, regardless of where they came from or their class position.
“Lawrence could remember what he had talked about with people many years later. I think fame is like beauty: if you don’t have anything inside, or anything remarkable and exceptional to say about the world, then your fame is overrated.” Lawrence Weiner, TOWARDS MOTION, Canary Wharf, London, 1997. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. Weiner was so grounded because he came from the working class.
He was born in 1942 in the Bronx, Manhattan, New York, to parents who ran a candy store. He once said that his family life was very happy, but that the neighborhood was chaotic, with a high crime rate, and that he was often bullied at school. At twelve, he began working as a longshoreman on Manhattan’s docks to earn extra money, where he saw much of the hard world below. Weiner was also gifted academically, and his excellent grades later won him admission to New York’s prestigious Stevenson High School.
Lawrence Weiner speaking with people at an event: “Interestingly,” he said, “people make art for other people,” 2019. Photograph: Amy Lombard. After high school, Weiner briefly studied at Hunter College, but he decided that he would rather see the world than “read dead books” on campus. He dropped out and began drifting around the country, taking temporary jobs as he tried to figure out what he wanted to do.
Along the way, he taught himself philosophy by reading and occasionally tried his hand at Expressionist painting. He continued wandering and making art until 1968, when he met Alice. Their child was born the following year, and he stopped painting to concentrate on putting his conceptual-art ideas into words. Lawrence Weiner and his wife, Alice, at their home in Manhattan, New York. Alice watering plants in the sunroom on the top floor. That experience of working odd jobs while making art left Weiner deeply resistant to the lofty posture of elite artists. Even long after he had become a major figure in the art world, he never lived in what could be called a conventional luxury apartment.
Before 2008, he, Alice, and their child lived for thirty years in the top-floor loft of an original, unrenovated townhouse built in the early nineteenth century in Manhattan.
“The house we lived in before was a lovely historical ruin. When the landlord called to evict us, we decided it was time to stop playing house and ‘grow up’ like everyone else,” Alice said of the move. Second-floor space. Interior circulation space. In 2008, the couple found a new home and hired the renowned architecture firm LOT-EK to radically transform a townhouse that had been stripped down to its steel frame.
The house had five floors, including the basement, and measured approximately 3,000 square meters.
“It took us a year to find the house we live in now. Its history goes back to 1910. It wasn’t originally a residence but a bakery, so it’s still noisy and full of the smell of food! But this is New York!” Alice said. In the 1960s, it was first converted into a residence; its earliest owner was a fashion editor at Playboy magazine. Rear garden. The building faces east and west, with excellent natural light: generous morning sun and an afternoon brightness that is both intense and warm.
One entire additional floor was added to the townhouse’s original three-story structure, along with a sunroom topped by a green roof. The green roof was salvaged from the house in the Hamptons where they had lived for thirty years, a memorial to their earlier life. Because the government required the street-facing facade to be built in brick, the open staircase was placed at the rear. Three enormous window ledges project from the front of the house, prompting passersby to look up.
The ledges were made partly from recycled stainless-steel sections of truck bodies and jut outward from the facade. Each has a completely different function on its floor. The first floor contains the living room and kitchen, so its ledge serves as a kitchen bench; the second is the artist’s archive office, where the ledge becomes a conference table; the third is the living room, where it functions as a bed platform.
“When your front window is the body of a truck, it gives you a feeling of freedom. We didn’t want to feel safe or satisfied; that’s not our style.” Alice sounded delighted as she discussed the unconventional design. Weiner in the studio in the basement of the house. Weiner in the studio, 2014. Image courtesy of the Lawrence Weiner Estate. The basement, once Weiner’s studio, opened directly onto the garden.
“The original house contained many elements, including a lot of mirrors. Lawrence liked being surrounded by reflected views; it was perfect,” Alice said. Weiner in his bedroom. Alice Weiner and Lawrence Weiner in the first-floor kitchen. “The bedroom used to be lined with gray flannel, with thick white braided rope covering the floor and walls.… It was an homage to the film The Grey Flannel Suit.”
“It had a strong 1950s business style, and LOT-EK renovated it into what it is now, pushing beyond people’s expectations. No one walks in and thinks they are in the 1950s. They look around and say, ‘This is really great. I like it!’” Alice said. They used battered galvanized steel sheets instead of wallpaper, and there were no stuffy sofas.
“But because the house was so different, at first people would ring our bell just to tell me how much they hated it. I always said, ‘Thank you!’” Alice said. Alice Weiner, standing by the rear window, organizing Lawrence Weiner’s archive. Although Weiner has died, Alice continues to run his studio and write extensively about his work.
Her writing is personal, intimate, and revelatory. Apart from Alice, perhaps no one could understand Weiner in quite this way.
“My pleasure is watching Lawrence play the role of an artist. I was an art teacher in high school, and it was not a good experience; the profession wasn’t for me. You may not believe this, but I love watching Lawrence be an artist. It makes me especially happy.
“Alice told us. Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from Lisson Gallery, UCCA, and the internet.