Weiner's World
MULLARKEY, MAUREEN
Weiner’s World The reductio ad absurdum of conceptual art. BY MAUREEN MULLARKEY Imaginary numbers are vital to modern mathematics. The discovery of imaginary art—a.k.a. conceptual art—in the...
...Comparison with the sociologist Baudrillard and the psychoanalyst Lacan is unwittingly double-edged...
...The catalog locates Weiner in the company of Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Alfred North Whitehead, and JeanPaul Sartre...
...In 1960, the 18-year-old Bronx-born artist jump-started his career by dynamiting holes (without permission) in a Mill Valley state park...
...It was the cognoscenti’s last joyride after the death of God...
...The procession is punctuated here and there with a dollop of paint, sea water, fi recracker residue, or some other clue to the existential status of the artist...
...Photographs commemorate civic adventures such as the 2000 Public Art Fund project that cast Weiner’s nonplusses onto 19 Manhattan manhole covers...
...plers...
...Execution of the concept is optional...
...Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, seedbed for deconstruction, was already on the stands...
...The aim is to demolish common understanding of the nature of art...
...It affi rms the artist as a handmaiden to analytic philosophy, French phenomenology, and linguistic theory...
...A knitted brow is part of the pose, the only thing left once artwork has been scuttled for the analysis of it...
...The resentment of rationality and of socially embraced patterns of meaning is the inadmissible subject of the Weiner retrospective...
...They blessed the demolition and announced it a “work...
...Antirational, it thwarts the basis for making the distinctions on which decisions, aesthetic and moral, rest...
...Only when language is judged a product of arbitrary will rather than of cognition can it be “left to the viewer to construct meaning...
...Visually, the show is in the sententious tradition of embroidered samMaureen Mullarkey writes about art for the New York Sun, the New Criterion, and other publications...
...A wrecking ball is better than a brush for effecting a Nietzschean upending of prevailing values...
...Gigantic Post-It notes signifying nothing suited the times...
...Those were the heydays of conceptual art...
...The privatization of meaning signals something larger than an art-world posture...
...Skills and aesthetic achievement do not apply...
...Guerrilla theater begins in the elevator with a blotch on the carpet...
...conceptual art—in the 1960s was greeted as a breakthrough of comparable signifi cance...
...The assent to intellectual anarchy, popularized in the arts, reached its apogee in Planned Parenthood v. Casey’s famous defense of individualized deduction: “At the heart of liberty is the right to defi ne one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and the mystery of human life...
...In an era of vandalisms great and small, conceptual art combined the malice of deconstruction with the antics of Alan Kaprow’s “happenings...
...As the catalog states: “Each person has a different relation to its content...
...And this Whitney retrospective of Weiner’s pranksmanship solemnizes the ethos of rebellion and disguised nihilism that rode Jefferson Airplane from the sixties into the Me Decade that followed...
...Running the old cannabis trade route from the West Village to Washington Square, Union Square and Tompkins Square Park, each cast-iron plate carries the phrase: IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER AND THE NEXT...
...Needlepoint aphorisms are tethered to communal trust in the correspondence between recognizable reality and language...
...The game was on...
...Do you need more...
...Dieter Schwartz, director of the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, trills: “By being linguistic, Weiner’s works have the property . . . of having no properties...
...The philosopher Roger Scruton, in a critical essay, has charged both with charlatanism, calling them impostors who abuse the terms of their disciplines “to deceive the reader into thinking that they are thinking when in fact they are doing no such thing...
...Most lines have the ring of contrived enigma: EN ROUTE ON ANOTHER PLANE/EN ROUTE VIA ANOTHER ROUTE...
...He separated language from its communicative function with “word-works,” nonconnotative phraselets broadcast on walls and building fa?ades...
...Customers are invited to fabricate signifi cance for themselves...
...STRETCHED TIGHTLY AS IS POSSIBLE [SATIN & PETROLEUM JELLY] is the sort of mannered incoherence that stokes curatorial cant...
...It is an apt motto for the persistent legacy of Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary...
...Man is made for meaning, a communal achievement realized in concert with what used to be called natural law...
...What counts is the artist’s shining brainwork and subsequent commentary by Those Who Know...
...At the Whitney, strings of Weinerisms are stenciled on walls and fl oors like riddles of the sphinx...
...On the qui vive to capture the zeitgeist, critics took the cue...
...SINK OR SWIM YOUR ASS GETS WET is not an insight that gets you up in the morning...
...Weiner’s role, like theirs, is to subvert the thinking of others...
...He dubbed them “Cratering Pieces...
...But with a crucial difference...
...Weiner seized the moment...
...Relations between words and meanings, given an earlier shake by Dada texts, went into free fall...
...A wall plaque declares the stain a creative act: AN AMOUNT OF BLEACH POURED UPON A RUG AND ALLOWED TO BLEACH...
...But in the rhetorical milieu of the graduate art seminar, from which curators emerge, it is an epiphany...
...Elsewhere, in caps: TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT DIRECTLY UPON THE FLOOR FROM A STANDARD AEROSOL SPRAY CAN...
...The Order of Things, Michel Foucault’s assault on semantic habits, had appeared the year before...
...In the axis year 1968, Weiner turned to detonating language, too...
...It demonstrated, so the thinking went, that art was capable of the same heavy lifting required by more rigorous disciplines...
...He helped put the torch to the traditional practice of painting and sculpture...
...Left open “for translation, transference and transformation,” they are applauded for their violence to intelligibility...
...Conceptualism scorns material works of art and exalts the artist’s mental labors instead...
...It is left to the viewer to construct meaning...
...Weiner’s “theoretical messages” follow the Dadaist trajectory of what Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) hailed as “word salad...
...To a generation whose critical capacities were capped by Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Hite Report, AND THEN UTILISED AS TO ANOTHER GENDER (as the capitalized titles read) sounded recondite and worldly...
...But of course...
...Only the mad, quarantined by unshared, idiosyncratic conceptions of reality, suffer that kind of freedom...
...Lawrence Weiner, now on show at New York’s Whitney Museum, is a key fi gure of the movement...
Vol. 13 • December 2008 • No. 16
