Lawrence Weiner’s
Materialism*
TREVOR STARK
I wrote this essay for the forthcoming catalogue of what turned out to be the final
exhibition of Lawrence Weiner’s lifetime: CLOSE TO A RAINBOW, curated by Anders
Gaardboe Jensen and held from June to October 2021 at the Holstebro Kunstmuseum in
丹麦. It is published in this issue of October as an homage to the artist, who died on
十二月 2, 2021.
I met Lawrence for the first and only time in Holstebro to celebrate his exhibition on
十月 9, 2021, and encountered an artist passionately invested in arguing about the
nature of his work, quick with a sardonic joke, and even ready to offer inimitable advice to a
new parent (he reminded me of the eternal imperative to kill the father and warned, “Just
don’t let him join the Navy”). In Holstebro, I met both Lawrence the individual and a whole
community that had been galvanized by his work. The outpouring of mourning and remem-
brance that has followed his passing makes it clear just how many such communities exist.
The fresh memory of meeting Lawrence Weiner made it difficult to revise into the past
tense an essay originally written about a vital and still developing art practice. I have left the
essay unillustrated, both to register the loss of Weiner and to make palpable one of the most
essential implications of his work: that his words exist sufficiently as works of art simply as
they are typed in the pages that follow. Weiner designed his work such that the nearly infinite
number of possibilities for his words would be equally valid, exceeding his individual control
and remaining in circulation as “PARADIGMS SUITABLE FOR DAILY USE” by anyone.
In his absence, they remain in play.
*
I would like to thank Anders Gaardboe Jensen for his editorial feedback and for his gener-
ous permission to publish this essay in October in advance of its appearance in his catalogue for CLOSE
TO A RAINBOW, forthcoming from the Holstebro Kunstmuseum in 2022. I’m grateful to Hal Foster
and Adam Lehner for their work bringing this text to October. Thank-you to Alice Zimmerman Weiner,
Carsten Juhl, Lone Mertz, Susanne Ottesen, Mark von Schlegell, and Anders once more for the conver-
sations in Holstebro.
OCTOBER 180 春天 2022, PP. 105–120. © 2022 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00455
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106
OCTOBER
Beginning in the 1960s, Lawrence Weiner persistently described his per-
spective as being that of a “materialist.”1 The primary empirical stuff of Weiner’s
art was also consistent for over fifty years: 字, supplemented by basic symbols
and typographical emphases (plus signs, parentheses, ampersands, underlines,
ETC。), arranged into phrases that follow a few principles,2 即, that they fre-
quently employ the past participle, rarely form complete sentences, (almost)
never issue orders, often refer to everyday things and actions, and generally
avoid abstract, specialized, or rarefied terminology. Is this what materialism in
language looks like?
实际上, such a question would immediately have to be amended, for it is
precisely the quality of “looking like”—of language’s visual appearance—that
Weiner’s materialism put under pressure. What sort of materialist would, 作为
Weiner did, pronounce himself mostly indifferent to the concrete form of his
chosen material—language, in his case? Whether his works are painted onto
walls or printed on posters or in books, whether they are designed in idiosyncrat-
ic polychrome typefaces or in deadpan sans serif capitals, whether they are spo-
ken in a film or sung to music, whether printed on an ice-cream-cone wrapper
or impressed on a manhole cover, Weiner maintained that each is simply a possi-
bility chosen for a particular setting—and could just as easily be otherwise. 这
situation is further complicated by Weiner’s practice of realizing his linguistic
statements in nonlinguistic form: setting off an explosion, emptying various liq-
uids on the floor (bleach or spray paint), removing a section of a wall, cutting a
narrow furrow into a collector’s driveway, tossing a dye marker into the Halifax
harbor. . . . 然而, famously, he insisted that “the piece need not be built” because
its existence as language sufficed.
To reiterate the question that will occupy me over the course of this essay:
What form of linguistic materialism could possibly account for such a practice? 到
begin with, it will be useful to briefly eliminate two tempting but ultimately insuffi-
cient options: His linguistic materialism depended neither on the objecthood of
the referent nor on the materiality of the signifier. Put otherwise, Weiner rejected
the notion that his art’s relationship to material reality required either an exit
from language (necessitating the manipulation of nonlinguistic matter in the
世界) or a circumscription of language to its physical properties (typographical
设计, grammar, site-specificity, timbre of voice, ETC。). After tackling these in turn,
I’ll advance an analysis of Weiner’s work as an aesthetic proposition working
through the social objectivity of language.
1.
There are many instances, but to Benjamin Buchloh, 例如, he affirmed, “I think that
I am really just a materialist. 实际上, I am just one of those people who is building structures out in the
world for other people to figure out how to get around. I am trying to revolutionize society, not build-
ing a new department in the same continuum of art history.” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “在
Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” in Lawrence Weiner (伦敦: 费顿出版社, 1998), p. 13.
2.
Birgit Pelzer specifies, “We are in the presence not of sentences but of distinct units of mean-
ing.” Pelzer, “Dissociated Objects: The Statements/Sculptures of Lawrence Weiner,” 十月 90
(秋天 1999), p. 76.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
107
The thesis that Weiner’s materialism depended upon the translation of
words into nonlinguistic objecthood may be disqualified quickly with reference to
the third clause of his “Statement of Intent” from 1969, which specified, as noted
already, that “the piece need not be built.” In the 1960s and ’70s, Weiner frequent-
ly “constructed” works in a manner generally consistent with the vocabulary of
Post-Minimal sculpture, realizing his linguistic “statements” through the task-like
manipulation of physical materials, such as his execution of A 36’’ X 36’’
REMOVAL TO THE LATHING OR SUPPORT WALL OF PLASTER OR WALLBOARD
FROM A WALL in the stairwell of the Kunsthalle Bern for Harald Szeemann’s Live
in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969). But the proportion of his activity
that may be described in this manner precipitously diminished in the decades fol-
lowing. For what amounts to the bulk of his career, Weiner predominantly restrict-
ed himself to the presentation of language. Yet he maintained that this was totally
consistent with his commitment to an art practice occupied primarily with the
human relationship to “objects” and “materials.” Indeed, far from requiring a
change of state into nonlinguistic matter, he held that it is “language [那] allows
a total materialist reading.”3 He proposed that the language making up a work
need never be instantiated in the form of a thing out there in the world for it to
bear upon matter.
The second thesis—of the “materiality of the signifier”—requires more care-
ful attention, given this assertion of a “total materialist” model of language.
Adopting this point of view, Weiner’s work should be placed squarely in the tradi-
tion that developed out of the “spatialized” writing of Stéphane Mallarmé and
passed through the varieties of the Concrete poetry of the postwar period that
experimented with “graphic space as structural agent” for manipulating the physi-
cal matter of the “object word.”4 Certainly Weiner’s dynamic typographical experi-
评论, the expanded terrain of vehicles he proposed for language (from bridges
to bins used by Icelandic fisheries), and his exploitation of symbols and unconven-
tional ordering of words to generate ambiguous or multiple meanings place him
within this historical trajectory. 然而, 关键地, Weiner never sought to reduce lan-
guage—let alone succeeded in reducing it—to a sheer physical material, imagin-
ing that he might cleave the material mark either from the exterior world of puta-
tively nonlinguistic objects or from the interior world of cognitive meaning. 这
论文, 最后, does not survive the test of a constant of Weiner’s production, 姓名-
莱, the list of materials applicable to all his artworks since 1968, which reads,
“Language + the materials referred to.”
Weiner’s art would thus appear divided between the material of words and
the material referred to by words. Take the case of a work such as A WALL
Lawrence Weiner, “A Conversation with Robert C. 摩根 [Interview on December 31,
3.
1979],” Real Life Magazine, winter 1983. Reprinted in Lawrence Weiner, Having Been Said: Writings &
Interviews of Lawrence Weiner, 1968–2003, 编辑. Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich (Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz, 2004), p. 101. Henceforth cited as HBS.
4.
Lee Hildreth (纽约: New Directions Press, 1968), p. 9.
“Pilot Plan” of the Noigandres group, 1958, cited in Jean-François Bory, Once Again, 反式.
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108
OCTOBER
STAINED BY WATER (1969): The materials would include the words themselves
and the situation described, comprising a particular conjunction of water, wall,
and stain. Whether the material situation preexists its representation in words or
whether the words stand virtually for the materials is not decidable once and for
全部. Things are even further complicated when one assesses the range of Weiner’s
phrases that contain no evident reference to any specific materials (or even to
nouns). What are the “materials referred to” in BROKEN OFF (1971), 为了
例子?5 BROKEN OFF seems to refer not to a particular physical object or kind
of material but to a material reality in which “having been broken off” might take
on meaning: a twig, a romantic relationship, a conversation, diplomatic ties, 一个
individual from a group. . . . And given the capacity of rhetorical speech to suspend
referentiality, what are the “materials referred to” by ON THE UP / ON THE
ABOVE UP / ON THE BELOW UP (2009), 例如?6 Do they include the
British colloquialism “on the up” or its variant “on the up and up”? The material
relations instated by Weiner’s language seem to encompass not only the physical
form of words, not only the given objects “pointed to” or named by words, 不是
only specific actions to be performed on materials, not only figurative or rhetorical
意义, but a kind of open-ended situation in which each might equally obtain.
On these questions, the subject of poetry might be illuminating. Weiner con-
sistently distinguished his language-based works from poetry—to the point of pre-
ferring the category of “sculpture” for his words.7 As he put it in 1969,
poetry is inherently involved in the medium of language as well as the
内容. I may utilize the medium in an attempt to get across only the
内容, in the most concise package I’m capable of at that moment.
Inherent beauty or exciting ramifications of the language don’t terribly
interest me.8
While one might object that the appeal of Weiner’s language frequently lies in
its beauty or “exciting ramifications,” he insisted that the formal manipulation of lan-
guage was secondary to his work’s intent, which did not coincide with the physical
characteristics of the words he used. Weiner’s work is thereby to be distinguished
from poetry’s binding of meaning to linguistic materiality (在哪里, 例如, 这
meaning of Racine’s verse is inseparable from its syllabic count and that of Susan
5.
See Kathryn Chiong’s analysis of Weiner’s film BROKEN OFF in Chiong, “Words Matter: 这
Work of Lawrence Weiner,” PhD diss. (Columbia University, 2013), PP. 88–95. My understanding of
Weiner’s work has benefited greatly from reading Chiong’s dissertation, which constitutes by far the
most sophisticated and detailed analysis of the artist to date.
6.
On rhetoric and referentiality, see Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics, V. 3, 氮.
3 (秋天 1973), PP. 27–33. See also Toril Moi’s recent reading of this essay and of the debates it
sparked in Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell (芝加哥:
芝加哥大学出版社, 2017), PP. 129–49.
7.
8.
See Chiong on the category of sculpture in Chiong 2013, PP. 221–59.
“Art Without Space (1970),” in HBS, p. 32.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
109
Howe’s poems from their articulation on the page). Poetry as “work on the signifier”
is not where language’s “empirical reality” is situated in Weiner’s work.9
The topic of translation is crucial here. For Weiner, “the definition [of poet-
里] could almost be something that is not translatable . . . . And my work is designed
initially to be translated, either into physical form or other languages.”10 The
belief that poetry is inherently untranslatable—a tendency exemplified by
Mallarmé—extends logically from its definition as a specific set of relations staged
between the material constituents of language (声音, syllabic count, 仪表, 线
length, ETC。, and eventually the physical appearance of the word or letter and its
spatial arrangement on the page) and the meaningful associations or significa-
tions the words generate. At its limits, the thesis of poetic untranslatability holds
that to extract a poem’s semantic content or meaning from its linguistic con-
cretization and to express it otherwise in translation is to produce an explanation
of the poem, an elaboration of aspects of the poem or an “approximation” or con-
spectus of it, or possibly to create a new poem altogether—whatever it is, it is no
longer the same poem.11 Weiner did not hesitate to translate his works into the
most appropriate language for a given exhibition context. But the question of
translation goes deeper than the transfer of words out of one language into anoth-
是. Weiner’s concept of “translation” also encompassed the capacity of words to
change contexts and mediums, to take on “physical form,” and to impel seemingly
nonlinguistic objects, 情况, 行动, or thoughts.
What relationship to objects (or to objectification) does Weiner’s model of
translation presuppose, and how is this different from that assumed by the mod-
ernist poetic trajectory since Mallarmé? Mallarmé felt there was precious little
overlap between words as he employed them poetically and the objects to which
those words might once have referred. The poetic use of language by Mallarmé set
itself against the linguistic economy of “common speech,” which rested on the pre-
tension to lossless “exchange” between words and things. Against this transactional
model of communication, Mallarmé advanced “transposition”: Poetry would offer
“the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its vibratory near-disappearance
according to the play of language.”12 Deploying words as “abolished baubles of
sonorous inanity,” Mallarmé pursued not only the suspension of linguistic referen-
tiality but a cosmic perspective in which the revelation of the emptiness and
chance inherent in language would demonstrate “the intimate correlation of
Poetry with the Universe.”13 Mallarmé’s conviction, 然后, was that the poetic
9.
10.
“A Conversation with William Furlong… (1980),” in HBS, p. 108.
“Interview with Dieter Schwartz (1989),” in HBS, p. 196.
11.
in The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness (杜克大学出版社, 2014), PP. 377–400.
On translatability and untranslatability, see Barbara Johnson, “The Task of the Translator,”
12.
大学出版社, 2007), p. 210.
Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations, 反式. Barbara Johnson (剑桥, 嘛: 哈佛
13.
Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 卷. 我, 编辑. Bertrand Marchal (巴黎: 伽利玛, 2003), p. 37;
Mallarmé, Correspondance complète, 1862–1871; suivi de Lettres sur la poésie, 1872–1898: avec lettres inédites,
编辑. Bertrand Marchal (巴黎: 伽利玛, 1995), p. 366.
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110
OCTOBER
search for a kind of essential language—language as such, stripped of its instru-
mental usage, referential function, and even its capacity to be linked to a particu-
lar speaker or recipient—would necessarily entail a negative relation to the empiri-
cal world. “Destruction was my Béatrice,” Mallarmé wrote, and a whole tradition
followed that posited the negation of objecthood as the truth of language.14
This modernist myth found its “scientific” counterpart in the contemporane-
ous linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.15 In Saussure’s attempt to seize the
essence of language qua language, he began by bracketing secondary considera-
系统蒸发散 (in a manner similar to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology). 第一的, Saussure
set aside the question of the “referent,” that is to say, the capacity of language to
name particular physical objects in the world, discarding it as a residue of a
“nomenclaturism” that conceived of linguistic signs as a set of labels (varying in
different tongues) for discrete things. 反而, he advanced a conception of the
sign as an entity split between a material signifier (the sound of a word or its
graphic inscription, 例如) and a conceptual signified (the idea or meaning
cognitively called forth by the signifier). Meaning in language functioned not by
matching up certain positive entities called words with other positive entities
called things; 反而, language was a structure for differentiating signs negatively
from other signs. The material signifier and the conceptual signified mutually
delimited one another: Their unity in the sign forged meaning from, on the one
手, the exterior world of otherwise meaningless marks and sounds and, 在
其他, the interior world of fleeting sensory and cognitive activity. 第二,
Saussure bracketed from the considerations of linguistic science any particular
individual’s speech—the diversity of everyday utterances made by users in a partic-
ular “language state.” The empirical study of specific uses of language would lead
the linguist down the wrong path, for the “social crystallization of language” that
Saussure sought to analyze existed only at the abstract level of the collectivity.16
Thus Saussure justified the exclusion of individual speech on the grounds that it
was “accessory and more or less accidental.”17
What I have called in shorthand the Mallarméan tradition in modernist aes-
thetics and the Saussurean field of semiology thus both took a negative stance
toward a) the exchangeability of language and objecthood and b) the world of
14.
同上。, PP. 348–49.
15.
Benjamin Buchloh is the first, to my knowledge, to link Weiner’s work to Saussure. 他写,
“Weiner defined an aesthetic proposition as a set of relations or differences, comparable to the way a
linguistic proposition had been defined as a set of variable functions and differences, since the first
decade of the twentieth century when Ferdinand de Saussure made his famous observation that ‘in lan-
guage there are only differences…’” Buchloh, “The Posters of Lawrence Weiner,” in Neo-Avantgarde and
Culture Industry (剑桥, 嘛: 麻省理工学院出版社, 2000), p. 559. I discuss the relationship of Mallarmé
and Saussurean linguistics in Trevor Stark, Total Expansion of the Letter; Avant-Garde Art and Language
After Mallarmé (剑桥, 嘛: 麻省理工学院出版社, 2020), PP. 61–62.
16.
反式. Wade Baskin (纽约: Philosophical Library, 1959), p. 13.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 编辑. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye;
17.
同上。, PP. 13–14.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
111
empirical usages of language or “common speech.” It is clear, 然而, 那
Weiner’s use of language is distinct from these traditions on precisely these points:
the relation to objects and the priority of everyday language. What is crucial to rec-
ognize is that Weiner’s fundamental interest was not the nature of the linguistic
sign as such but how language may be used—never once and for all, always contin-
gently—to construct relationships between humans and objects. One of his fre-
quently reiterated statements of principles reads: “Art is and must be an empirical
reality concerned with the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to
objects in relation to human beings.”18
The task Weiner set for his art was decidedly not to determine the nature of
language in itself, theoretically severed from the infinite particularity of its social
uses and from its capacity to stand for objects and materials. 反而, he asked,
“What does language refer to? It refers to material. It doesn’t stand by itself.
Therefore you can’t get away from a materialist viewpoint.”19 Yet language’s rela-
tionship to material, as envisioned by Weiner, is not predetermined or fixed but
fragmentary and open-ended. As he proposed, in language “there is always an
incomplete relationship to objects.”20 With this, Mallarmé and Saussure might
agree: It’s the arbitrariness of the sign, its “incomplete” relationship to the ideas
and objects it refers to, that allows for linguistic change in history, as well as for
interpretive multiplicity. (毕竟, Mallarmé noted, “words have several meanings,
otherwise we would always understand one another.”21) The difference with
Weiner is that this recognition of language’s “imperfection” (as Mallarmé would
call it) led him to emphasize not the chasm between the word and the world but
the way language is always in relation, pointing outside itself (to objects and peo-
普莱), waiting to be converted into meaning, 行动, 材料, or more words.
Elsewhere, Weiner formulated these minimal conditions for his work: “Content
plus use are sufficient.”22
The category of use was crucial to Weiner’s conception of language, which he
considered “an applied part of the way people learn to deal with their world.”23 In
这, he fell closer to the tradition of “ordinary language” philosophy originating
in the late work of Ludwig Wittgenstein than to Saussurean semiology. 韦纳
himself established the link between his work and that of Wittgenstein: In one of
the rare occasions of citation in Weiner’s work, in his film Plowman’s Lunch (1982),
18.
“Section 2 (1982),” in HBS, p. 135.
19.
in HBS, p. 67.
“Red as well as Green as well as Yellow as well as Blue: Interview by Irmelin Lebeer (1973),”
20.
21.
“Gordon Matta-Clark (1985),” in HBS, p. 156.
Mallarmé, 作品, 卷. 1, p. 508.
Cited in Ann Goldstein, “If It Looks like a Duck and It Walks Like a Duck, It Is Probably a
22.
Duck,” in Lawrence Weiner: AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, 编辑. Donna De Salvo and Ann Goldstein (新的
避风港: 耶鲁大学出版社, 2007), p. 134.
23.
“Early Work: Interview with Lynn Gumpert (1982),” in HBS, p. 128.
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112
OCTOBER
one actor states, “An idea only has meaning in the stream of life.” As Kathryn
Chiong discovered, Weiner included a version of this quotation with attribution in
a notebook from 1975: “An expression has meaning only in the stream of life
(Ludwig Wittgenstein).”24 Chiong formulated the decisive point of contact
between Weiner’s and Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language in this way:
“Language is . . . not analyzed in its abstraction, as an idealized system of relations
between words and objects. Rather it is observed as a tool for use…”25 In brief,
Weiner and Wittgenstein both held that for a linguistic statement to possess mean-
ing at all depends upon a context of use, what Wittgenstein called, in aquatic lan-
guage that appealed to Weiner, the “stream of life.”
I’ll turn now to certain coordinates of this territory shared by Weiner and
维特根斯坦, most notably their refusal to pin down the nature of language in
本身; their emphasis on use in language (and on the unforeseeable and potentially
infinite diversity of uses to which language may be put); and their conviction that
language is inseparable from the “stream” of everyday life. 最后, I’ll indicate cer-
tain significant differences.
Early in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein addresses a potential crit-
ic who berates him for avoiding the question of the “essence” of language. 他
agrees, and writes, “Instead of producing something common to all that we call
语言, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which
makes us use the same word for all—but that they are related to one another in
many different ways.”26 As opposed to engaging in a philosophical search for the
“essence” of language (let alone the essence of the “object” or of “being”),
Wittgenstein seeks to “bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday
use.”27 Words simply mean what they allow us to do with them, and the kinds of
uses to which humans put language are innumerable: “This multiplicity is not
something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-
游戏, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get
forgotten.”28 This concrete multiplicity of language is obscured “because the cloth-
Chiong 2013, p. 152. The phrase is obscure and is not used in Wittgenstein’s major works
24.
available prior to 1975. Weiner likely found it in Norman Malcolm’s 1958 memoir about Wittgenstein.
那里, Malcolm recalls a remark by Wittgenstein in a conversation in 1949: “‘Ein Ausdruck hat nur im
Strome des Lebens Bedeutung’ [An expression has meaning only in the stream of life].” Norman Malcolm,
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (牛津: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 75. A variant of this phrase
was also published in English in 1967 in a collection of aphorisms: “Only in the stream of thought and
life do words have meaning.” Wittgenstein, Zettel, 编辑. G. 乙. 中号. Anscombe and G. H. Wright and trans.
G. 乙. 中号. Anscombe (伯克利: University of California Press, 1967), p. 31e. On the “stream of life” in
维特根斯坦, see David Kishik, Wittgenstein’s Form of Life (To Imagine a Life, 我) (伦敦: Continuum,
2008), p. 54–60, 133–134.
25.
p. 335.
Chiong, “Sympathy for Lawrence Weiner (One Plus One),” in AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE,
26.
布莱克威尔, 1986), p. 31.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 反式. G. 乙. 中号. Anscombe (牛津: Basil
27.
同上。, p. 48.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
113
ing of our language makes everything alike.”29 Thus follow, for Wittgenstein, 这
many significant errors of traditional philosophy, which in its search for an abstract
and general definition of language sets aside its different uses in specific cases.
In her recent account of ordinary-language philosophy, Toril Moi writes, “Use is
not a ground. Use is a practice grounded on nothing. Use is simply what we do.”
“Wittgenstein’s radical point,” she continues, is that “there is no meaning ‘behind’
the use (for if there were, what kind of thing would it be? A mental [psychological]
实体? A real thing in the real world? . . . ), there is only meaning in use.”30 In
accounting for Weiner’s work, 也, it seems mistaken to ask about the “meaning”
either of a particular set of words or of language as such; it would be mistaken as well
to seek to root that meaning in the physicality of words (the “materiality of the signifi-
er”), in the conceptual content of the signified (“a psychological entity”), or in the
objecthood of the referent (“a real thing in the real world”).
相当, following Moi, one should ask after what uses his words can be put
in a variety of different circumstances. 的确, Weiner posited in one of his
works that a word is “SIMPLY A NAME FOR USE AT THE MOMENT.”31 His
words may be used to establish relationships of different sorts to physical objects
in the world at different degrees of specificity or generality: CONCRETE POURED
UNTIL IT SETS ITSELF ABOVE THE GROUND (1988) is quite clear in the materi-
als referred to, although presumably a concrete-filled ditch of either five square
centimeters or of five square meters would fit the bill; 反过来, BITS PUT
TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE (1994) is almost infinite-
ly variable. Other works, such as DONE WITHOUT (1971), suggest the paradoxi-
cal use of severing a particular action from an object. Weiner’s choice of medi-
um also importantly allowed for the specifically linguistic fact of iteration: 他的
works may be read aloud, written anew, spray-painted, sung, 建成, ETC. (尽管
he did maintain that if the words themselves were changed in any way, 他们
would cease to be a “Lawrence Weiner”32).
同样地, Weiner’s emphasis on the everyday can’t be reconciled with either the
Mallarméan negation of instrumental communication or the Saussurean indifference
to the individual uses of language. His work’s materialism lies in language’s capacity
to bind itself to the world in an unforeseeable multiplicity of ways. This is what moti-
vated Weiner’s move beyond the circumscribed space of the canvas:
The picture-frame convention was a very real thing. The painting
stopped at that edge. When you are dealing with language, there is no
28.
29.
30.
31.
同上。, p. 11.
同上。, p. 224.
Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary, p. 29.
Cited in Chiong 2013, p. 119.
32.
If the words of one of his works were altered by its “owner,” Weiner argued, it would be a
breach of a certain kind of “social contract.” “From an Interview with Maria Eichhorn (1998),” in HBS,
p. 371.
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114
OCTOBER
edge that the picture drops over or drops off. You are dealing with
something completely infinite. 语言, because it is the most non-
objective thing we have ever developed in this world, never stops.33
换句话说, it is language’s “nonobjective” character—its irreducibility
to either its material substrate or to the particular objects that it might name—
that renders it capable of remaining open to the infinite possibilities of human
relationships to objects. His words, as he put it, are simply “PARADIGMS SUIT-
ABLE FOR DAILY USE” and presuppose no definitive objectification.34 They do
not exist in the abstract sphere of the concept but in the ordinary world of any
person who might put them into practice. “I would like to go on record,” he con-
firmed, “and say that the reason I’m making these things is for people to use.”35
韦纳, like Moi and Wittgenstein, affirmed the thesis that the meaning of a
linguistic statement simply is its use. But the question remains: How might one use a
work by Weiner? The question has no general answer but must be explained through
particular examples. In this, 也, we are following Wittgenstein’s move from “con-
cepts to examples,” his focus on how, in Moi’s words, “examples neither represent
nor hide essences; they teach (展示, instruct) us how to use words.”36 If we are to
“LEARN TO READ ART,” to cite a rare injunction by Weiner, this will amount to
learning how to use words in the context of his artwork.
拿, 例如, the words in 2 BLOCKS OF SALT [IN THE MORNING
MIST] (1991). To enumerate different ways of understanding them is to enumer-
ate different ways in which they can be used:
A) As a linguistic statement: The work is an incomplete sentence or phrase
describing a relationship between four nouns (blocks, salt, 早晨, mist). 这是
composed of two parts, with the second enclosed in square brackets. The words
as presented at the Holstebro Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2021 were in
English and Danish. Restricting oneself to their character as signifiers, the words
and brackets may be used in any number of ways, including but not limited to:
A1) being spoken
A2) being written by hand
A3) being typed
A4) being sung
A5) being printed as a poster
A6) being printed as a book
A7) being printed on a wall
33.
“Art Without Space (1969),” in HBS, p. 33.
34.
in Chiong 2013, PP. 125–62.
These words were printed on a poster in 1986 and make up the title of a chapter on drawing
35.
36.
Cited in ibid., p. 116.
Moi, p. 77.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
115
A8) being translated into another language
A9) being written in an essay
A10) ETC.
Each of these forms, according to Weiner’s principles, is “equal and consistent
with the intention of the artist.” Thus, as per A9, sufficient conditions are in place
为了 2 BLOCKS OF SALT [IN THE MORNING MIST] to exist fully as an artwork just as
it is typed out within these pages of October.
乙) As a statement of fact: Weiner specified that the title of his book Statements
referred to a bank statement rather than a linguistic statement.37 That is, the words
serve as a factual record of a particular material or set of materials’ having been
there—somewhere, at some point in time. In this instance, we’re informed that two
blocks of salt once sat in particular atmospheric conditions (mist) at a particular time
of day (早晨): We know not whether they were in use (by a cook on a grill or by
deer as a salt lick), being mined, produced by compression, stored, or on view in a
gallery. Though the phrase is verbless, Weiner’s general preference for the past tense
is significant, for the work describes an unstable arrangement of two objects in condi-
tions that would likely cause them to change state: The salt blocks would absorb mois-
ture and possibly melt in the mist until they were no longer blocks at all. At that
观点, the work would persist only as language.
C) As a signified: As I read the work, I call forth a mental image of two blocks of
salt sitting in a misty environment or simply consider the meaning implied by the
字. The objects exist virtually in the mind as a set of associations with almost
infinite variations depending on the reader.
D) As an object to be fabricated: 2 BLOCKS OF SALT [IN THE MORNING MIST]
might function as a recipe, a list of components for production. Though Weiner
resists the notion that his works provide “instructions”—for he does not wish to
impose on viewers—there is nothing in the words themselves to dissuade a reader
from taking them as a suggestion. 在这种情况下, one would need two objects, a par-
ticular time of day, and particular weather. This might constitute a sculpture.
然而, the two salt blocks would cease to be the particular sculpture described
by the work every day at noon, whatever the weather, and begin to be that sculp-
ture again at midnight, but only if it is misty. One might alternatively interpret
“morning mist” as a single term restricted to naturally occurring morning weather
conditions or as two conjoined terms indicating any mist before noon. If the for-
梅尔, the words could not be acted upon outside very specific climate conditions
and times of year. If the latter, one might generate mist indoors with a humidifier
or fog machine.
37.
“Interview by Phyllis Rosenzweig (1990),” in HBS, p. 237.
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116
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乙) As ostension: Were one to pronounce the words and point to two salt blocks in
the morning mist or even to affix the phrase next to the objects as a label, 他们
could function linguistically by “ostension,” i.e., demonstrating or defining by giv-
ing examples. The words would indicate a particular instance of the things or
characteristics to which they refer: Depending on the emphasis of speech, 一个
accompanying gesture, or context, “Two blocks of salt in the morning mist” might
意思是, “This is salt,” “these are blocks,” “this is mist,” “there are two,” “it is morn-
英,” or any further combination. The words in conjunction with the objects might
be used to help a child add to their vocabulary or learn how to count.38
F) As words to be looked at: The phrase is given a particular realization in visual
形式, with its “meaning” bracketed. At the Holstebro Kunstmuseum, the English
text is red and Danish text blue, and both overlap slightly. The sites of overlap are
unpainted, showing the white of the wall. The text for “2 BLOCKS OF SALT” has
no outline, while the text for “[IN THE MORNING MIST]” is outlined in black.
The colored paint is matte (Blue: PANTONE 2995 U; Red: PANTONE 032 U),
while the black paint outlining the text is glossy (PANTONE PROCESS BLACK C).
The work is 234 centimeters tall and 542 centimeters long. The words have a
graphic impact quite apart from their semantic content and might trigger visual
associations with, 例如, the history of Constructivist typography.
G) As an art object: The words are a particular kind of artwork authored by
Lawrence Weiner in 1991, comprising “Language + the materials referred to.” It
may take different physical forms, including but not restricted to the conditions
described above in F): 例如, 在 1991 at the Galleri Susanne Ottesen it was
shown only in English in differently colored paint, in a different font, and with a
horizontal line separating “2 BLOCKS OF SALT” from “[IN THE MORNING
MIST].” In 2014, as part of a show with Per Kirkeby at Galleri Susanne Ottesen, 它
appeared again in a different font, but this time next to the Danish translation.
While Weiner chose how the words looked when invited to exhibit the work, 一个
owner can always install the work how and where they wish (Weiner provided sug-
gestions only if they were requested).
If we think through further examples, the kinds of uses suggested by
Weiner’s works expand dramatically. Some works imply the playing of a game:
PAPER + STONE OR FIRE + WATER (WHEN IN DOUBT) PLAY TIC TAC TOE &
HOPE FOR THE BEST (1996), installed in Ballerup, 丹麦 (Weiner comment-
ed on this gnomic work, “Every single child knows what it means”).39 Others are
almost infinitely general and encompass rhetorical, constructive, or cognitive uses,
such as ANYTHING ADDED TO SOMETHING (2009): As I write this essay, 添加
38.
It is not possible to delve into the topic of early-childhood language acquisition here, 但
Weiner has on numerous occasions signalled the importance to him of Jean Piaget’s work. 看
Buchloh, “In Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” p. 30. See also Wittgenstein on the “ostensive teach-
ing of words” and “ostensive definitions” in Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, PP. 4–6, 13–19.
39.
“Interview by Marjorie Welsh (1996),” in HBS, p. 352.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
117
words to a document, I may be performing or enacting this particular work by
韦纳 (I am intending to do so at this moment, but when I added water to my
coffee maker this morning, I had no intentional relationship to Weiner’s work).
Others are exceedingly specific in their designations while specifying no determi-
nate content for use: PUT ASIDE OR PUT AWAY / REACHING FOR THE MOON
(2002), 例如. What is to be put aside or away while reaching for the moon?
Or should one put aside/away the act of reaching for the moon itself? In an exam-
ple analyzed by Chiong, Weiner insisted that TRIED AND TRUE (1970), his submis-
sion to Kynaston McShine’s Information exhibition at MoMA, could be built;
虽然, he confessed, “I can offer no suggestions as to how this is accom-
plished.”40 His works sustain conviction in use value, but the particular relation-
ship entailed to the world of objects may flummox even the artist.
Here we run against the limits of a model of use drawn from ordinary-lan-
guage philosophy. For Stanley Cavell, the negative insight of Wittgenstein’s writing
on language (though Cavell does not use the term “negative”) is that “it makes no
sense at all to give a general explanation of the generality of language.”41 Yet,
Cavell argues, language use is “pervasively, almost unimaginably, systematic,”
defined by “grammatical” constraints and shared “criteria” for use that precede the
capacity to make words function, into which a speaker must be initiated.42 (在这个,
Cavell and Wittgenstein might agree with Saussure’s emphasis on the stability of
rules in a given language state, which make it like the rules of a game of chess;
although “in order to make the game of chess seem at every point like the func-
tioning of language, we would have to imagine an unconscious or unintelligent
player,” Saussure specifies.)43 For Cavell, “You cannot use words to do what we do
with them until you are an initiate of the forms of life which give those words the
point and shape they have in our lives.”44
Wittgenstein gives an example that is apparently quite germane to our dis-
cussion of Weiner’s 2 BLOCKS OF SALT [IN THE MORNING MIST]: If one hears
the words “five slabs,” Wittgenstein writes, one must be “initiated” into a particular
context of use to know whether the two words constitute a “report” (a “statement”
in Weiner’s sense) or an “order,“ 那是, whether they merely describe an existing
state of affairs or consist of instructions that must be acted upon.45 What helps the
person hearing these words to decide what to do is “the part which uttering these
words plays in the language game.”46 This is what Wittgenstein calls, in the
Philosophical Investigations, a “form of life,” a phrase he seems to have decided on in
40.
See Chiong 2013, p. 70.
41.
牛津大学出版社, 1979), p. 188.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: 维特根斯坦, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (牛津:
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
同上。, p. 29.
Saussure, p. 89.
Cavell, Claim of Reason, p. 184.
维特根斯坦, Philosophical Investigations, p. 10.
同上.
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118
OCTOBER
preference to “stream of life”: It is the context that provides criteria for determin-
ing what kind of “language game” one is playing, and thus how to use the words.47
The number of possible “language games” is infinite, but each exerts exacting con-
straints upon the way words can be used in a particular “form of life.” This can be
glimpsed by the list of “language games” that Wittgenstein provides, which we
might imagine applying to Weiner’s works:
Giving orders, and obeying them— Describing the appearance of an
目的, or giving its measurements— Constructing an object from a
description (a drawing)— Reporting an event— Speculating about an
event— . . . Forming and testing a hypothesis— Presenting the results of
an experiment in tables and diagrams— Making up a story; and read-
ing it— Play-acting— Singing catches— Guessing riddles— Making a
joke; telling it— Solving a problem in practical arithmetic—
Translating from one language into another— Asking, thanking, curs-
英, greeting, praying.48
Where Weiner’s “stream of life” branches off from Wittgenstein’s is precisely
in the lack of social criteria to decide in advance what kind of “language game” is
entailed by 2 BLOCKS OF SALT [IN THE MORNING MIST] as opposed to “five
slabs.” In the context of a mine, 例如, a person unable to tell whether “five
slabs” is ordering or reporting would not last long on the job. A work by Weiner,
另一方面, strips away the criteria that would delineate correct usage from
misunderstanding or misuse. More radically, Weiner’s artwork requires ambiguity in
the determination of criteria for possible use.
Weiner’s phrases solicit an aesthetic use that cannot simply be enumerated
alongside other uses (as I vainly attempted above) but that inflects and ultimately
defeats every attempt to use his words as one might do others while immersed in
the “stream of life.” For, as Weiner himself asked, “What use [做] society or cul-
ture make . . . of its art?. . . . It uses the objects of the real world to discuss the place
of human beings in the real world.”49 This use of words—to discuss the place of
humans in the world—is a very particular case in human language, in that it ques-
tions and even undermines its own everyday use.50 Thus Weiner is right to caution
47.
that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” Ibid., p. 11.
Wittgenstein writes, “The term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact
48.
49.
同上.
Cited in Goldstein in AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, p. 103.
50.
Though the topic far exceeds the scope of this essay, Wittgenstein or Cavell might critically
describe this as a pretension comparable to that found in philosophical uses of language: to speak “out-
side language games,” and “in investigating ourselves” to “consider expressions apart from, 并在
opposition to, the natural forms of life which give those expressions the force they have,” as Cavell puts
它. 他继续, “What is left out of an expression if it is used ‘outside its ordinary language game’ is
not necessarily what the words mean (they may mean what they always did, what a good dictionary says
they mean), but what we mean in using them when and where we do. The point of saying them is lost.”
Cavell, Claim of Reason, p. 207.
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Lawrence Weiner’s Materialism
119
that “basing so-called art on Wittgenstein would be a rather big mistake . . . anti-
thetical to what Wittgenstein was trying to do.”51
Like Wittgenstein’s philosophy, Weiner’s words bring the work of art down
from the metaphysical to the everyday: They translate art’s questioning of the human
relationship to the world into ordinary language, the medium of everyday human
transaction with the world. 然而, even in so doing, his works are not implacably
carried along by the “stream of life,” the objective current of socially determined cri-
teria for language use; 相当, his works might operate within language like A NATU-
RAL WATER COURSE DIVERTED REDUCED OR DISPLACED (1969). They are “struc-
tures out in the world for other people to figure out how to get around.”52
After a talk by Weiner at the PowerPlant Gallery in Toronto in 2009, I recall
an audience member asking why his public art had such a negligible physical
effect on the viewer, as opposed to other interventions of the Minimalist and Post-
Minimalist generations (perhaps the questioner had Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in
头脑). They cited Weiner’s work IN DIRECT LINE WITH ANOTHER & THE NEXT
(2000), imprinted on manholes in New York City, as a sort of site-specific art so
unassertive as to escape notice completely. Weiner responded, “Listen, I don’t
want to fuck up your day,” and after a beat added, “I want to fuck up your life.”
Weiner’s joke balanced the modesty of his devotion to the ordinary with his desire
to “revolutionize society”:53 He did not want to act upon viewers by impeding their
movement through space (as in what he derides as “heavy-metal macho sculp-
ture”54) or by deploying language to give instructions or commands (which he sees
as a form of “aesthetic fascism”55) and thus fuck up their day. 相当, as he put it
别处, “I made art because I was unsatisfied with the configuration that I saw
before me. . . . The reason I make art is to try and present another configuration to
fuck up the one I’m living in now.”56 Rather than place particular objects in the
viewer’s way, Weiner deployed words, one of the primary tools with which humans
relate to objects (as well as communicate, conceive of themselves, 思考, order one
another around, describe the world, imagine others, play games, impose rules,
renegotiate them, ETC。), but freed them from the imposition of any particular
“grammar” that could be determined in advance.
These conditions of “erratic” use and of potentially universal accessibility
define the social reality of language as Weiner saw it.57 Rather than expose the
reification of language and art under capitalism (作为, 说, Marcel Broodthaers did),
Weiner held fast to a definition of language as a kind of object that can never be
51.
“Lawrence Weiner at Amsterdam: Interview by Willoughby Sharp (1971),” in HBS, p. 50.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
Buchloh, “In Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” p. 13.
同上.
Discussed in Chiong 2013, p. 85; “Early Work (1982),” in HBS, p. 122.
Cited in Chiong 2013, p. 86.
“Interview by Marjorie Welsh (1996),” in HBS, p. 352.
“Lawrence Weiner at Amsterdam,” in HBS, p. 49.
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120
OCTOBER
completely owned. This is made most evident in Weiner’s practice of designating a
percentage of his works “public freehold” (“approximately half,” he noted in
1982),58 meaning they are not available for sale and are kept in the public domain
to be reproduced and used however anyone wishes. Yet he insisted that even the
works that were put up for sale and bought on the art market remain available for
使用: The “owner” of a work merely assumes “responsibility” for it, in a manner
comparable, according to Weiner, to “signing your name at the bottom of a peti-
tion.”59 The works that are owned privately are still reproduced and published,
and Weiner reserved the right to continue to exhibit them as he saw fit; 更远,
he allowed that “anybody that really is excited can make a reproduction. So in fact
the art is all public freehold.”60 He emphasized that he was not concerned by any
changes anyone might make to the visual appearance of the language or to the
particular character of its use (“they can tattoo it on their ass if they want”).61 这
one thing that cannot be done with a particular arrangement of words, even if one
purchases them, is to lock them up in a bank vault or free port.62
Weiner’s politics as a “hardcore American socialist”63 were in this way bound
up with his decision to use language as his medium: “I prefer language—it’s a
political question, not an aesthetic question.”64 If capitalism has produced a histor-
ical world of apparently thing-like objectivity, in which “the definite social relation
between men themselves . . . assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a rela-
tion between things,” Weiner’s words modestly and unobtrusively remind us of a
class of “thing” that can never wholly become private property, whose capacity is to
stage relationships between humans and objects in a manner that is impossible to
determine in advance.65 This social reality of language is the ground of Weiner’s
“dialectical materialism,”66 the foundation of an art practice conceived as “a
methodology to deal with the relationship of human beings to material as well as
the methodology of a dialectic accessible to all.”67
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58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
“Early Work,” in HBS, p. 127.
“Interview by Michel Claura (1971),” in HBS, p. 42.
“From an Interview by Patricia Norvell (1969),” in HBS, p. 27.
“From an Interview by Maria Eichhorn (1993),” in HBS, p. 371.
“A Conversation with Robert C. 摩根 (1983),” in HBS, p. 102.
63.
Guerra (1996),” in HBS, p. 336.
“The Only Thing That Knows Its Own Essence Is the Thing Itself: Interview by Charles
64.
“I Don’t Converse with Heaven: Interview by Jean-Marc Poinsot (1989),” in HBS, p. 182.
65.
约克: 企鹅图书, 1976), p. 165.
Karl Marx, 首都: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, 反式. Ben Fowkes (新的
66.
67.
Buchloh, “In Conversation with Lawrence Weiner,” p. 14.
“Notes for a Talk Introducing a Screening of ‘A First Quarter’ (1974),” in HBS, p. 73.
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