ARTS & CULTURE

Lawrence Weiner (born 1942) is an American artist and an integral figure of the Conceptual Art movement of the 1960s. Best known for his text-based work, Weiner creates subversive installations that alter an existing space or environment. Although he sees himself as a sculptor rather than a conceptualist, he is among the trailblazers of the 1960’s to present art as language.  

Weiner's composed texts describe process, structure, and material, and although Weiner ‘s work is almost exclusively language-based, he regards his practice as sculpture, citing the elements described in the texts as his materials. Lawrence Weiner defines his sculptural medium simply as ‘language + the material referred to’.  Accordingly, his first book Statements (1968) contains 24 typewritten descriptions of works, where only a few had actually been made, suggesting that a work’s existence requires a readership rather than a physical presence, and addressing whether the imagined gesture or actual creation of a work have any hierarchal difference in regard to the assessment of art.  

Self-taught as an artist, his urgency to make art broadly available and engaging, stems from his childhood in the South Bronx: “I didn’t have the advantage of a middle-class perspective. Art was something else; art was the notations on the wall, or the messages left by other people. I grew up in a city where I had read the walls; I still read the walls. I love to put work of mine out on the walls and let people read it. Some will remember it and then somebody else comes along and puts something else over it. It becomes archaeology rather than history.” (2013)  

While Weiner's works exist only as language and can be displayed in any form, he is closely involved in the creation, detailing the size of the font, the surface texture and placement of the paint or vinyl letters.  He often invents new fonts.  

Larry Bell (born 1939) is one of the most renowned and influential artists to emerge from the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s.  He is known foremost for his lifeline dedication to glass boxes featuring his refined surface treatment of glass and explorations of light, reflection and shadow.   

Bell's art addresses the relationship between the art object and its environment through the sculptural and reflective properties of his work. He has said: “My work is about the properties of light and the way it interacts with surfaces — it’s about volume and illusion.” His understanding of the potential of glass and light allows him to expand visual and physical fields of perception. He has said: ‘Although we tend to think of glass as a window, it is a solid liquid that has at once three distinctive qualities: it reflects light, it absorbs light, and it transmits light all at the same time.’ Bell’s surfaces work both as mirrors and windows, sometimes simultaneously. His sculptures appear material yet immaterial, hard yet ethereal, transparent yet saturated with a myriad of fleeting hues.  

In 1966, Bell purchased a vacuum coating chamber which allowed him to deposit micron-thin films of different metallic and non-metallic substances onto the surface of glass.  Through thermal evaporation he could create infinite variations in the color, transparency, and reflectivity of the glass.  

His large cubic glass works feature a four paneled structure within a larger version of itself, allowing 2 colours to be fused together through reflection and refraction. The space declared by these sculptures become the work, as the scale of the material begins to overwhelm the spectator. This creates the sense of a partial environment. Then the observer could walk around and into the unit, and at the same time, see through it. The sculptures will animate and be animated by natural light, with the varying conditions at different times of day repeatedly altering the visitors’ experience of the works. 

Graham has been investigating the relationship between architectural environments and those who inhabit them since the late 1960’s.  His very personal and intuitive exploration of architectural space and perception has come to be defined by his pavilions. 

Blurring the line between sculptural art and architecture, Graham’s pavilions comprise steel, mirror and glass structures that create diverse optical effects.  Created as hybrids, they operate as quasi-functional spaces and art installations.  As studies of space and light, they are situated in public spaces, created for the public experience and are activated by the presence of the viewer. 

Viewers are involved in the voyeuristic act of seeing oneself reflected while at the same time watching others.  While giving people a sense of themselves in space, loss of self may also result, as the viewer is momentarily unable to determine the difference between the physical reality and the reflection.  The architecture of the pavilions results in a shift in perceptions. 

Dan Graham was born in Urbana, Illinois in 1942. He lives and works in New York City. 

Quotes by Dan Graham: 

Dan Graham has described his work and its various manifestations as “geometric forms inhabited and activated by the presence of the viewer, (producing) a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion.” 

My pavilions are always a kind of two-way mirror, which is both transparent and reflective simultaneously, and it changes as the sunlight changes.  This relates to the changing landscape, but it also means that people on the inside and on the outside have views of each other superimposed, as each gazes at the other and at the material.  It’s intersubjective. 

My pavilions derive their meaning from the people who look at themselves and others, and who are being looked at themselves.  Without people in them, they might look a bit like minimal art sculptures, but that’s not what they’re meant to be.