lawrence weiner show

wow... i've been thinking about this post for quite some time now, hence the delay. it's about the lawrence weiner show at the whitney museum, here in nyc.

in fact, i TRIED to go last weekend, but ended up just getting drunk on a saturday afternoon.

and after seeing the show today, i regretted that decision.

i've been a fan of mr. weiners for a number of years now, and was so excited to learn of the show at the whitney, which, if i'm not mistaken, is his first major american retrospective, EVER.

in any case, this posting has a weird place in the admittedly brief history of this blog. as in, how does it fit in? how does, what basically amounts to a sort of art criticism fit into a geeky type blog?

well, it just does, ok?

but seriously, as i said earlier, i've been a fan for years now, but for the life of me, i seriously don't get this art work.

i love it because of his design approach, how he puts certain words on angles, his color and typeface selections, his sense of spacing... all very graphic design-ey types of things for a fine artist.

but again, in all seriousness, i do not get his work. i wish for the life of me that i did. but i don't.

so that's why the works of lawrence weiner fit on this type geek blog so well. because i'm not approaching it from an art criticism sort of base, i'm just looking at it from a graphic, type geek sensability.

but even beyond that, i don't know, i feel like this work speaks to me. it's on a primal level or something. perhaps it's my time in the publishing industry, that better part of a decade spent working with words and images in such close quarters. i feel like this work is the distillation of a lot of lesser artists and speakers and poets, etc. i feel like it's filtering out a lot of crap, and just giving you the good.

there was a show many years ago, i think it was on comedy central, many, many years ago now. but they basically took some lame 2 hour movie, cut out all the crap, amd made it like 25 minutes long. it's a genius idea. one that's ripe for another visit i think actually.

but that's what lawrence weiners work reminds me of.

i'll fess up though, i read the pamphlet that accompanied the show, and i even bought the catalog. so after a brief skim of each, while i still can't say that i get mr. weiners works, i do have a better understanding, even greater than the graphic sort of agreement.

one cool point that i think i picked up was that the works that i sweat so hard, are merely vehicles to deliver a message. the work is actually the idea, or so to paraphrase the shows pamphlet.

cool, right?

most of the photos in this posting are from the catalog that i bought from the whitney. so if the publisher of the book, or some other chump has a beef, let me know, and i'll take them down.

the other photos are of things that i own.

and i do apologize for the quality of the photos.
though it seems like i say that a lot.

anyway, enjoy!

>n

ps, now if i can only find a mark lombardi retrospective close by, i'll be set!