The belief at the core of Lawrence Weiner’s work is that art is a material reality between human beings and objects and between sets of objects in relation to human beings. Weiner considers language to be a sculptural material and believes that a construction in language can function as sculpture as adequately as a fabricated object.
PR, Lisson Gallery, 2005
The protagonist of the exhibition is the series Radical Writings (from the early 1980s to the 1990s) with which Irma Blank makes her sign even more abstract with respect to the previous cycles, clarifying its relationship with time. The long writing-like signs of color (first rose-violet, then blue), applied with a brush on canvas, are linear and uniform. She literally paints “in one breath,” with absolute concentration, without hesitation. Writing is breathing, painting is breathing, working is living. Every trace matches the length of one breath, from left to right, start to finish, emptiness to fullness. A sign in total tension. At the start of the sign the color is more emphatic, fading as the sign gradually extends, generating a shadow zone at the center of the painting that reminds us of the space of a book. Here writing and painting blend in the continuity of a sign-time.
p420.it
“the sign may have other functions in addition to the communicative function” Mukarovsky
“to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder …” Sarah Ahmed
via Craig Dworkin, Radium of the Word
