Galerie Hubert Winter

IMPEDED TIME
Suzy M. Halajian & Marlies Wirth — Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna. 2012

In working through the relationship of art and life in response to Lawrence Weiner's practice, his own reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein allows us to make the correlation manifest: „Ein Ausdruck hat nur im Strome des Lebens Bedeutung“ (words have meaning only in the stream of life). The impossibility of separating art and life is inscribed in the work of Weiner. We may encounter his sculptures unexpectedly, outside of museums and galleries, in the places we pass through and enter, where art and life intertwine. With his statements, always challenging yet never authorial, Weiner continues to propose questions for us to interpret through our own experience and perception of work, culture, and the world at large. He offers us options but never just opinions. Meaning remains fluid. Staying neither stays static nor one-dimensional, meaning reveals new ways to perceive and confront material reality and the current social and political landscape at any given time.

Weiner lives his art and simultaneously allows the viewer to bring his work to life. The language is the material; reality is the material. As such, the works lend themselves to an ambiguity that rejects determinativeness and allows a subjective approach to their meanings and the materials referred to, as well as the spaces they are found in. Through the temporality of language – in its perpetual shifts and manifestations – time, too, is recontextualized. Time allows multiple points of access and different lenses for those who are looking and experiencing. Time unfolds and reinvents Weiner's language, and through its poetic currency makes us aware of the transitional aspect of his concept, and that of life itself.

IMPEDED TIME is not only the title of Weiner's exhibition but concurrently the first work encountered upon entry in the gallery space. It urges us to deliberately slow down in real time and experientially let in the essence of matter and the essence of language that Weiner lays out in space. Time seems to be the essential ingredient in the artist’s multidimensional construction, a means to implore the value of things and their symbolic significance.

Three sculptures, BLACK OIL/WHITE SAND, WHITE SUGAR/WHITE SALT, BROWN LOAM/RED CLAY denote different materials that are potentially being mixed with each other. The act is still in progress – the outcome is yet undetermined, it is PENDING RESOLVE. The exact denomination of materials – in dual languages English and German – translates the texts to images, associations, and their resultant significations. They represent materials of different consistencies, be it natural matter or industrially refined products; these are ubiquitous substances of prime matter, building material, or materials employed in contemporary art production. As such, they point to commodities bound to specific values that are connected to larger economic considerations resulting in undeniable inequities present in culture.

Cat. #1067 (2012)

Both language and the materials referred to are carriers of meaning. The denotation of materials activates a process of effective value assignment, their specific values defined by their relations to each other. Accordingly, the materials referred to raise overarching concerns over the symbolic and actual values placed upon the base, tradable materials in society. Such significations conjure contexts and meaning related to privilege and access, abundance and poverty, and precariousness that eventually all lead to one conclusion: they are similarly in need of resolve. The viewer is left imagining an outcome that is intertwined with the economic structures of contemporary culture. Although PENDING RESOLVE – seemingly open-ended – the particular values assigned will shift, or even dissolve entirely, when the individual elements are indeed mixed together. Time that is impeded upon entry and without an ultimate outcome remains unsettled and unsettling.

The final work of the exhibition poignantly reveals the temporality of language, matter and the Sein. It offers poetry in the ephemerality of existence, and solace in this thought: GENTLY CRUSHED STONES TIME & AGAIN UNTIL STONE AS SAND & SWEPT AWAY ALL IN DUE COURSE. It is only a matter of time. Time alone manifests resolve, the essence and value remain at the end.