Lawrence Weiner: My work is all about sculpture. My sculptures build a flow and almost the construction of any sculpture will build a flow. It will build a flow because there is always a top of another material. This flow is an inherent part of sculpture. It is part of sculptural practice.
Wolf Günter Thiel: Can you make an example from your own practice?
LW: I am doing a project in a little French town called Corbigny. I am on my way there just in 2 weeks and I want to see how the work has settled into this tiny little town. It is an odd thing that they are bringing me into doing that. The whole process has been going on for a while. The people in the town -as it was being put together – realized, that it was a virtual thing. The sculpture was placed at a music school. It has a flow that the children going to this school, having begun to recite the sculpture, as if it was a song. The local press would interview the children and they would say: We are singing the sculpture. They realized that the children do not have a problem with my work. One child answered, when asked how the sculpture is called: „It does not have a name yet, but we use it in school.“ That is how we all grew up. And somehow when we entered into the art world, we realized that people became more aware of the world they live in through art. That I can realize this project shows how much art became a part of our social consciousness, which has been accomplished in the last 30 or 40 years. For me as an artist it means that my work has entered into society what means it founds its own place in the sun.
WGT: Do you think the understanding of the work is depending on the cultural surrounding of the different places you are exposing it?
LW: I am in a very positive mood about that. I think that the basis of understanding is already there within the culture. We have to stop trying to explain it in terms that nobody requires. That is where I find myself right now. It was producing those records of John Cage and doing the retrospective expositions of my work in Düsseldorf, New York and Los Angeles. There were no explanations, there was no signature and nobody complained. They got an attendance, they got what they wanted and there was no signature. Nobody explained what this was supposed to be. Well if it works 3 times in 3 different places ... . All of our continual trying to explain something to somebody as if they were stupid is not necessary. The public knows what to do with the Mondrian. They really do. They may not like it, they even may not have any use for it, but they know what it is supposed to do. They may not know what to do with sociological art, with art that wants to do things to people.
WGT: Düsseldorf, New York or Los Angeles are places in the western cultural world. What is your experience in the Far East?
LW: The Far East, at that point, reads things from the Western standpoint. The same as we read Asian things from an Asian standpoint. It is an attempt, this is a complicity. As far as the Arab world, what the Moslem world does, I do not know. I did a piece in Dubai and I am working on a project with Bidoun magazine right now. Works of mine have been shown in the Arabic world. I cannot read the Arabic calligraphies, but I like to draw Arabic. I am not particularly in trance by the culture, but by chance I read literature in books and the bibles when I was younger. So it is not that foreign to me. I made a show in Malaga recently, where the catalogue and a big poster in the city is in Spanish, Arabic and English because there are a lot of foreign workers. The authorities were a little nervous, because it is a very racist city. Traditionally, there are lots of rivals. You know what happened? Absolutely nothing. The show was well attended. It was okay. The poster they asked if they would have been allowed to save them in the city for cafeterias and other places. I made the piece in Dubai on the ground in between the two towers what was against the local law. And you know, nothing happened. Except a lot of artist in that art fair started to be able to do things, because nobody could say no, in that moment, because I was doing that. That is not being revolutionary. That is just seeing what happens. You are in a culturally different place and let’s see what it is like. Why are we not the same conscious, if we are building art in Vienna that in fact also confronts peoples’ feelings. Why don’t we look at doing that, too. We anticipate the difference because people in Dubai come from a much more repressive culture. In fact Austria has a very repressive culture, too.
WGT: Can you give us a concrete example?
LW: I worked in places like Klagenfurt and I did a piece in Salzburg which was quite successful in the end. But everybody in the little town council kept saying the Mozarteum is going to be really upset. It is supposed to be about Mozart. We were not trying to be inapplicable, it was not about that. However, the child came dressed in a different way and they have learned to live with it. It has not created a scandal. And it is talking about things, really about Mozart, because Mozart is the first composer who used silence. He was the first one who understood that silence was a sound. And it was just luck that when I built that piece they were having a festival on John Cage. So people were talking about the relationship to Mozart and the people at the Mozarteum were very supportive.
WGT: When you work all over the world and you are always working in the tradition of your work, is that in a form transcultural?
LW: I do not know what to call transcultural. What is this multiculturalism we are talking about? I do think it really relates to something a little bit further than multiculturalism, it relates to not accepting Aristotle, it relates to not accepting Hegel and it relates to not accepting parallel structures and accepting what we may be learning from Quantum and what we may be learning from other things. Within the parallel structures we have always make an imitation of something else. This makes something the real thing! The other thing is the reflection. What happens if it is a simultaneity in the acceptance of the fact what happens in Dubai, to that what happens in Marocco, what happens in Bejing and in Tokyo and in New York. At the same time, when it happens in Vienna - exactly at the same time and in fact at the same point of space. The changes are a whole concept of time …
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LW: The changes are a whole concept of what we have been looking at. That is not multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is always entering into accepting something you don’t believe in.
WGT: That’s why I said “transcultural” because it is not multicultural. It’s something which is derived from the different cultures . . .
LW: Then it’s becoming something like I am going to play African. Looking at transculture it is becoming very odd for convenience sake. To accept slavery, for convenience sake, to accept anything that you would not allow to yourself. You always make an exception. I think it is an odd thing to make exceptions. Artists have to take a stand because that is what they get paid for. That is what they are. Artists are not supposed to be diplomatic. They are not ambassadors. If they really think something is dreadful, they are supposed to not accept it in somebody else. I found myself in a desperate trouble at the time of Salman Rushdie. I worked a lot in provincial places in England. Actually, I have a habit of working in very provincial and little places because of making shows in Vienna, Paris and New York it is easier for them to get you there because you are on their list. I was in Bradford that is in England. The city has a large Muslim community. A few years ago I was working there and the mayor was going to give a little ceremony because I did a piece for the Henry Moore Foundation. Right before the event the town burned books, the Salman Rushdie book in the square. They were burning Salman Rushdie. You remember the author who wrote the „Satanic Verses“. Our memories are well living like people who forget these happenings. We don’t remember anything any more. We are forgetting that these things just happened around 10 years ago.
Thomas Redl: I did not even know that they burned Rushdie’s book.
LW: They burned the book because it was obvious that he offended the religion.
TR: They burned books in Great Britain?
LW: In Bradford! And there I was with people who I liked who wanted to be nice to me as an artist and I could not shake hands with the mayor because you do not shake hands with people who do not prohibit that books were burned. And he kept saying: But you do not understand. This is an evil book. And you try to explain that you cannot do it! You don’t burn books! I am always in that position to become the good nigger. The thorough point is there. I do not know how we got into this.
WGT: We asked about transculture. Transcultural from what I understand means the culture which is derived from the idea of Francis Fukuyama of social habits developing in between the different cultural groups in cities like Berlin, London or New York. The people in these places have to find ways how to live with each other in the everyday life, although they do not share the same religion or the same social upbringing and still live in the same neighbourhood. They develop habits of common grounds even if they are small. I just came back from Guam and we were talking with Chamorro people about these habits and how to keep their own original culture and still being citizens of the United States.
LW: When it works. That’s the problem with any kind of art. When it works it is designed to be able to be used in any place without having to know anything else than it is art. Your Guam experience was the same experience I had in Papua Guinea where they know what an artist is. They know that an artist does things, and nobody minds. So, by the time they did not come in with the artist bios. Instead whenever they were in the field they would look at drawings. These drawings made the same amount of sense to them. That’s what you mean by the term transcultural? Then it is a good term, but I do not know we are supposed to making a culture, not transcending a culture. We are not supposed to be heroes and transcending these heroes.
WGT: Yes and this type of art is not colonial to start with! What do you think?
LW: I do not know. Can we find a culture that is not colonial? I am a New Yorker. You don’t think that New York is a colony of Europe?
WGT: No, I do not.
LW: Oh, my heavens! I think you do not know New York, especially in the so-called cultural world it is a colony of the privileged Europeans. This is no problem but it is a fact. It is changing now with the economy collapsing at this place, but this is worldwide phenomenon. But before that nobody could afford all the real estate because the Austrian and Swiss Institute, the Alliance Française, they all had all the places rented for their people to come and spend a year or longer in New York. It is what happened to Paris in the 1960s. It is colonialism of a sort. Paris in the 1960s was impossible for Parisian artists to live. It was occupied by artists from Germany and all over the world, the United States and artists supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. So this is colonialism in the art world. As the art world is a micro-cosmos of the real world because it is real – you are real: you pay taxes, you go to the dentist, if you have kids you take them to the dentist, what else makes you a real person? Nothing else.
TR: Colonialism is one of the driving engines of contemporary art. Is that what you mean?
LW: It is an essential function of art. Well, if you are trying to pose a question, obviously you are not happy with the configuration of the way how things are. Over the last 100 years the art is questioned. Today artists are not longer questioned. Things changed to be better. It began now to look so good. The structuralists tried to save their parents, and they did not. It did not work, happily. That is the interesting thing with transculture. What happened to structuralists and deconstructionists. Journalists do it better. They really do. And there is no sociological art that is not yesterday’s newspaper. You have to believe in the problem, you must believe in the problem. But sometimes problems disappear. They solve themselves. Well, I have been very lucky in that way, but I wanted that from the beginning. I wanted a work to be able to be shown in Tokyo without being exotic.
WGT: So it was a point where you started to imagine an artwork that would be globally understood?
LW: I wanted to go straight on my own road.
TR: Is there a big difference when you work in public space or in an art space?
LW: I like commercial art spaces for one thing, for the openness of being able to do things that are not sure because it has no position, people do not feel bad if they do not get it. Public art involves real responsibility. You have to remember that you are part of the public and you have to do something of what you feel adds to the landscape you are in. That is what you basically do. I have been doing a lot of public work lately and over the last years, but recently for some reason, even in the economic crisis I have being brought to places and been asked to do things, like Bruges Concert Hall. It is the last place where you will expect to see a work of mine. Coming back to your question I do not know, I am even not quite sure. I have been only on one panel about public art in Vancouver and there is a little book about it with all the artists in it. I make work that, if anyone ever sees it, even in a newspaper or magazine, it is public. There is no difference. I do not think there is one.
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LW: In the exhibition I am making here - Galerie Hubert Winter in Vienna, May 2009 - basically the real side of sculpture is shown, a sculpture is 3dimensional, so they appear to be flat in the back or vice versa. I like working in Vienna and do feel real responsibility but it is sad I have no relationship to Austria or Vienna or anything else. But it is a place where I have been able to work for a long time.
TR: You have made this work on the Flak Tower at the Gumpendorfer Strasse in the Esterházy Park. It works with the history of the building. Did you create the work for this building?
LW: That’s just by chance that it works for the history of the building. And then people read it, as if it was related to Kristallnacht. I do not know how Vienna and the Kristallnacht were related. There was a revolution in Vienna, there was no Kristallnacht. But the piece is really all about breaking. The sound of breaking glass in the day and the sound of breaking glass at the same place in the night. It sounds differently. Totally. In any major city when there are thrown beer bottles and people are drunk on a Friday night. At night it sounds differently than it does during the day. The same sound. It has nothing to do with the noise. It has to do with the fact that the air is different. That is sculptural.
WGT: Today this work is a landmark what you perhaps have meant as a normal sculpture and now it turned into a monumental landmark. A sculpture for the whole area of a city.
LW: Yes it is, but the responsibility is heavy.
WGT: What you said about sculpture is very different from the traditional idea of sculpture as it was defined through art history. Can you explain why your sculpture is a sculpture in the tradition of art history?
LW: If you were at the turn of the century and you were an open, intelligent and educated person as you are now, how would you relate to Cezanne? I do not think that I am Cezanne, it is not that, but how would you relate to Cezanne? You cannot. It does not do the things that they told you that painting should do. That is the principle of art. To continue presenting people things in relation to the world. These artworks do not do the things, they told you they are supposed to. I mean Cezanne is a very good example because nobody knew what to do with him and today nobody knows what to do without him. Franz West uses that a lot in his work, where you do not quite know why the chairs are supposed to be a sculpture, why the sofa is supposed to be a sculpture, where you do have no concept of why. But from that moment on you see everything in the same terms, you see them as sculpture.
TR: You are saying a word is a sculpture?
LW: No, I don’t. I say that what the word means is a sculpture. There is a difference. Word is a word and people can make poetry, songs and other things with them. But what the word means is what the sculpture is about.
TR: In your work there is a melody and there is rhythmic. Is that an essential part of the work?
LW: That is something that is personal on my level. I think in nouns. I am a New Yorker and, essentially, when I am thinking in English I do not have articles like “der”, “die”, “das”. So I am thinking in nouns. And the reason why I have been so attracted by Dutch in the 1960s was that they began to be able to speak without the equivalent of articles. After I have finished a work, after I built it, after I translated it into language I cleaned it up. I try to make it as, in my eyes, beautiful as possible. And that is the rhythm you are responding to when I succeed. And I do not succeed all the time. When I succeed, it is there because it is part of the language. That is like using the Masonic plinth. Once it is there it is there and that may make it so beautiful.
WGT: When your sculptures are translated the language gives shapes to it.
LW: Yes it does, it brings needs. It tries to make it fit into its world. And in trying to make it fit, it is that general problem about art, it has no place yet. And this banging to get into the world and the trying to find its place. This process is one function art has. All the banging gives people the chance to look at their environment, to look at things that they are doing, and you’ll never see it before until something is trying to fit in. That is why any art that does not quite look right, makes you stand there and you learn more about yourself and your world. Once it fits, each individual piece, I do not know, whether it still functions as art. In the art history this is just one more of those things that worked like Cezanne. The Cezanne is not asking any questions at this moment, it is remembering you and reminding you of questions that were asked. It is part of your “Geist”. It is part of your culture. That’s what you are. And it is not about progression. Maybe the world turns also. Maybe Quantum did not exist when we were using analog theory because digital did not exist. So it is not really a matter of discovering things, it is a matter of the world in changing itself. When you cook something it changes so completely that whatever you come up with did not really exist before, all though all the pieces existed. Art is very much like cooking except it has a meaning and cooking is purely sensual, it has no meaning. How many years they told you if you did not feel well: Stop, drinking coffee! It turns out coffee was the one thing that did not do any harm to your health at all. Children can drink coffee. It does not do any harm if not over quantity. It does not do anything. It is good for your liver. It makes your liver work. It turned out that coffee was fine. Coffee did not change, but people changed.
TR: You mean the change in the meaning of things?
LW: About the use! It’s about the use. There will be a day when the Flakturm will have no use. It will be just like any statue, it will be a mark of time, but it will not be used as art any more. It is to close now to know but I see that there is a lot of art which does not work as art any longer. But it is pretty. That is why museums are so quite nice. It is a place where you put art that does not work any more.
WGT: A museum is a place where you put art that does not work any more?
LW: Yes. Art which is not questioning things at the moment. The time you are really living in. We have a value as human beings. We do not always have to look towards other human beings to say that culture has a right. We have a value and we use art to question and to see things and to balance them. There is a point where there is nothing about to offer, you know, digital works. Okay? This works, that works, you move on.
WGT: When you see now these huge museum projects are developed in the United Emirates, what do you think does art start to work better there?
LW: Do you think, they will still be able to build these museums in the economic situation as we have it now?
WGT: Yes, I think so!
LW: Really? Because I heard a story about Jakarta that really made me think a lot. In Jakarta there was an economic boom and they built all these buildings and the boom collapsed, but the buildings did not collapse and people are forced to live in these open structures. So maybe these museums will stay as half-built open structures, the new idea: the open museum? High rise public space!
WGT: The question would be, if it is - as you said - the same for Europe. Will the same art be art again?
LW: If you remember the United States, the American culture in the 1920s, it was people eluding Europe, they were bringing in things that Europeans did not want any more, that did not work any more. I am running this out from the top of my head. I have no idea of all. When I read what you write I might be amazed of what I said. You never know. I made a decision a long time ago that I was not a product. And if I am going to be able to give interviews it has to be something where I can have to let my mind to wonder a little bit because it does not matter, I am not flying an airplane, I am not writing a prescription as a doctor. There is a point where I can take risks as an artist that support my job, but sometimes they rock.
WGT: You are one of the artists in art history who achieved to put an innovation up in the art and to claim the sentence to be a sculpture and to continue to do this for a long time. It became part of the discourse and the concept of the general culture and gives a new meaning to the terminology of sculpture.
LW: You think I did? I am touched. I do not know. I think it was normal.
WGT: It is not normal because Cezanne and Picasso would still belong to the tradition of painting on canvas. But you made something completely new and if you think of the concept art at the time when you were inventing it, it became a new artistic option.
LW: I was not inventing it, I was told by all the people who were inventing art concepts. I was not a concept artist. I was a materialist. I did not invent anything.
WGT: When we look back from the art historian view, when we look back to the 1960s and on artists who really established concept art, then you, Joseph Kosuth or Robert Barry were outstanding artistic innovators.
LW: Robert Barry I find very interesting because he is a mystic. I am not a mystic. I am really pretty down to earth. Joseph Kosuth is an academic and this is not meant as an insult. He is trying to reconcile things, his problems is a lack of education. So he thinks quoting something that he cannot read in the original language is going to mean something and sometimes it does not. I am disappointed with that. It is the first time I have ever said this by the way. I am usually very careful about colleagues and things. I am very disappointed because he is not engaged in the world as we know it, he is engaged in the world as we knew it. That’s a very big thing for me. I like to be engaged in the world as we know it now, not as we knew it. You have to take it for granted that the whole world is turning. The world is developing at the same time and if you look at the entropy we are also decaying and the world is decaying, but it is a development. So we are working to make sense in our time. It is all about this thing. When someone is looking at a park he is not looking back at a time when it was built, but from our today perspective. It perplexes me and it frightens me sometimes that we are all dancing to what was a revolution when I was a kid in 1954: Rock and Roll. And we still cannot break away from Rock and Roll. And that is the same problem with what people were trying to do in the late 1950s and 1960s and 1970s. It is not healthy. Each work is about that you have to stand right here and now with all of these agitations of history. And if art does not speak about today, today art will no longer have the function it has, it will have another function. Art is not about commodity. There are countries which have not been lucky enough to understand the basic of cultural socialism that they cannot have a dancer and that the dancer has to get something to eat. We do not live in the world that is basically culturally socialist. So art has to be a commodity, to be on the way to get the money to buy the one most expensive thing in the world: time. If you have ever done manual labor in a factory or if you have worked on a ship, you do not have the time to think any longer. You are tired. It does not matter how smart you are or how educated you are. The commodity aspect of art is not very interesting for me. I have just stepped away from it. That was my problem as human being to survive and to try to raise a family and not to join the academy and not to teach. I do not know how to teach art. And the role of the academy is to present answers and when it cannot at least a solution. The role of the artist is to question. The artist is not supposed to have any authority, and you cannot be a good teacher without assuming an authority because you have a responsibility. So it just does never fit. This has been the difficulty of my life how to make my living. But I do not think it is particularly an art question. It is a general question. It is a bitch for everybody to make a living and I do not know why we got a constant discourse in the art world through the whole 1990s on commodity and about what was a commodity, and during the 1970s this questioning I am purer than you because I do not sell anything. Fine, how do you eat, do you steal? I do not mean the finances. The art world always survives.
WGT: So, what is your advice?
LW: One thing we can do, is to stop questioning the public, to ask the art, saying it is all there now, we have all the material, let’s start building with it. And somebody always starts to talk about it, they cannot answer the question, they do that horrible thing: John Cage, John Cage, Nam June, Nam June. It does not mean anything. It is there. It is understood. We are just not playing with the full deck because we do not really want to get to the pictures on the card, and those pictures are as failing. Who doubts that?
WGT: A Chinese friend told me the Ying and Yang of the world has changed. The idea of Ying and Yang talks about the complementary and not of the difference and it is about living with changes. The western philosophical idea is still very much about good and bad. In the United States you have a new president who claims the change although he is a Moslem. Do you think the western ideas are changing?
LW: But he is not a Moslem, he is a born-again Christian. Because the right wing in the United States did not want to have him elected and they told everyone his father was a Moslem and he was a Moslem. He understands being Moslem, he is not frightened of Moslems. That was the same as the old Nazi’s Jewish grandmother. You have a Jewish grandmother therefore your logic cannot be good. They were saying: do not elect him! The whole world is going to be Moslem. But they are forgetting that Moslems are making babies like everyone else. The whole world is filled with Moslems.
WGT: Moslems do have the idea of good and bad as Christians have.
LW: But don’t you think that the essential Chinese does? The essential character as we know it is not in its practical economic straight. It is confusion and confusion is still basically good and evil. There is always a little bit more Ying than Yang. That is what people tell their children. They always tell them to be a little more Ying and then they are being Yang. Too good it is not the person they want their child to be.
TR: Do you think that maybe the society has to change rudimentary in between the next 20 years?
LW: I think in the next 20 minutes. I am not trying to be funny either. Now!
TR: And it involves every aspect of today´s life, new structures and a new idea of art?
LW: I do not know. You might be able to find a new structure for art faster and long before we can find a new basis for life. Art is another thing. It is a little farm and works that way.
