AROUND THE WORLD is the featured work used to both title and of course, as the introduction to Lawrence Weiner’s exhibition at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art. The show is fused by action and idea. By action the works relate to movement, that of navigation; and by idea, as it is the framework of the age-old demarcated invisible line that splits the globe into two equal halves. AROUND THE WORLD is accompanied by four other works, PLACED ABOVE THE EQUATOR, PLACED BELOW THE EQUATOR, TO THE LEFT OF THE EQUATOR, TO THE RIGHT OF THE EQUATOR.
The works arranged in the gallery give rise to interlaced readings. AROUND THE WORLD shines like a welcoming beacon to the visitor through the large plate glass windows that overlook the street. The English version of the work appears in yellow letters with a black outline while the Portuguese version, in blue letters with black outline, floats just under it. In fact, the two lines that comprise the presentation, or you could also say the two languages intersect - and where their letters interlace, the blue and the yellow combine naturally to become green. From there, the observer is warned where this journey leads: a circumnavigation around the world. Once inside the gallery, the works pair up according to a rhythm and a sequence: in blue and to the right as we enter the space, TO THE LEFT OF THE EQUATOR acquiesces to PLACED BELOW THE EQUATOR in red. On the adjoining wall, to the left and in the direction of the entrance, the red letters of TO THE RIGHT OF THE EQUATOR precede PLACED ABOVE THE EQUATOR in blue, which in turn follows the wall as it bends around a sharp ninety-degree corner. Here, the spaces between the letters on the upper and lower lines are white, devoid of color.
Equator (1) is a European device that speaks to the obsession with building theoretical fences for our planet’s geography. The equator is an idea because it does not really exist per se. In Latin it is called the “Even-Maker” because its line is defined by equaling day and night around the circumference of our world. Literal or metaphorical, navigation requires reference points to plot a course, to know where one is and how to get where one is going. Extra-terrestrial navigation in 20th Century science fiction led to technological developments today, and we aren’t surprised about recent extravagant interplanetary travels by private people.
Stars were reference points and location systems in pre-digital navigation. The invention of the compass and the astrolabe improved the quantity and quality of observations, feeding our insatiable desire for travel. This, in turn, expanded conventions to facilitate our voyages, and these transformed our planet into a finite place. Navigation is an almost perfect metaphor for human life, and it is an integral part of Lawrence Weiner’s universe, as evidenced by structures traced and named in his six decades of making art. His work, especially since the late 1960s, has been engaged with the relationship between himself, as artist-producer, and his viewers. It is as if these two entities unconsciously negotiate the production of meaning and/or value. The inherent work and its recipient are both subject to the conditions of time and place in which the work is presented. Even so, the here and now do not produce fixed and immutable imaginaries, but quite the opposite. In 1968, Weiner issued for the first time his “Statement of Intent”(2) for the art that he would begin to make in language. The framework for the reception of his art, its materials per se, is expressed by him as “language + the materials referred to.” His Statement of Intent does not imply a diminishing of the artist’s role, but it does significantly affect how viewers conceptualize both the work (which may or may not be concretely materialized) and the receiver (the spectator or viewer) who is engaged in bestowing meaning on a personal, existential level. Weiner’s works are not scores to be interpreted in a specific way; in fact, he gives the work’s receiver, or collector of the work absolute freedom of interpretation. Their engagement with the art is a collaboration. Weiner has been a leading figure in the demystification and dismantling of hierarchies that placed thework of art and the artist as separate from all other entities. As he has stated, “The artist’s reality is no different than any other reality.”(3) The notion of the ‘artist-as-genius’ has given way to the ‘artist-as-producer’ as described by Walter Benjamin in 1934. Such an idea proposes we completely rethink the role of the artist: as simply another member of society, wherein cultural activity is an industry, defined by the means of its production.
Navigation here implies putting out to sea, using the wind and currents to fulfil our will and aim. The North Star, the wind, the ocean, flotation, the waves, the horizon are all subjects that appear in numerous works by Weiner and suggest environments that differ from the urban contexts and solid territories common to his earlier works. It seems that, for Weiner, being a cultural navigator is a natural condition, a primordial state to which he always seeks to return. Over the years, he has used a variety of media to present his work, from the pages of books to the walls of galleries and museums, from fly posting posters on the street to using postcards that blur the boundaries between different languages and cultures. Weiner has also directed films and videos and produced songs that at times integrated the work into the structures of standard narrative storylines. More recently, his works have at times incorporated graphic elements that coexist and complement the linguistic elements. These devices occasionally replace language, generating spaces that approximate understanding and widen possibilities for the viewer — adult, child, specialist, or neophyte — to play with.
STARS DON’T STAND STILL IN THE SKY (1990), is one of many works by Weiner that refer us back to the world of navigation and the sea4 and reminds us that perhaps we never really know where we are in this world. It has been presented in numerous variations and formats over three decades and helps us place AROUND THE WORLD in a broader perspective. Both navigation and liberal ethics (at least since Kant) are based on the belief in the constancy of a set of values that – like the stars – we assume are static, eternal, and unmoving. As much as things may change for humans, that set of values and references would, many thought, remain unchanged and could always be depended upon. When the sensory evidence that the sun moves east to west was transformed into the postulation of the globe’s daily rotation, around its own axis, the world was assumed to be spherical. Such ideas, contrary to the interests of those in power at the time, needed both conviction and science to succeed. But the argument that the Earth was not flat, nor the center of the universe, was also destructive. The voyage begun by Fernando de Magalhães in 1519 (and concluded by Juan Sebastián Elcano in 1522) would constitute the first complete circumnavigation of our planet, expanding the territories and wealth of Portugal, possibly the largest colonial empire of our time. This expansion forced Portugal’s colonial indigenous peoples to trade their wealth, property, life, and liberty, for diseases, bondage, indignities, and annihilation.
We could consider four of the works in Weiner’s current exhibit: PLACED ABOVE THE EQUATOR, PLACED BELOW THE EQUATOR, TO THE LEFT OF THE EQUATOR, TO THE RIGHT OF THE EQUATOR as a single unit, or an equation in which the order of its factors do not alter its product. I invite you to go through them without presupposing any relation or specific order. Together, they refer us to a division of the planet in a double binary system that assumes, but does not depend on, the establishment of cardinal points. By postulating an ‘above,’ a ‘below’, a ‘to the right of’ and a ‘to the left of’, the work invites us to consider an alternative orientation to a static world where the north is always above and the south always below. The cardinal points were not created to establish a hierarchy, but they ended up representing one in colloquial speech. (5) The stars in the sky do not define who occupies what position, that is left to those who use the grid and to the dregs of history, largely irrational. We’ll avoid the debate about whether planet Earth is extensive with and equivalent to what we call the world, even if we sometimes mix the concepts when we speak. We know that our planet and the humans who live here are but a small fraction, made of fragile balances and easy disagreements, of an infinite universe. For now, in any case, we have become aware of how our behaviour as a species affects all the members and constituents of the world-planet, seventy percent of which is covered by water, most of which is navigable. We move on the globe’s skin, wistfully looking at the stars above us and fearing what lurks in the depths below us. “Above” and “below” are hierarchical expressions that have a wide range of implications, in various contexts. To remain at the center of one’s own universe is one way to resist another’s authority.
Similarly, Weiner’s Statement of Intent firmly places the work’s evolving state and meaning in the decisions made, at each moment, by the receiver-spectator-reader. First presented by him in 1968, the idea that the work is completed by the receiver has its origins in literature: the text is completed by the reader on the occasion of it having been read. For this reason, Weiner’s works are never normative; they do not contain imperatives, they do not tell anyone what they should do, but rather convey the possibility of others determining what use to make of them. The works on exhibit here are comprised of participles or sentences without a verb, making the reader receiver-user free to position themselves anywhere ‘in the world.’ Furthermore, the work does not indicate what is above or below the imaginary line that divides the world. We can position ourselves or anything else in relation to the Equator. The work invites us to become aware of the world’s finitude and of our boundless freedom and desire to navigate.
Because it is a circular line – without beginning or end and horizontal by convention and interpretation – the idea of being located to the right or left of the Equator is seemingly an oxymoron, something absurd. But the work also asks us to question the conventions, abstract or concrete, of geography, as the division of the world. What is up ordown, in the representation of the Earth, depends on what was established by the first western navigators as they described their travels, often heading west, towards the setting sun. The Arab sailors heading east, toward the rising sun, came up with their own designation f ‘up’ and ‘down’. When the artist started consolidating his work in the late- 1960s, the relationships between different genres in the visual arts, photography, cinema, theatre, dance, music, and poetry became fluid. Traditional and experimental works, erudite and popular forms of expression, all flowed into each other, forming vigorous currents that fed and renewed the vast ocean of art. But Weiner’s work is not comparable to poetry. He draws attention to a decisive difference between his work, which uses “language and the materials referred to” and poetry, which can be difficult to translate. Due to its linguistic specificity – and the desire to not limit the work’s reception, by linking it to the uniqueness of a given language – Weiner has always combined English and the language(s) of the place where the work is exhibited. The works are not linked to a specific place (not “site-specific,” as some sculpture is) and yet they are received and understood in a specific context. Each place, with its own language, is a space of unique significance. The various media in which the work may appear suggest that the condition of its existence is linked to its publicness. It is available in a variety of accessible forms: the pages of a book, the walls of a gallery or museum, the floor of a street, the surface of a poster, the projection of light through moving celluloid film. All of these are used as a medium or support that is as valid as the frame of a painting or the plinth of a sculpture.
The Equator divides the globe into two halves, equal in theory but not in reality. Two different worlds touch each other at the Equator, the line whose name means the opposite of what it does (dividing rather than equating). But AROUND THE WORLD implies the viewer might determine for themselves what is above, below, left, or right, and reorient themselves accordingly.
Bartomeu Marí, 2021
(1) The term equator comes from the Medieval Latin aequator, from Latin aequatus (past participle of aequare, meaning
‘to make equal’).
(2) 1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the viewer upon the occasion of receivership
(3) “NOTES FROM ART” (1982) In HAVING BEEN SAID. WRITINGS & INTERVIEWS OF LAWRENCE WEINER 1968-2003 Edited by Gerti Fietzek & Gregor Stimmerich, Haatje Cantz Publishers, 2004, p.130
(4) Alexander Alberro writes about another of these examples: “FACTORS IN THE SCOPE OF DISTANCE (1984), for example, features drawings that do not illustrate a particular work but show paradigmatic ships on the horizon. The vertical lines indicate a cartographic method of determining distance and the horizontal elements render ships at sea as they appear on the horizon” Alberro, A & Zimmerman, A.: Ibid p. 55
(5) If the Earth’s axis was tilted enough — in 1917 it’s axial tilt was calculated at 23’’17’ — the Equator would rise vertically (provided we stick to the representational perspectives to which we have become accustomed). The axial tilt, or obliquity, creates the seasons and punctuates the passing of the years in each revolution around the sun.