Installation view of *Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: A Tribute to Lawrence Weiner* at Regen Projects, Los Angeles, September 15 – October 22, 2022. Photo: Evan Bedford, Courtesy Regen Projects.

A New York native, Lawrence Weiner’s art career proper started with a bang in a quiet Californian field. He was just 19 when he staged ‘Cratering Piece’ by detonating sticks of dynamite at four points in the unsuspecting earth of Marin County in 1960. He spent six more years on exploratory explosions before finding a new way to blow things up—pure language. 70 years later, Lawrence Weiner is renowned as a semiotic maestro with an impact that’s hard to overestimate. A driving force behind the Conceptual Art movement, his unmistakable phrases have emblazoned museum wall and gallery floor for decades, provoking both thought and international acclaim.

Lawrence Weiner. “WITH A RELATION TO THE VARIOUS MANNERS OF RESONANCE:
HAVING BEEN MOVED TO A POINT OF DISCORDANCE
(WITH OR WITHOUT PURPOSE)
HAVING BEEN VIBRATED TO A POINT OF DESTRUCTION
(WITHIN OR WITHOUT A PURPOSE)
HAVING BEEN PLACED AS A MEANS TOWARDS RESONANCE
(DESPITE EFFECTIVENESS)
HAVING BEEN PLACED AS A MEANS AGAINST RESONANCE
(WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF EFFECTIVENESS)” (1974). Language + the materials referred to. Dimensions variable. © Lawrence Weiner / ARS, New York, Courtesy Regen Projects.

Always speaking of his word pieces as sculptures, his radical practice confronted Establishment mores from East Coast to West and far beyond. By 1968, Weiner had come to the realization that a work of art did not need to be produced to be a work of art—that a statement of intent was enough. Weiner’s typographic interventions were immediately recognizable after he adapted a slim, sans serif font ‘Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed’ into his very own ‘Margaret Seaworthy Gothic,’ with title instructions denoted IN ALL CAPS. Like graffiti on a city wall, a Weiner idea could be communicated anywhere, from the side of a palazzo in Venice, a bus in Berlin, the London Underground or the Bern Kunsthalle. Infinitely translatable into any written dialect, these were not luxury objects to be commodified and collected, but explicitly designed as pieces that could be replicated with ease, to be ‘owned’ by anyone who passed by them.

Less than a year after Weiner’s passing from cancer in December 2021, his Californian story continues. Fittingly, as a Weiner show inaugurated by Stuart Regen Gallery Los Angeles in 1989, Regen Projects now plays host to a wide-ranging tribute exhibition. The full-circle show is both retrospective and forward-looking, demonstrating the breadth of his influence and delivering the powerful messages of his practice to new eyes.

Sue Williams. *Untitled* (2022). Plastic and rubber. 3 x 12 1/4 x 12 1/4 inches. © Sue Williams, Courtesy Regen Projects.

When I spoke to artist Catherine Opie at the opening, she shared her memories of Weiner as the ultimate cross-generational mentor. “Lawrence Weiner was always the kindest, most giving, most amazing human being to be in association with. I met him in 1989-1990 here in LA. He brought me in—before I was even a Regen Projects artist, to work with Regen, Rita McBride and himself on a show called ‘Piggy Back Back.’ I shot an image for the poster. Then, Lawrence and I just became friends. I had him give a lecture at UCLA; I just always liked to be with him, to talk to him, he was just one of the wisest most generous, most esoteric people, that was a pleasure to have in my life.”

Weiner was friends with many of the artists in this museum-standard hang. There’s knowing humor in the ‘Ed Ruscha toasts Lawrence Weiner’ short film from 2012. In a jolly mood, Los Angeles art scene icon Ruscha strings together Weiner’s textual fragments into a Bob Dylan-style poem, a riff on ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ from 1965 complete with cameo from ‘Allen Ginsburg’ chatting in the background. Stephen Prina takes the poster from the foundational 1989 Stuart Regen Gallery show and re-presents it obscured by the contents of two cans of black gloss spray paint directly onto the gallery wall, an echo of Weiner’s TWO MINUTES OF SPRAY PAINT DIRECTLY ON THE FLOOR FROM A STANDARD AEROSOL SPRAY CAN (1968).

And the lively dialogue goes on throughout the space, which is packed full of much more Weiner and complemented by works from Doug Aitken, Sol LeWitt, Gordon Matta-Clark, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Daniel Buren, Robert Smithson, Wolfgang Tillmans, John Bock, DeWain Valentine, Louise Lawler, Jenny Holzer, Gillian Wearing and Isa Genzken alongside many others. Even Virgil Abloh’s reinterpretations for Louis Vuitton F/W 2021 show up, where classic monogram meets Lawrence’s fresh fonts as high fashion apparel accessory. Over 100 works are included in the varied display, and that’s not counting an entire room full of vintage posters, (including some for the New York iteration of Factory Records) and limited edition artist books from Weiner’s legacy of worldwide installs.

Kevin Beasley. *SCATTERED MATTER BROUGHT TO A KNOWN DESTINY WITH THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD CUSPED* (2022). Polyurethane resin, raw Virginia cotton, dye sublimation t-shirt, t-shirts, altered housedress, confetti t-shirts, shoelaces, gold powder. 74 x 55 1/2 x 3 inches. © Kevin Beasley, Courtesy Regen Projects.

Welcoming visitors at the entrance to the gallery is Opie’s atmospheric image of a wild-bearded and shirtless Weiner, shot as part of her ongoing artist portraits series. Standing in front of it she explains how it came to be. “I did two versions, one with a shirt on and one with a shirt off. I always love this version the most. It’s just a meaningful portrait for me, that he would take off his shirt for me and have that kind of vulnerability. Everybody thinks he’s smoking a joint, but actually he was always rolled his own cigarettes with tobacco. [Opie indicates his face in profile, with slightly open lips.] It also shows that—Lawrence always talked. He’s kinda always about ready to to have words come out of his mouth. And that’s how Lawrence was. He was always in mid-sentence. But I have this ‘frozen moment’ of him, with that beautiful smoke in the air that matches the beard on the skin. He was a very special person.”

The portrait hangs adjacent to a large typographic wall piece, ‘BITS AND PIECES PUT TOGETHER TO PRESENT A SEMBLANCE OF A WHOLE.’ Even as prolific as he was, Lawrence Weiner clearly had a whole lot more to say. This show and all of its many parts proves that the artist has left us more than enough words, and works, to keep speaking for him, and inspiring us, far into the future.