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It's reinvented by each person who comes to it

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It's reinvented by each person who comes to it.""Why give them your metaphor?" Weiner asks, in low wide vowels. "Why not give them the phenomena of the materials together and let them find the metaphor that they need - or don't need - because all art cannot be for everybody."The phrase "smashed to pieces in the still of the night" would have set off different resonances, he points out, when he painted it on the side of a bunker in Vienna, than it would have done if it had been laid out in pebbles on a South Sea beach. The work need not be built.")Instead of laying physical things down on a gallery floor, Weiner would now just paint a no-nonsense phrase on a gallery wall, such as "many coloured objects placed side by side to form a row of many coloured objects"."I feel it can transcend cultures," he explains, "because, no matter what materials I choose - even the simplest many-coloured objects - they are going to take on a different cultural metaphor in each different place I would prefer that a work of mine is not exotic. "If it takes, it will give them something to help understand their relation to the world," he adds. "And that is all that art is supposed to be about."Working out what "art is supposed to be about" is Weiner's favourite occupation Aesthetics don't come into it. "You make art because you're dissatisfied with the configuration of the world as it's presented," he insists.Weiner's earliest works, back in 1960, tried to alter the configuration of the world rather literally, using truckloads of explosives to blast huge craters in fields across California. He soon gave up on the macho pyrotechnics, however, deciding to change the world by more discreet means.He formulated a theory, which he has stuck to ever since, that building his sculptures was a mere optional extra ("1 The artist may construct the work 2 The work may be fabricated 3.

One "what" for the money? Two "what" for the show? Each viewer will read the phrases differently - depending whether they are on their way to or from work; or perhaps, on how much they like their jobs and how tasty the "to go" option is. Perhaps it's even sending out a subliminal message for people to hand in their notice?"Being with this for two months will give the people here the opportunity to relate this into their lives," Weiner whispers conspiratorially into his gingery whiskers. The phrases he chooses to display are all deliberately indeterminate but vaguely suggestive. "You," Weiner replies triumphant - "that's where you place yourself." Maintenance man wanders off perplexed.Filling in the gaps yourself is what Weiner's work is all about. There, against the glass-sided up- and down-escalator panels, thinly traced out in blue-edged transparent type, are the words "One for the money .. Two for the show .. Three to get ready ... And four to go ( )".For the most part, the office-workers glide between floors oblivious of Weiner's work, but every once in a while, there's a glimmer of a double- take, as an unduly perceptive punter notices the slight modification to his or her habitual surroundings "What goes in the brackets, then?" asks a maintenance man. What's more, for every one of those years, the world's most prestigious art institutions have continued to commission him to do it, from Dokumenta and the Whitney to the new Guggenheim in Bilbao.Closer inspection of the escalators in between the Docklands Light Railway and the Canary Wharf Tower does in fact reveal the scantiest wee suggestion of an artwork.

Lawrence Weiner's art is not exactly in your face. In fact, you may not notice it at all, even if you look at it. Judith Palmer catches up with the elusive US conceptualist at the site of his latest creation, in an East London shopping centre. As I was going up the stairs, I met some art that wasn't there It wasn't there again today .. and will continue not to be there until the end of February. "Why take up space when it's not necessary?" shrugs artist Lawrence Weiner, as I scan Canary Wharf in search of his latest installation, Towards Motion. One of the granddaddies of conceptual art, New Yorker Lawrence Weiner has been designing non-existent sculptures for over 30 years.

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