Lawrence Weiner
Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2005
Born	(1942-02-10) February 10, 1942 (age 70) Bronx, New York
Nationality	American
Field	Conceptual art

Lawrence Weiner (born February 10, 1942) was a central figure in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s ^[1] His work often takes the form of typographic texts.

Early life and career[link]

Weiner was born in the Bronx, New York. After graduating from Stuyvesant High School at 16,^[2] he had a variety of jobs—he worked on an oil tanker, on docks, and unloading railroad cars. After studying at Hunter College for less than a year, he traveled throughout North America before returning to New York.^[3]

Work[link]

Weiner is regarded as a founding figure of Postminimalism’s Conceptual arm, which includes artists like Douglas Huebler, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, and Sol LeWitt.^[4]

Weiner began his career as an artist as a very young man at the height of Abstract Expressionism. His debut public work/exhibition was at the age of 19, with what he called Cratering Piece. An action piece, the work consisted of explosives set to ignite simultaneously in the four corners of a field in Marin County, California. That work, as Weiner later developed his practice as a painter, became an epiphany for the turning point in his career.^[5] His work in the early 1960s included six years of making explosions in the landscape of California to create craters as individual sculptures.^[6] He is also known during his early work for creating gestures described in simple statements leading to the ambiguity of whether the artwork was the gesture or the statement describing the gesture: e.g."Two minutes of spray paint directly on the floor.." or " A 36" x 36" removal of lathing or support wall..." (both 1968). In 1968, when Sol LeWitt came up with his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Weiner formulated his "Declaration of Intent" (1968):

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 receiver upon the occasion of receivership.

Weiner created his first book Statements in 1968, a small 64-page paperback with texts describing projects. Published by The Louis Kellner Foundation and Seth Siegelaub, "Statements" is considered one of the seminal conceptual artist's books of the era. He was a contributor to the famous Xeroxbook also published by Seth Siegelaub in 1968. Weiner's composed texts describe process, structure, and material, and though Weiner 's work is almost exclusively language-based, he regards his practice as sculpture, citing the elements described in the texts as his materials.^[7]

An important aspect of audience participation in Weiner’s work is site-specificity. In SOME LIMESTONE SOME SANDSTONE ENCLOSED FOR SOME REASON (1993) he recast the iron weighbridge of the Dean Clough carpet factory, incorporating the words of the title as an embossing inscription.^[8]

Since the early 1970s, wall installations have been Weiner's primary medium, and he has shown at the Leo Castelli gallery. Nevertheless, Weiner works in a wide variety of media, including video, film, books, sound art using audio tape, sculpture, performance art, installation art, and graphic art. In 2007, he participated at the symposium “Personal Structures Time-Space-Existence” a project which was initiated by the artist Rene Rietmeyer. In 2008 an excerpt from his opera with composer Peter Gordon – The Society Architect Ponders the Golden Gate Bridge – was issued on the compilation album Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records) produced by Mendi + Keith Obadike. In 2009 he participated in the art project Find Me, by Gema Alava, in company of artists Robert Ryman, Merrill Wagner and Paul Kos.

Exhibitions[link]

Flakturm at Esterházypark in Vienna: Zerschmettert in Stücke (im Frieden der Nacht) / Smashed to pieces (in the still of the night) (1991)

A comprehensive retrospective of Weiner's nearly 50-year career was organized by Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2007-2008. Major solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have been mounted at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1990), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1991), Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1991), Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991 and 1992), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1992), Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1994), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1994), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1995), Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2000), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City (2004), and Tate Gallery in London (2006).^[9] He has participated in Documenta V (1972), VI (1977), and VII (1982), as well as the 2005 Venice Biennale, and the Biennale de São Paulo in 2006.

Weiner is represented in New York City by Marian Goodman Gallery,^[10] in London by Lisson Gallery, in Paris by Yvon Lambert Gallery,^[11] in Los Angeles by Regen Projects, in Reykjavik by i8 Galleri, in Tel Aviv by Dvir Gallery and in Switzerland by the Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen.^[12]

Recognition[link]

Among his many honors are National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1976 and 1983), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), Wolfgang Hahn Prize (1995), and a Skowhegan Medal for Painting/Conceptual Art (1999).^[13]

Recent and Upcoming Exhibitions (Selection)[link]

• March 01 - May 13, 2012 Lawrence Weiner: NO TREE NO BRANCH at The Jewish Museum, New York
• May 19 - June 19, 2010 Lawrence Weiner in the House of Art, České Budějovice, Czech Republic
• November 15, 2007 - February 10, 2008 Lawrence Weiner: As Far The Eye Can See at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
• March 22 – December 9, 2007 Lawrence Weiner: Inherent in the Rhumb Line at National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England

References[link]

Weiner's At the Same Moment painted on pilings in the East River, as seen in 2011

Bibliography

• Alberro, Alexander; Zimmerman; Buchloch, Benjamin H.D. and Batchelor, David. Lawrence Weiner. London: Phaidon, 1998.
• De Salvo, Donna and Goldstein, Ann (eds.) Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007.
• Fietzek, Gerti and Stemmrich, Gregor. (eds.) Having Been Said: Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968-2003. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004.
• Schwarz, Dieter (ed.) Lawrence Weiner: Books 1968-1989. Köln / Villeurbanne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König / Le Nouveau Musée, 1989.

Notes

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Lawrence Weiner

• Work for the Abbey of Corbigny, "Au pays"
• Guggenheim bio page
  • Lisson Gallery
• Lawrence Weiner in the Video Data Bank
• Homeport
• Lawrence Weiner audio work "Having Been Done At / Having Been Done To, Essendo Stato Fatto A", 1973 (excerpt 2:25) from Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
• Artist statement and bio by the Guggenheim in Berlin
• Lawrence Weiner video by Hillman Curtis
• Lawrence Weiner at Dvir Gallery
• Lawrence Weiner at Regen Projects, Los Angeles

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2011)

Sharon Ruth Hayes (born January 15, 1948) is a former Canadian politician.

Born in Toronto, Ontario, she represented the riding of Port Moody—Coquitlam from 1993 to 1997 for the Reform Party of Canada.^[1]

Hayes is a graduate of the Honours Math and Computer Science program at the University of Waterloo; while enrolled there, she worked as a co-op student with the Toronto Stock Exchange and IBM. After graduation, she worked as a program analyst at the University of Guelph and then as a Sessional Instructor in computer science at Simon Fraser University.

Her election victory in 1993 came over the incumbent, Ian Waddell of the New Democratic Party, and challenger Celso Boscariol, B.C. president of the Liberal Party of Canada. As one of 52 Reform MPs, she served as Chair of the party's Family Caucus ^[2] and critic on Human Rights and Status of Women. She was assistant critic for Health (1995-'96) and Human Resources (1997), and a member of the Standing Committees on Health (1994-'97), Citizenship and Immigration (1994-'96) and Human Rights (1996-'97), and of the sub-Committee on HIV/AIDS (1994-'96). While in office, Hayes joined many of her Reform colleagues in donating 10% of their salary to charity and opting out of the MP pension plan.^[3]

Hayes was best known as a socially conservative advocate for family issues. She crafted the RPC's response to parliamentary initiatives on family and the definition of family, age of consent, Child Care Tax Credit, corporal punishment and the Unified Family Court.^[4] She was an advocate for the rights of the disabled, and prompted a change to the compassionate airfare policy for Air Canada. Hayes also sponsored a rally in 1994 in Coquitlam of an estimated 2,000 persons to press for changes to the Young Offenders Act.^[5]

She was a member of the Canadian Delegation to the Fourth UN Conference for Women in Beijing in 1995, but left early to protest what she called (in an essay published in the Globe and Mail on Sept. 15, 1995) the conference's pre-ordained, anti-family agenda. She had also stirred controversy for issuing a press release on her House of Commons letterhead calling on Liberal ministers attending the conference to reject "Chinese government policies that endorse the mandated one-child policy, the murder of inmates for body parts and the alleged consumption of human fetuses as health food." Writing on her personal blog in 2011, Hayes apologized to anyone who had been offended by the release, noting, "Thankfully, there has been no evidence of the truth of that story since that time." She explained that she had not intended for the release to be made public, and, "In no way did I intend to discredit any nationality or group of people then or since."

Hayes was also a speaker at the First World Congress of Families, organized by the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society, in Prague in 1997. She was appointed co-chair of the RPC's Family Campaign, along with Chuck Stahl, leading up to the 1997 general election. Even though her husband, Doug, was in a coma from a massive brain hemorrhage when the election was called and she was able to campaign very little, she was reelected. However, she resigned four months later to care for her ailing husband after his condition deteriorated. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, Opposition Leader Preston Manning, Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe, and NDP spokesman Bill Blaikie all praised her in the House following her resignation announcement.^[6]

She has two daughters and six grandchildren. A past board member at Trinity Western University and Focus on the Family Canada, Hayes currently sits on the board of Affordable Housing Societies.

References[link]

Liam Gillick (born 1964, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City.^[1][2] He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic,^[3] which first introduced the term Relational Art.

Life and career[link]

Liam Gillick graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1987 with a degree in Fine Art. In 1989 he mounted his first solo gallery exhibition, 84 Diagrams, Karsten Schubert, in London. Gillick has exhibited in galleries and institutions in Europe and the United States, many of which have been collaborative projects with other artists, architects, designers and writers. In 1991, together with art collector, and co-publisher of Art Monthly, Jack Wendler, Gillick founded the limited editions and publishing company G-W Press.^[4] The company produced limited editions by artists including Jeremy Deller and Anya Gallaccio.

In the early-1990s Gillick was a member of the band Soho and is credited with providing samples during their live performances.

Together with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Angela Bulloch and Henry Bond he was, "the earliest of the YBAs"^[5]—the Young British Artists who dominated British art during the 1990s.

In 2002, Gillick was selected to produce artworks for the canopy, the glass facade, the kiosks, the entrance ikon, and the vitrines, of the then-recently-completed Home Office building, a United Kingdom government department, at Marsham Street, London.^[6] In 2002, Gillick was nominated for the annual British Turner Prize.In the Winter 2006 edition of October (No. 115) Gillick's response to Claire Bishop's October article "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," was published as "Contingent Factors: A Response to Claire Bishop's 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics'." Gillick has also contributed written articles to fine art journals Frieze and Artforum.

Installation in the German Pavilion, 2009

In 2008, Gillick was short-listed for the Vincent Award of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. In 2009, Gillick represented Germany in the Giardini Pavilions of the Venice Biennale.^[7]

On October 1, 2010, in an open letter to the British Government's culture secretary Jeremy Hunt—co-signed by a further 27 previous Turner prize nominees, and 19 winners—Gillick opposed any future cuts in public funding for the arts. In the letter the cosignatories described the arts in Britain as a "remarkable and fertile landscape of culture and creativity."^[8]

In October 2010, Gillick contributed a recipe for a vodka and lime juice-based cocktail as his participation in the Ryan Gander art project "Ryan's Bar." The beverage titled "Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of two and a half," was sold for £50 per serving.^[9] In 2010, Gillick composed a score of "zingy electronica" for the artists' film "Beijing," made by his wife Sarah Morris.^[10]

Together with others including Ingrid Schaffner and Tirdad Zolghadr, Gillick is one of the Graduate Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson. ^[11] He has been on the faculty of Columbia University, School of the Arts in New York since 1997. ^[12] Gillick is represented in the UK by Maureen Paley and in New York by Casey Kaplan.

Artistic practice[link]

Gillick's artistic output is characterized by diversity, as Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, of University College Dublin, has said,

"Gillick's practice to date has encompassed a wide range of media and activities (including sculpture, writing, architectural and graphic design, film, and music) as well as various critical and curatorial projects, his work as a whole is also marked by a fondness for diversions and distractions, tangents and evasions."^[13]

Mural, Balfour Avenue, Belfast, 2008

The focus of Gillick' practice is evaluations of the aesthetics of social systems with a focus on modes of production rather than consumption.^[14] He is interested in forms of social organization.^[15] Through his own writings and the use of specific materials in his artworks, Gillick examines how the built world carries traces of social, political and economic systems.^[16] As art critic Ina Blom has said,

"Artists such as Liam Gillick ... no longer address abstraction as the principle for the creation of distinct minimalist objects, but rather try to create through design spaces for open social interaction [artworks] whose actual use is to be constantly redefined within the situation of the exhibition - without necessarily producing relational-aesthetic models of community."^[17]

Central to Gillick's practice are the publication that function in parallel to his artworks. An anthology of these "Allbooks" was published by Book Works, in 2009.

Documents Series with Henry Bond[link]

Between 1990 and 1994, Gillick collaborated with artist Henry Bond on their Documents Series a group of eighty-three fine art works which appropriated the modus operandi of a news gathering team, in order to produce relational art.^[18] In order to make the work the duo posed as a news reporting team—i.e., a photographer and a journalist—often attending events scheduled in the Press Association's Gazette—a list of potentially newsworthy events in London. Bond worked as if a typical photojournalist, joining the other press photographers present; whilst Gillick operated as the journalist, first collecting the ubiquitous Press kit before preparing his audio recording device.^[18] The series was first shown commercially in 1991, at Karsten Schubert Limited^[19] and then, in 1992, at Maureen Paley's Interim Art^[20] —two of the galleries that were pioneers in the development of the YBA art movement. The series was subsequently exhibited at Tate Modern, in the show Century City held in 2001,^[21] and at the Hayward Gallery, in the exhibition How to Improve the World, in 2006.^[22]

Exhibitions[link]

Solo exhibitions include The Wood Way at Whitechapel Gallery in London 2002, A short text on the possibility of creating an economy of equivalence at Palais de Tokyo in Paris 2005, and the retrospective project Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short scenario 2008-2010. Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short scenario was created through the collaboration of four international art museums: the Kunsthalle Zurich, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunstverein München, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.^[23][24] The U.S. presentation of the exhibition was the most comprehensive of Gillick’s work in an American museum. Accompanying his solo exhibition at the MCA was the show The one hundred and sixty-third floor: Liam Gillick Curates the Collection, curated by Gillick from the MCA collection.^[25]

Personal life and family[link]

Gillick is cousin to British artists James Gillick and Theodore Gillick. In the early 1990s he was in a relationship with artist Angela Bulloch.^[26] He married fellow artist Sarah Morris, in 1998 at a ceremony in Miami.^[27] Family relatives include the sculptor Ernest Gillick, the medallionist Mary Gillick, and the pro-life activist Victoria Gillick.

References[link]

Literature[link]

• Liam Gillick, Proxemics: Selected writing 1988-2006 (JRP Ringier, 2007).
• Lilian Haberer, Liam Gillick: Factories in the Snow (JRP-Ringier, 2007).
• Monika Szewczyk (ed.) Meaning Liam Gillick (MIT Press, 2009).

External links[link]

• Liam Gillick's website
• Documentation of recent Liam Gillick exhibitions
• Casey Kaplan Gallery
• Maureen Paley
• Esther Schipper
• Air de Paris
• Photos of Gillick's Turner Prize installation
• Gillick on the Tate Gallery website
• KultureFlash Interview (27/11/02)
• Article regarding the Documenta X Winter School written by Liam Gillick
• Article, by Liam Gillick, defining The Discursive in contemporary art practice and curation
• Gillick interview at Fillip
• Liam Gillick in Dům umění České Budějovice, Budweis, Czech Republic

Michael Heizer is a contemporary artist specializing primarily in large-scale sculptures and earth art (or land art).

Heizer was born in Berkeley, California in 1944; and he attended the San Francisco Art Institute. Traveling to New York City in 1966, he began his career producing more conventional, small-scale paintings and sculptures. In the late 1960s, however, Heizer left New York City for the deserts of California and Nevada, where he began to produce larger-scale works that could not fit into a museum setting, except perhaps in photographs. This culminated in the production of Double Negative, a 1500-ft trench Heizer cut into the side of a mesa in the Nevada desert.

Since then, Heizer has continued his exploration of earthworks, with his efforts directed primarily toward City, an enormous complex in the rural desert of Lincoln County, Nevada. He has also produced a number of abstract paintings, and his large-scale sculptures, often inspired by Native American forms, can be found in museums and public spaces worldwide.

Since the late 1990s, Heizer's work has focused primarily on City, and his work continues to this day, supported by the Dia Art Foundation through a grant from the Lannan Foundation. City is not yet available to the public.

Projects[link]

His latest project is the Levitated Mass for Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). It took 11 nights to move the 340-ton rock from the Riverside County to the museum in March 2012. When completed, the granite boulder, 21.5 feet wide and 21.5 feet in height, will be installed atop the 456-foot-long trench which will allow people to walk under and around the mass rock. Opening date is slated for June 24, 2012.^[1]

List of works[link]

• Windows and Matchdrops (1969), seven small rills in the floor in front of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf entrance, Germany
• Double Negative (1969–70), located near Overton, Nevada
• Isolated Mass/Circumflex (#2) (1968–72), Menil Collection (Houston, Texas)
• Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976), Myrtle Edwards Park (Seattle, Washington)
• 45 Degrees, 90 Degrees, 180 Degrees (1984), Rice University (Houston, Texas)
• City (1972, unfinished), in rural Lincoln County, Nevada
• Levitated Mass (March 2012), Resnick Pavilion North Lawn at LACMA (Los Angeles, California)
• Noth, East, South, West (1982), 5th and Flower Streets, Los Angeles^[2]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Webpage of Heizer at the Dia Art Foundation
• Michael Heizer in the National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler collection
• Levitated Mass Michael Heizer in the spotlight of California. (world press review)

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