Lawrence Weiner at Leo Castelli - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

An Internet throw out by Lawrence Weiner is limit to be fascinating, partly because of by what mode much his own work has anticipated the flexible ways that language is transformed in digital space. This exhibition featured an ongoing Web site called "Homeport" (http://www.adaweb. com/project/homeport), which you could access via a computer in the gallery. It's based upon the interactive rooms and architectural environments of Internet "palace" technology, on the contrary with a real twist: nothing here insinuates the layout of a play or the floors of a building, nothing commits to familiar architectural spaces.

Instead, you find a quirky, somewhat baffling environment strewn with icons and squiggles, tokens and phrases. Clicking on a certain quantity of of them elicits more phrases, or an extract from a song by Weiner and the band N and the Sublette Embedded in the site are invisible pathways. one time you discover how to go into you're assigned an empty rectangular chest that frames whatever you emblem As visitors to the site rejoin to earlier jottings, the guard fills with ever-changing miniblocks of writing, which is prime Weiner territory - words as the couple visual objects and conveyers of meaning.

In the same expanse at Castelli, four mixed-mediums-on-paper drawings based upon the "Homeport" environment transformed the flowing of the digital realm into a more familiar form. Homeport Ne To Know (1997) a drawing upon graph paper, is filled with circles, types and phrases, some composed through Weiner, others contributed by visitors to his Web site. The visitor's annotates -- "Is this room half replete or half empty," "What about the body" -- have a smooth yet pronounced resonance. Homeport When in Doubt (1997) features a kind of call-and-response exchange -- "May I inquire as to what," "Enough of what," "Enough to obtain on with it" -- that looks at once forthright and elliptical. With their scattered notwithstanding precise allocation of diagrams and language fragments, these drawings are at one time casual and exquisite.

In the main space at Castelli was a room-sized installation of painted true copy (as well as plus and minus symbols) upon walls and columns. Slanting across single wall was the phrase "More or Less" in black alphabetic characters and, across the gallery upon the opposite wall, "Give or Take." upon the two longer walls, you set "That as it is," in big silver alphabetic characters with black borders, and "This as it was." As ofttimes happens, Weiner's deceptively common-place words had a space-altering, consciousness-changing presence

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