Lawrence Weiner / Factors in the scope of distance. A structure of Lawrence Weiner

“The book, FACTORS IN THE SCOPE OF DISTANCE, does away with the words altogether. It shows a number of drawings which do not illustrate a particular work but convey pictorially a personal statement of the artist rendered in the context of watching a ship in the distance. The vertical lines indicate the cartographic method method of determining distance, and the horizontal elements render ships at sea as they appear on the horizon. The drawings draft an image of the subject’s relationship to the world within a relationship to a graphic language. Of comparable value are the metaphorical sentences circulated by Weiner in recent years on posters, pins, etc. Weiner calls his ambiguous and yet precise formulations drawing in Weiner’s work does not coincide with that of his language pieces. “The content of the relationship of objects to objects and materials to materials requires no illustration. The object itself is invariably the best representation. But when you’re dealing with things to do with the heart and the soul, as we call it, the aspirations, the dreams, the passions, illustrations then become this strange other kind of paradigm, they become this world of the artist that the artist uses to present other things.” (Schwarz)