Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky

On view from September 17 – October 22, 2022

This month Regen Projects celebrates the legacy of Lawrence Weiner, who died just last year, with Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky: A Tribute to Lawrence Weiner. The exhibition reiterates his 1968 theses by which he “shifted away from object-centric work.” They read:

1. THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK

2. THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED

3. THE WORK 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

In a 2014 interview Weiner compellingly argued that “beauty” is, in fact, a very ugly word. His assessment was that subjects and objects defined by “beauty” must be predicated on tearing down whatever is not worthy of that label. He then suggests looking past beauty and focusing on figuring out how to refashion reality. The argument seems pivotal to the aims of a good deal of modern art. Once beauty is nixed, then one is free to think about the other ways in which a piece of art is working. Weiner was ambivalent about poetry, claiming that he would be a very bad poet. And yet, language was key to his medium. In his own way, his work generated a poetics of artmaking that rejected the superiority of brushes and bottles, instead widening the scope of what could constitute an artwork. To celebrate his influence, Regen Projects gathers some of Weiner’s own work alongside works by those who might have followed his philosophies or worked near his sphere of influence. By gathering such a group, the widening of the scope is demonstrated. Title and biography don’t accompany the pieces, suggesting conceptual boundedness. Overlap is limited among these works, and yet, they are bound by a similar artistic repurposing of reality championed by his theses.

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 key to conceptual art, to me, spurns from how it can encapsulate or surround an audience or a space. The exhibition, in some ways, practices world building. Weiner’s work acts as the framing, while the other artists populate the city that his words construct. Presenting Weiner’s work in context with his web of influence broadens the artistic conversation and widens audience appeal. A piece by Raymond Pettibon is included. Pettibon is a widely recognized artist who is frequently included in gallery spaces but, for me, his work remains synonymous with the punk rock album art that he created for the influential LA outfit Black Flag, led by his brother Greg Ginn. It is a nexus that places conceptual art in a space of subcultural, often politically charged visuality. It is also a kind of visuality that transcends mediums, as evidenced by the Black Flag cover starring a cop being put in his place travelling from album cover to t-shirt, to the tattooed arm of an old restaurant manager of mine. Black Flag’s music endures, but one might argue that Pettibon’s contributions have solidified the iconicity of Black Flag’s subcultural impact.

When one enters the main room, it is difficult to ignore the feeling of intentionality of the introductory wall, which reads, “Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present A Semblance Of A Whole.” The exhibition does, indeed, feel like a gathering that is meant to convey a “semblance of a whole,” while cheekily insinuating that only such semblance is possible, rather than an actual “whole.” The ways that pieces come together effectively testify to the fragmentation of “the whole” made inevitable in modern life. The inclusion of Kevin Beasley’s recent work with cotton, for instance, might share some overlap with Pettibon’s piece. Perhaps they share skepticism towards power. Politics are certainly present in some of this work, though the exhibition isn’t an overtly political one. In general, though, they can only contribute a reconfiguration of the realities that they aim to wrestle with. Some of the more interesting pieces in the exhibition activate tendencies of reconfiguring both space and material.

In a hallway to the right sits a glass protected table filled with smaller artifacts from Weiner’s career. An old pack of Nat Sherman cigarettes rests on the far-left side. Weiner’s font design covers the top of the package. A pin that bears the words: “Stars don’t stand still in the sky” sits in the middle of the table. A small box houses the pin and bears a direct semblance to a match box. Here is a reminder that, despite Weiner’s own objections to poetry, this artistic harnessing of language sometimes asks to be read as poetry. Stars might just as well be the mundane materials and walls that Weiner’s words are pasted upon. When we look up, we look up at something that may well look the same tomorrow and the day afterward, and yet, they move and age and change. The ordinary, non-celestial bodies of materials like a cigarette or a matchbox might sit on a table, to be looked at in a snapshot moment in time, but inevitably to age, brown and move. This inclination to compose a piece of art on a transient surface presents an inherent rejection of museumization and the reverence of the preserved art object.

This reformulation of subjects continues throughout the exhibition. One sign by Rachel Harrison repurposes a newspaper headline reading, “Woman dies in religious fast” – a sentence of ideological irony prodding the viewer for interpretation. A yellow painted canvas hangs caddy-corner to Harrison’s poster. The artist has pasted coins, a euro, and an American dollar bill to the canvas. Each piece strips a subject of context and refashions media and economic materials that pass through our hands in everyday life. Admittedly, this privileging of fleeting details is compelling to me, activating an almost discombobulating response. Plenty of audiences might, upon viewing, argue that this is not art and does not belong in an exhibition, to which the artists might say that that is precisely the response they expected. These pieces work to reformulate reality rather than to generate aesthetic elevation.

Of course, the space is not without grander spatial configurations. A few sculptures populate the centers of the rooms. One is a smooth, elegant glass sculpture, while another squeezes together twelve, smoothly carved, rectangular hunks of wood, resisting an urge to fashion something with a utilitarian purpose. The exhibition includes some images by the big thinking Gordon Matta-Clark. His images showcase the carved-out interiors of buildings, granting a destructive beauty to already existing infrastructures that might now become abandoned. Like the wood sculpture, these buildings resist utilitarianism and traditional aesthetic beauty by revealing the naked innards of building infrastructure. None of his video work is included, but his inclusion complements a Weiner film featuring Kathryn Bigelow to nod toward multi-medium artmaking. The exhibition, of course, casts a much wider net, including the work of Jenny Holzer, Glenn Ligon, Robert Rauschenberg, Sable Elyse Smith among many more. Audiences will, like me, identify with the artists that they feel drawn to. Hopefully some of those will be unfamiliar. Most importantly, hopefully, they will bring an openness to expanded forms of artmaking.

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Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky

Josh Beckelhimer

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