EARTH TO EARTH / ASHES TO ASHES / DUST TO DUST is a text installation by Lawrence Weiner made of silver alphabetical letters referring to Solomon, the Preacher. The work is part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. After a long illness, Weiner, born in the Bronx in 1942, has passed away.
From an art-historical point of view, his textual works - together with those of Joseph Kosuth and Robert Barry - mark the extreme point reached in the dematerialisation of art. His works are not paintings or sculptures, but texts applied directly to walls. His textual works are sculptural works made up of the words and materials named by the words themselves. Thus for example in EARTH, DUST and ASHES earth, dust and ash are the materials used. Weiner’s work embodies the final stage of development and also the end of the modern era. Postmodernism then begins in art. Weiner’s works have been and are exhibited in the world’s most renowned museums of modern art.
Despite his almost exclusive use of language, Weiner always claimed to consider himself an artist, who used language as a means of expression, and not a poet. But the artist liked to refer to literature. As in the monumental phrase that from 1992 stood for two decades on the Flakturm, Vienna’s anti-aircraft tower: SMASHED TO PIECES / IN THE STILL OF THE NIGHT. The source language of Weiner’s texts is always English; in the presentations, however, translations into the respective languages of the host country always become part of the work.
In 1992 Weiner, together with Heinz Gappmayr and Maurizio Nannucci, exhibited in Museion. On the occasion of this exhibition Museion produced Weiner’s artist book entitled ALL FALL DOWN. Shortly afterwards, the Bolzano gallery owner Clemens Gasser produced an exhibition of the artist’s works. The text installation on the hospital tower in Merano dates back to the same period: OUT ON THE RIVER OF THE OCEAN / OUT AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN. In Weiner, nature can also serve as sculptural material.
For the silo of the Rieper mill in Vandoies di Sotto in 2003, the following enigmatic textual installation was realised: BROUGHT ABOUT. The statement refers to a completed sculptural process that is, however, not named. Perhaps it refers to the work itself installed in Vandoies, we can no longer ask. Over the years, two of the three text installations shown in the exhibition “Spaces of Thought: Gappmayr, Nannucci, Weiner” have become part of Museion’s collection: X+X ACROSS THE WATER and 1 LARGE 1 SMALL AT THE EDGE OF THE DRIED UP LAKE. Weiner’s work is well present in South Tyrol and his person remains unforgotten.
