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Painting with Architecture in Mind

In his own chapter 'Notes (not) reiterating Lawrence Weiner' Whittaker attempts to understand the wall text ‘paintings’ of Lawrence Weiner as communications dealing with physical and material inventories. Taking Weiner’s texts as performative yet without a ‘subjective’ intention in mind, Whittaker unpacks the question of semantics as the concept of an expanded field in painting. By addressing architectural walls as space within which the visual structure of the painted letter-signs, it is argued, they are not only seen by the viewer but, in turn, thought and reiterated by her. Whittaker contends that painted wall text becomes the metaphor (in the sense of a ‘travel’ over space and time) involved with a politically determined intertextual communication with which Weiner attempts to tap into the origin of the (unconscious) relation between language as iteration and language as symbolic system. Noting the typographic similarities between Weiner’s painted words and those painted on the sides of ships and via invocations of Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar and the semiotics of actor network theory at work in postmodern geographies, the essay unfolds a position in relation to art and it place in architecture. Essentially, Whittaker sees Weiner’s work as representing a condition of possibility for an architectural painting that ‘uses’ the architecture rather be culturally legitimized by it. Whittaker maintains that Weiner’s work ‘acts’ politically to intervene in the transposition of geo-physical spaces into the spaces of historical contingency such as sites of architectural decay. Weiner’s pieces then reshape architectural discourses in the light of late-capitalist simulations. Weiner’s texts are now open to a shared critique with the bio-political (cultural) spaces examined by Michel Foucault. Whittaker further suggests that further research is needed in the curatorial situation of Weiner’s texts, as the use of postindustrial architectural sites could provide a threshold for the critical synthesis of the global art ‘system’ as identical to economic logistics.