One of the leading figures of the global Conceptual art world from the late 1960s onward, Lawrence Weiner was among the first to question traditional conventions of objecthood and propose a new relationship to art making and redefine the status of the artist. 

Artists have stretched our understanding of art, adopting and adapting new and old practices to express something about our changing world. Weiner and his peers have “dematerialized” art works, deliberately evading strict academic genre definitions. Weiner has specifically questioned the connections and obligations that link artist and audience through the objects they make. Instead, Weiner has chosen to make these connections through language, the very material that shapes our relationship to the world, to objects and to one another. 

Weiner’s works are described by him as ‘language + the materials referred to,’ and he defines them as ‘the relationship of human beings to objects, and objects to objects in relation to human beings.’ His parameters allow for an endlessly adaptive representation of the relationship of material components, processes and states, permitting simultaneity and a flexibility of spatial construction.

A poetic ambiguity of his pieces allows the individual viewer a point of reception that is not bound by time and place, enabling personal interpretation through real time experience of the work.

Although Weiner does not consider his works site-specific, each piece can be reconceived and built anew. Building a distinct relationship to content and/or context, Weiner’s language fosters a universality that offers the public a multitude of interpretations, that are their interpretations. Realized in many diverse forms, whether on building facades, museums, on sidewalks and cross walks, in public or private commissions, as music or as multiples, artist books, film, video, posters... Weiner’s belief in the democracy of the object and multiplicity of its reception is the essence of his conception of the work of art.

With AT THE SAME MOMENT on the Milwaukee skywalk Weiner once again reiterates the relationship of human beings to objects, and vice versa, allowing for multiple interpretations which continue to disrupt and transform our experience of art today.