Join us on Sunday, September 14 at e-flux Screening Room for a day-long platform dedicated to Lawrence Weiner’s films and audio works. Three cinematic screenings with two intermissions. The program focuses on Weiner’s redefinition of the mise-en-scène as a direct, material form of expression.
Lawrence Weiner often referred to his film works as “moved pictures” and “motion drawings”. Weiner’s view of the world is illustrated in recurring topics of emigration, censorship, eroticism, capitalism, and a cornucopia of the Seven Deadly Sins. As a director, Weiner’s approach was a mix of the formal and informal. He scripted his movies with his works in language as an armature for the structure of the film and allowed his “players” ad hoc to deliver the lines in the manner of their own choosing. In humanizing his propositions, he put into motion a dramaturgy that simultaneously functioned as documentation as well as performance. The players were a part of his social life and the props were his immediate surroundings.
This program is organized in conjunction with Lawrence Weiner’s inaugural exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, AS OFTEN AS NOT, on view from September 12 to October 25, 2025.
Program
Part 1
2:00–3:30pm
A Second Quarter (1975, 88 minutes)
A Second Quarter is decidedly European; the “place” (Berlin) is the catalyst for the “action.” Works recited in the film are concerned with barriers and borders, physical and geophysical phenomena. Characters translate, count, and recite the alphabet. They build a narrative that is not a story followed dogmatically but rather a pattern from which to extract one’s version of what is seen. The locations include an old bourgeois apartment, a government office near West Berlin’s Zoo train station, and the ominous WW2 ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof with the Berlin Wall in the background. —Video Data Bank
3:30–4:00pm
Intermission #1: Audio set
Selections from recently remastered sound work made for exhibitions and broadcasts by Weiner.
Part 2
4:00–5:00pm
Lawrence Weiner’s Passage to the North (1981), Plowman’s Lunch (1982), How Far Is There: Part Two of Hearts and Helicopters (1999)
Passage to the North (1981, 16 minutes)
Passage to the North revolves around a reverse Ibsen dialogue (Ibsen’s people would have longed for the south) about the necessity of the various characters—including two hard-faced young women in black leather coats and a soft man—going to the north. Domestic scenes of inquisition and conflict are intercut with black and white photographs and movies of a fire being put out on the blackened remains of a ship. Weiner inserts his texts more adroitly and humorously than usual: at one point, he sensuously sucks a woman’s toes while placing a telegram that spells out various verbal “actions” or situations to take place in a Northern Art Center. —Ann-Sargeant Wooster
Plowman’s Lunch (1982, 28 minutes)
Plowman’s Lunch is called a documentary because its intent was to explore actual occurrence, be it the building of the work, or what befalls the players. It still uses the structure of an open form although the characters are more developed: they have “names” and some of the scenes were dangerous to produce. There is a nucleus of three major characters, two women with boys names, Boris and Jamiee, and one man with a girl’s name, Steentje (Pebble), a transvestite/hermaphrodite. The music composition is harmonious with developments. Cartoon-like framing and intense color give the film a painterly quality. It is about emigration; in contrast to Passage to the North it is “out of the house.” A loose group of young and old people, intellectuals and workers (both blue and white collar) are attempting to leave where they are, to simply go somewhere, anywhere. They are a microculture, their machinations are revealed in stylized vignettes, i.e. stories unto themselves that are strung throughout the film like fishermen’s buoys. Dutch and English, a smattering of French, German, and Latin flow throughout the story like water. —EAI
How Far Is There: Part Two of Hearts and Helicopters (1999, 17 minutes)
There are times when concurrent multiple realities of place demand at least an attempt to determine who in fact has, and where is, this place in the sun. Hearts and Helicopters occurs at that moment in the lives of four people. —Video Data Bank
5:00–5:30pm
Intermission #2: Audio set
Selections from recently remastered sound work made for exhibitions and broadcasts by Weiner.
Part 3
5:30–6:30pm
Lawrence Weiner’s Blue Moon Over (2001), Deep Blue Sky (2002), Light Blue Sky (2002), Wild Blue Yonder (2002), Inherent in the Rhumb Line (2005), and Turning Some Pages (2007)
Blue Moon Over (2001, 5 minutes)
Blue Moon Over extends Weiner’s works into the digital realm, positing phrases that investigate the language of ADMIRE DESIRE ACQUIRE. Its visual system suggests flowcharts, horizon lines, and diagrams, Blue Moon Over is a series of animated sequences of drawings and text fragments. These subtle manipulations imply Weiner’s metamorphic inquiries in response to the then-recent bombing of the World Trade Center. —EAI
Deep Blue Sky (2002, 6 minutes)
Deep Blue Sky is a game of association and juxtaposition. In this silent motion drawing, Weiner engages in visual and linguistic play. The interaction of Weiner’s elliptical text and graphic symbols—which suggest stylized tic-tac-toe boards—allude to the relationships between artist/viewer, language and perception: “That of which there is no trace does not enter into the equation.” —EAI
Light Blue Sky (2002, 4 minutes)
A silent “motion drawing,” Light Blue Sky continues Weiner’s digital exploration of language structures, categorical systems, and the process of reading. Distinct interactions of shifting colors, animated graphics and epigrammatic text, Weiner engages in play that suggests philosophical puzzles. “The future laden as it is with the mistakes of the past” reads one of his typically gnomic phrases. —EAI
Wild Blue Yonder (2002, 15 minutes)
Wild Blue Yonder fuses animated drawings and text with video footage of Weiner’s friends, colleagues, and family. Weiner recontextualizes the everyday, leveling gestures, conversations, actions, and interactions into a system of codes that blur the boundaries between what is choreographed and what is improvised. Weiner’s visual grammar (arrows, horizons, frames) suggests motion and borders; the relationships of the animations, aphoristic text, and conversations activate questions of intimacy within the conventions of physical and personal space. —EAI
Inherent in the Rhumb Line (2007, 7 minutes)
Quotes taken from the motion drawing: “With the advent of the rhumb line—a line of constant bearing or loxodrome—a cognitive pattern developed in the Western world that allowed the possibility to conceive pillage on voyages of discovery. Inherent in the Rhumb Line is an imperative for use—regardless of consequence— a flattened convolution that marries landscape with loot and preordination….” The motion drawing was made for an exhibition of the same name at the National Maritime Museum, London. —EAI
Turning Some Pages (2007, 5 minutes)
This work was Weiner’s participation in the Howard Smith Lecture Series held at BAFTA. The intent of the series was to show that Howard Smith Paper was not just a paper distributor, but a vehicle to celebrate what people can achieve with paper. Weiner’s choice was to make an animation that shows the action of reading a book in his own style. Images of dice are interspersed with cryptic aphorisms (“With the addition of explicit meaning, the implicit sense of the throw of the dice becomes clear”); arrows say to turn the page. A layer of complexity and enigma repurposes his droll 1981 audio work Where It Came From as its soundtrack, with Roma Baran on the piano. Weiner matter-of-factly explains: “Art is not a metaphor upon the relationship of human beings to objects and objects to objects in relation to human beings, but a representation of an empirical existing fact.” —EAI
For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.
Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to progam@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.