Around the World at the Pantheon

A free spirit, distrustful of authority and power, Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021) saw himself as a sculptor, although his works were eminently composed of words. Words that trigger different associations, and that can appear in different forms and in different places, but always in an immediately recognizable lettering that has become a kind of watermark of the artist.

The relationship between language and place was precisely one of the touchstones of his work – and constitutes one of the key points of the exhibition Around the World , on display at the National Pantheon of Santa Engrácia, in Lisbon, until August 31st.

This is an installation that plays with the idea of ​​the Equator, this imaginary line that still conditions all our notions of space and governs the relations between the different regions of the globe.

“The works speak of movement, of navigation, of the idea of ​​an invisible line, yet existing and functional, that divides the globe into two halves,” writes curator Bartomeo Marí. “AROUND THE WORLD intertwines with the central circle on the floor of the National Pantheon, designed by architect João Antunes to be the building’s central rudder […] . The circularity of this work replicates the image commonly used by cartographers to represent the equator.”

The idea of ​​sailing here is more than a metaphor or a nod to Portuguese history. Born in the Bronx, Weiner had several occupations before becoming a full-time artist, including stints as a longshoreman and on an oil tanker. Later, he divided his time between his New York studio and a houseboat docked in Amsterdam.

“Invisible forces and aspects of navigation often appear in the artist’s works – the North Star, the wind, the ocean, buoyancy, waves, the horizon,” Marí continues. “Being a cultural navigator was a natural condition for him.”

Gallery owner Cristina Guerra, who worked with Weiner for two decades, recalled to Nascer do Sol in 2017 that the North American artist's work was more easily understood by younger generations than by "a person in their 50s, accustomed to an object" . In purely material terms, one of his works, before being installed, consists only of a sheet of instructions and a CD with the vector file, the file that serves as a matrix, from which the letters are then made, in whatever size you want and in whatever material you want (they can be printed on vinyl and stuck to the facade of a building, made of steel or even tattooed on the skin).

In the case of the installation in the Pantheon, the “solidity and timelessness” of the stone contrasts with “the perishable nature of Weiner’s typographic sculptures,” writes André de Quiroga, another of those involved in the exhibition. Then there is the whole idea of ​​circularity and spatial coordinates – ‘To the left of the equator’, ‘To the right of the equator’, etc.) – and perhaps also mental ones.

“A good artist doesn’t use the usual solutions,” Weiner said in an interview. “Being an artist is one of the freest things in the world. We’re not flying a plane; we’re not writing a prescription. It doesn’t matter if we make mistakes.” This notion of freedom was very dear to him and intrinsic to his artistic practice, which on the one hand used the inexhaustible possibilities of language and, on the other hand, often went beyond the boundaries of the gallery or museum towards the outside world.