MOCA Geffen: Allan Kaprow + Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner, AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE, 1988, language + the materials referred to, dimensions variable, installation at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany, 2000, photo courtesy of Moved Pictures Archive, New York, artwork © 2008 Lawrence Weiner/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

MOCA Geffen

Allan Kaprow + Lawrence Weiner
Kaprow thru June 30; Weiner thru July 14

Allan Kaprow invented the Happening. Lawrence Weiner helped invent Conceptual Art. Both were New York guys working in the border - a thin line or a huge no-man’s-land - between art and life at a time when art was art and everything else was everything else. Kaprow came out of abstract expressionism when he started working with found materials, then started filling rooms with those materials, then started activating those rooms with the actions of performers - and the reactions of observers. Weiner, a generation younger, came out of minimal art when he started substituting words for shapes and verbal descriptions for objects. 

Allan Kaprow, Household, women licking jam off of a car,1964, photo by Sol Goldberg,

So Kaprow went wide and Weiner got small, but both made art something else, something very different from what it had been by getting to the root of what it was wanting to be. The Kaprow retrospective is full of historical documentation - including films, videos, photographs, scripts, handwritten instructions, and souvenirs - as well as reconstructions of installations which you can now interact with. The Weiner retrospective is words, phrases, and concepts, plastered all over the walls in graceful, sometimes dramatic formations, like poetry springing off the page, and all over objects, posters, and books, like poetry staying on the page. The visual impact of these two retrospectives, one as messy as life and the other as tidy as rational thought, couldn’t be more different, but the mind-expanding impact is equal - on opposite sides of the brain.

MOCA Geffen
152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo
Mon., Fri., 11am-5pm; Thurs., 11am-8pm; Sat., Sun.,
11am-6pm; Closed Tues.-Wed. (213) 621-1745.
http://www.moca.org