Photo: Gerhard Kassner
However, there are values which he believes both art and design share. He talks about his work and how it doesn’t matter if he actually makes something or not the most important thing as in design is to communicate an idea to somebody. He also states that design is as politically important as art because they both change how people react to society. His final comparison between the two disciplines was that they are each information without an explanation and your goal is to reach people who think what you have to say doesn’t concern them.Lawrence Weiner
Lawrence Weiner is one of the key figures of Conceptual Art. He was born in 1942, in the Bronx, New York. Like other Conceptual artists who came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, Weiner’s work is about forms of display and distribution that challenge traditional assumptions about the nature of the art object. Typographic wall installations have been a primary medium for him since the 1970s. He has also produced video, film, books, sound art, sculpture, performance art, installation art and graphic art. His work, with its focus on the potential for language to serve as an art form, has exerted a fascination over graphic designers since the 1990s, when his “public typography” was discovered by designers eager to learn from contemporary art practice. As Eye magazine noted: “Lawrence Weiner's art is a kind of sculpture made of language, free from excess or embellishment and strangely familiar from its far-reaching influence on graphic designers.”
Text: Lynsey Power, Graphic BirdWatching
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