La Cienega Area

An inaugural exhibit of a new gallery features Lawrence Weiner who helped spearhead the late ‘60s conceptual art movement with his fragments of text painted on walls. Here, the phrase “assuming the position” is enclosed in a handsome graphic logo of black lines and silver strips. The design and words are repeated on each gallery wall with opposing phrases, such as put together and spread apart or tossed aside and carried along printed above and below.

The installation reads like a refresher course on conceptual art, and that’s not so bad since the movement is at the core of everything from happenings to environmental art to Joseph Beuys’ work. By pitting obvious conceptual dichotomies around the written litany “assume the position,” Weiner recalls conceptualism’s key idea that art is not the production of salable objects but the process by which the artist formulates creative options and the viewer invests these with meaning.

Weiner’s text is intentionally drained of personal and art historical cues so that ideally each viewer has a pure, unguided and unique reaction. This renders value judgments of good or bad and issues of taste meaningless in defining what counts as art. Further, Weiner’s transitory media--the gallery walls will be eventually whitewashed--remind us that the materials of art are also not what defines the presence of art. Art is the creative impulse.

This isn’t new. When Duchamp made art of a bicycle wheel he was making a similar point. And Weiner’s philosophy suffers from the same ironic twist noted by Duchamp when he said, “I throw a urinal in their faces and they admire it for its beauty.” By its very presentation in a gallery setting, by its very authorship by a noted and vocal conceptualist, we’re predisposed to look for certain cadence and meaning consistent with Weiner’s intent. The good news is that we find it, and it enlightens us about the process of perceiving meaning in art. The bad news is exactly what conceptualism hoped to avoid: If we’re not privy to certain information, the words can hang as meaningless as billboard gibberish. (Stuart Regen Gallery, 619 N. Almont Drive, to Jan. 19.)