review of the big Lawrence Wiener retrospective--
"Weiner's conceptualism, if that's the right word for it, turns out to be a strange way of transcending the romance of ruins, his equivalent of his contemporary Robert Smithson's embrace of entropy as a basic principle for his work. But such strategies have a deep background. Artists have always held that something remains of the life they give to a work even after its inevitable physical decrepitude. Alberto Giacometti, in his day, questioned whether Modernist abstract art might not be too vulnerable to the ravages of time; one could understand classical statuary from a broken torso, or medieval painting from an isolated and cut-down panel from an altarpiece--but, he wondered, "How would a Brancusi statue look if it were chipped and broken, or a Mondrian painting if it were torn or dark with age?" For centuries, Greek artists like Apelles and Praxiteles were held up as models of artistic achievement even though their works were entirely lost; they inspired generations through verbal report alone. As Walter Benjamin observed, "The medium through which works of art continue to influence later ages is always different from the one in which they affect their own age." Turning his art into suggestive language no longer vulnerable to ruin, Weiner seems to be trying an end run around history--like the ghost at the funeral, seeing his own work in the form it might have some time in the future when some future civilization has displaced our own and he is at best a figure of legend like the masters of ancient Greek painting and sculpture..."
