Lawrence Weiner: Films and Videos

Please join us at e-flux Screening Room on Sunday, September 14th for a special day-long program of Lawrence Weiner’s films and audio works, prepared in collaboration with Gladstone Gallery. The program will include three cinematic screenings with audio intermissions, focusing on Weiner’s redefinition of the mise-en-scène as a direct, material form of expression.

Lawrence Weiner often referred to his film works as “moved pictures” and “motion drawings.” Weiner's view of the world is illustrated in recurring topics of emigration, censorship, eroticism, capitalism, and a cornucopia of the Seven Deadly Sins. As a director, Weiner’s approach was a mix of the formal and informal. He scripted his movies with his works in language as an armature for the structure of the film and allowed his “players” ad hoc to deliver the lines in the manner of their own choosing. In humanizing his propositions, he put into motion a dramaturgy that simultaneously functioned as documentation as well as performance. The players were a part of his social life and the props were his immediate surroundings. 

Running in three screenings from 2 to 6:30pm on September 14, the program will feature Lawrence Weiner’s A Second Quarter (1975); Passage to the North (1981); Plowman’s Lunch (1982); How Far Is There: Part Two of Hearts and Helicopters (1999);  Blue Moon Over (2001); Deep Blue Sky (2002); Light Blue Sky (2002); Wild Blue Yonder (2002); Inherent in the Rhumb Line (2005); and Turning Some Pages (2007). Selections from recently remastered sound work made by Weiner for exhibitions and broadcasts will be presented during intermissions. View the full program and reserve tickets here. 

A key figure in the development of Conceptual Art, Lawrence Weiner pursued language itself as the dynamic in his art-making process. Weiner’s work posits a redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship and the very nature of artwork. Weiner has produced books, films, videos, performances, and audio works. His cartoons stake out new territories as a departure from his drawings, while melding his epigrammatic statements traveling across the screen, from stage left to stage right and vice versa. Weiner was an inveterate urban dweller; he spent his entire life working between New York City and Amsterdam until his death in 2021.

“Lawrence Weiner: Films and Videos” is organized in collaboration with Gladstone Gallery. The program takes place in conjunction with Lawrence Weiner's inaugural exhibition at Gladstone, AS OFTEN AS NOT, on view at 520 West 21st Street from September 12 to October 25, 2025.

Accompanying the program, the online presentation of Lawrence Weiner's A First Quarter (1973) runs for the month of September 2025 as part of e-flux Film's series Staff Picks. Additionally, e-flux Film Notes is pleased to republish an interview of Weiner by Bartomeu Mari, originally conducted for and published in Show (&) Tell / The Films & Videos of Lawrence Weiner (Imschoot/Uitgevers, 1992). View A First Quarter here, and read the interview here.

Special thanks to the Lawrence Weiner Estate.