Bury Bury Good for You: Lawrence Weiner and the launch of Bury Sculpture Centre

THE WORK DOES NOT HAVE AN AFTERLIFE

IT HAS A LIFE

THE SCULPTURE WORKS IN ANY WAY THAT IT CAN BE REPRESENTED TO ANY ONE

+ ONE DOES HOPE THAT THE RECEIVER REMEMBERS IT IN THE SAME MANNER AS THEY REMEMBER ANYTHING THEY HAVE SEEN THAT HAS IN SOME WAY MANNER OR FORM AFFECTED THEIR PERCEPTION OF THEIR PLACE IN THE SUN

WHICH IS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE OPERATION

– LAWRENCE WEINER
AMSTERDAM 22 MAY 2014

Bury Sculpture Centre opened its doors for the first time last month with the launch of the fourth Bury Text Festival and a new exhibition from superstar conceptualist, New York-based Lawrence Weiner. The Centre occupies the ground floor of Bury Art Museum, a space formerly occupied by Bury Library and is the coalescence of several long-standing conversations: the role of public sculpture in the area, the growth of Bury Text Festival and the ongoing relationship between Lawrence Weiner and the Northwest.

The Sculpture Centre’s history is rooted in the Irwell Sculpture Trail which runs from Salford Quays up to Bacup in the Pennines. The beginnings of the trail, says Tony Trehy, the driving force behind the Centre and founder of Text Festival, were a happy accident. “There had been about three sculptures commissioned for the area at the time – after a while we began to look how we could be a bit more strategic. If all the boroughs that were involved – Salford, Bury and Rossendale – could start to think together and commission more works along that route then some sort of sculpture trail could have potential.”

“The trail really came out of a phenomenon of the 1990s,” he says. “Public art was very active and people were very interested.” Interestingly, the National Lottery initially only offered funding for two art forms, film and public art. Some of the UK’s most recognisable public realm works – The Angel of the North by Antony Gormley, for example, or the revolving programme of Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth commissions – were conceived within this decade. The big money involved meant that projects such as the Irwell Trail could invest in more internationally renowned artists and attract a wider audience. Today the Irwell Trail includes the work of over 70 artists across 33 miles.

During this boom time, Trehy took over Bury Museum’s gallery programme. “This is when we really began to join up our thinking between the public art commissioning and the gallery. If an artist was invited to make a new work we would have an exhibition simultaneously.” This was working fine for a while but the economy was changing. “Of course the Lottery money ran out,” he says. “The partnership between the local authorities was faced with the question of what would be the next step.”

Bury, at the time, was going through a library review and it was inevitable that there were going to be cutbacks. Part of the decision taken was to reduce the size of the library. “It seemed like the perfect opportunity,” says Trehy. “We had been thinking about the success of other sculpture centres like Tatton or Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The difference, particularly with YSP, is that you arrive somewhere, a hub, before you begin to navigate the park. Having a first point of public contact for the trail seemed a good [idea]. We also wanted this indoor hub to have an exhibition programme with its own integrity – somewhere that would work as an individual experience.”

So Bury Sculpture Centre was born, and its launch exhibition of the language-based sculptures of Lawrence Weiner coincides with the fourth edition of Text Festival – fitting, given the space’s former use as a library. Weiner made his name in the 1960s conceptual art movement alongside Joseph Kosuth, Carl Andre and Robert Barry. Working prolifically since the start of his career, he is collected by most major museums and is still travelling and exhibiting all over the world. You get the sense that sometimes Weiner doesn’t even realise how far and wide his work is situated. When I spoke to him for this feature he was on his way to a public sculpture in Hamburg where, he commented, “It seems I have three public sculptures.”

Weiner uses language in his work – phrases, sentences or individual words on paper or vinyl on the gallery walls. In Bury, the gallery exhibition opens with black text on bright blue

CONTOURED OVER THE HORIZON & / JOINED AT MANY FIXED POINTS / ALONG THE CURVE DELINEATING / THAT AT THE WATER & / THAT NOT AT THE WATER

“The work is an aphorism which came about in a conversation with the curators in Bury,” says Weiner. “As with most aphorisms, it functions as a drawing using sculptural materials.” In the public realm his materials change accordingly: “None of the work is site-specific,” he says, “although often the materials themselves are specific to the location. My work over the years has changed in its awareness of various cultural materials. As the work finds different plinths, material itself becomes more informed and hopefully so do I.” Language, for Weiner, is resolutely sculpture. “It is not sculptural, but sculpture. The material is language.”

This is not the first time Weiner has exhibited in the Northwest, or even Bury. In 1998 he was commissioned to make a work as part of Arttranspennine98 for a site in Hull. The work, Horizon, consisted of words on steel placed at different heights on the water-side of a river wall. As the water levels go up and down, the words are obscured or revealed. In 2000 there was risk of the work being put on sale or destroyed and Weiner gave the commissioners the option to re-site the work somewhere in the North of England, preferably in a river location. Bury Art Gallery saw the opportunity and, in conversation with Weiner, the work was reconfigured for a new location on the River Irwell under the new title Radcliffe Horizon. Keen to invite Weiner to make a new work for the Trail, when the 2005 Text Festival came around it seemed like the right moment. A large steel text in red, Water Made It Wet, was installed on a railway bridge by the canal in Radcliffe that year and an exhibition of Weiner’s poster archive was held in the gallery.

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“It is not sculptural, but sculpture. The material is language” – Lawrence Weiner

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Weiner’s influence stretches further than his public commissions in the area. It turns out that the Text Festival itself was inspired in part by the artist. Trehy had, over his career, been establishing himself not only as a curator but also as a poet.  Initially he saw these practices as separate. “I had been talking with Lawrence about how language functions, but then I was talking with the American poet Ron Silliman and realised that I had just had the same conversation with both of them. There seemed to be an artificial distinction between these practices and I was also making that artificial distinction by keeping them separate in my own work. I wondered what would happen if I put them in the same space at the same time. The first festival happened in 2005 and it has just kept on growing and getting a bigger response.” The festival has now become increasingly non-art-form specific and includes poetry, text art, sound, media and live art over ten weeks. “My original questions had been about poetry and conceptual art,” says Trehy, “But I realised that the issues were bigger than that, the actual art form is secondary.” Over time a comprehensive archive has also formed, the Bury Text Art Archive. “The archive should be a place of opportunity for new research, rather than just a depository, and with the archive we want to look at new models of artists' books and publishing.”

Now that the Sculpture Centre is up and running, it is a busy year ahead. After Text Festival closes in August, a group show, Remix, is planned, which links up to another international festival, Manchester’s 2014 Asia Pacific Triennial. Curated by David Thorp, Remix will bring together the work of three artists from the UK and three from China. Trehy comments that this will be “more recognisable as a sculpture show,” which may answer some critics of the current space and exhibition. During my visit I overheard several people commenting, “Is this it?” or something along the lines of, “Where’s all the sculpture then?” This is to be expected, in some sense, with an exhibition of sculpture that is wall-based and in a space that has been under the spotlight recently. When I put it to Weiner that some visitors to his exhibition might take quite a conservative view of his work, he firmly admonished me, “I’ve had the pleasure of working in Bury several times and I don’t find it conservative.”

Bury, says Trehy, “has always had a very international outlook. We have a commitment to our young people to engage in the dialogues of globalisation. We are not apart from that just because we are not a large city... We have a responsibility.” This is followed through in the commitment to not just temporary exhibitions, but in the permanent public works that the area of Bury is known for.

“The sculpture is part of the patrimony of Bury,” says Weiner, and he’s right. Chanced upon, revisited, discussed and endlessly snapped, works in the public realm have their own existence beyond the exhibition moment or the ‘big reveal.’ They can also be passed down through generations and transform slowly into the landscape, becoming part of a place. I’m glad they have not just crash-landed a fancy new architectural building into the town. The Sculpture Centre is the product of ideas developing over time, opportunities taken, threads coming together and various conversations arriving at the same place at the same time.