Production Still from A Second Quarter, 1975
Goodman Gallery/Moved Pictures Archive
Lawrence Weiner is a noted figure in conceptual art who helped redefine the role of the artist as both a material practitioner and intellectual provocateur. He once claimed “walls were built for things to be put upon them,” and in Germany and throughout Europe, one can find numerous artworks by Weiner, including monumental installations of text-based mantras in public spaces and museum galleries. However, when he began working on themes related to Germany’s division in the 1970s, he did so without any direct interventions on the Berlin Wall itself, favoring instead other modes of border engagement and entanglement. In 1971, he adapted his Broken Off project to include a series of postcards that he sent out from East Berlin. In 1975, Weiner was awarded a DAAD grant and directed the avant garde film A Second Quarter. Actors in this experimental work include Coosje Kapteyn, Tony Long, Beatrice Conrad-Eybesfeld, and Weiner himself, all of whom read statements on camera from Weiner’s catalogues and other utterances in repetition. The film was shot on location in West Berlin and aimed to treat the city as a theoretical laboratory of liberation, free expression, and aggression through language games. The scenes take place in a number of dramatized domestic spaces and within sight of one iconic vista of the divided city—looking down along the Wall from an observation deck near the bombed-out ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof. Production stills by Weiner alternately offer a glimpse of the Wall as a strange cultural meeting place and a zone for charged recollection. In one instance, he stages an inscription on a building’s exterior wall of the insidious historic phrase from Nazi concentration camps: Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”).