GORDON: How did you go from being interested in the Abstract Expressionists to using words as a form?

WEINER: That was a political decision. If you wanted to make something that everybody could get, the way to do that was to make something with genuine sculptural values and to portray it in a language so that people could be able to do it themselves. Not instructions. But something that sat by itself. So that was it, and it just happened.

Despite the apparent simplicity of his work, Lawrence made revolutionary contributions to the art of his time. Among them is the capacity for a piece to simultaneously exist in multiple locations, while each time completely changing form according to its context of presentation. For Weiner, art is not bound to a support—wall, piece of canvas, video, computer screen, or sheet of paper. It is not the materials but the “little bit more” that makes all the difference.