Tobacco.org

The Discreet Charm of the Gauloisie  

Lawrence Weiner has made a career out of taking abstraction to new levels. . . .

Then he decided to lose the end product and just let his titles do the talking, as printed words on walls. The results -- which can be imagined, if not seen, in Mr. Wiener's new retrospective at the Whitney Museum -- are like paint-by-numbers ideas viewers fill in for themselves. . . .

As the Whitney show, “As Far as the Eye Can See,” makes clear, his art is for those who like to roll their own, so to speak. The artist does this literally, with Gauloises loose-leaf tobacco. He started smoking at 13 or 14, he said, as a boy in the South Bronx, and has been smoking ever since.

Smoking’s charms are, appropriately, hard to capture; it is both smoke signal and smoke screen, both upper and downer. So Mr. Weiner is realistic and imaginative about its role in his life.

“I don’t see smoking as a ritual,” he said. “It’s a habit. I wouldn’t say it’s an admirable one.

Jump to full article »