Beached, 1970
Beached and Broken Off are among Lawrence Weiner’s first video works made in the early seventies. They were both shot in a marshy area by the sea and in sequences separated by dissolves. In both of them, five different actions are shown that allude to the title of the piece in question. In line with his famous ‘statements of intent’ formulated in 1969, the soundtrack of Beached begins with Weiner himself stating the conditions of the work of art: ‘An artist may construct a work and/or a work may be fabricated and/or a work need not be built. I elected five possibilities for videotape.’ Then the artist approaches a rocky beach and throws a piece of wood into the water. The five possibilities are actions related to the title and executed in the film: throwing, pulling, lifting, dragging and using leverage. In Broken Off, the actions involve breaking a tree branch, rubbing and kicking the ground, snapping a stick on a fence and scraping a fingernail on a stone.
Technical details
- Original title:
- Beached
- Registration number:
- 3652
- Artist:
- Weiner, Lawrence
- Date created:
- 1970
- Date acquired:
- 2009
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
- Object type:
- Audiovisual recording
- Media:
- Single-channel video, b/w, sound, 2 min 24 s
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
- Copyright:
- © Lawrence Weiner, VEGAP, Barcelona
- It has accessibility resources:
- No
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.
