Do You Believe in Water?, 1976
Film: 39 min, color, sound.
A tape within a structure by: Lawrence Weiner
Featuring: Robert Stearns, Steve Bluter, Suzanne Harris, Norman Fischer, Ann Wooster, Madeleine Burnside
Director: Lawrence Weiner
Producers: The Kitchen; New York City; Fifi Corday and Moved Pictures, New York City Videophotography: Carlota Schoolman, Michael H. Shamberg
Table: Jim Burton
Audio-track Overlap: Lawrence Weiner
Melodic Noise: A Tribe in/of New Guinea, from Niugini Sampela Song Bilong Yumi [Schlenker-Film, 45 rpm].
Voices: AZW Bentley, Lawrence Weiner
First presentation: The Kitchen, New York City, 1976, as a component of the exhibition "With Relation to the Various Manners of Use," September 25-October 18, 1976.
In Do You Believe in Water?, conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner employs minimalist props and scenarios to stage an oblique psychological drama. In a nearly bare loft space, Weiner's performers cluster around an octagonal pink table, enacting a series of what seem to be choreographed exercises or processes: playing patty-cake, grappling for possession of rectangular blocks, kissing and embracing, engaging in bizarrely coded conversations. The performers' physical actions and interactions with one another — and with the distinctively colored and shaped objects in the space — evolve in constantly shifting relationships that become a kind of language of inflected meaning. As these relationships unfold, viewers must synthesize these cues, together with a multi-layered soundtrack that suggests linguistic, rhetorical and philosophical puzzles. This performance translates themes and strategies seen in Weiner's conceptual artworks into the realm of theater.
Text from Electronic Arts Intermix catalogue
Technical details
- Original title:
- Do You Believe in Water?
- Registration number:
- 2882
- Artist:
- Weiner, Lawrence
- Date created:
- 1976
- Date acquired:
- 2007
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
- Object type:
- Audiovisual recording
- Media:
- Single-channel video, color, sound, 38 min 51 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.
