The 13th documenta spread so widely across the city that it had neither a centre nor a designated focal point. In keeping with the programme, it avoided the assertion of a centre. Against this background of a de-hierarchised exhibition, Lawrence Weiner addressed the problem of precisely this centre with the coloured wall text. He verbalised the attempt to delimit a concrete standpoint that presupposes a concentric, closed structure.
In evocative repetition, his stencil writing poses the question of those who determine what and where the centre of something is. And this question is at the same time the question of the power of definition over art. Critically addressed, then, is the task that the documenta had made its own concern for decades.
