Installation view

Photograph: Courtesy The Whitney Museum Of American Art

In many respects, the art of Lawrence Weiner is a lot like Seinfeld: It’s about nothing. Certainly, his first U.S. retrospective, assembled by curator Donna De Salvo for the Whitney, might frustrate museumgoers expecting something tangible in the way of painting, sculpture or installation. With the exception of numerous small multiples and posters, there’s little in the way of objects in this show, just the artist’s famed epigrams—which run the gamut from instructions for making artwork to short haikulike phrases suggesting existential algorithms—painted or printed directly on the walls in large block letters. But by saying the work is about nothing, I’m not speaking of just its form; even the content leaves a void for the viewer. On this point, the artist’s Statement of Intent (1969), which greets visitors as they step off the elevator, is quite clear: “The artist may construct the piece; the piece may be fabricated; the piece need not be built. Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.”

“The occasion of receivership”— i.e., how and why we look at art, what we get out of it by looking at it and what it may ultimately mean or not mean—has been the focal point of Weiner’s oeuvre for more than 40 years, and it’s astounding to think that he is only now enjoying a major survey in an American museum. As one of the founders of ’60s Conceptual art, Weiner, 65, is a key figure in postwar art history. The evanescence of his output is arguably a factor in why it’s taken this long for him to be so honored here (Europe is another matter; there he’s something of a god), but it is interesting to note that few artists have achieved so indelible a style with so little evident effort. Whether printed on a matchbook or chiseled into the facade of a building, a Weiner, in all of its permutations, is unmistakably a Weiner. In large measure, this is due to the graphic nature of his work, a quality made all the more apparent by De Salvo’s dense installation, in which variations in color and line and abstract flourishes—orange letters outlined in blue here; yellow letters outlined in red there—are displayed to maximum effect.

Indeed, Weiner is the fulcrum between early Modernist experiments with typography-as-art (like those of Kurt Schwitters) and a younger generation that includes Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and even Kara Walker, which may be one reason why the Whitney overlapped the latter’s survey with Weiner’s. Revisiting her show after taking in Weiner’s, I was struck by how textlike her wall-mounted silhouettes became.

But Weiner differs dramatically from any of his successors in terms of attitude. Although his work proposes a radical subversion of art, it is bound up in the sort of ’60s optimism that supposed anything was possible and that true fulfillment could be obtained beyond any material measure. Perhaps that’s why this particular exhibit has been trumpeted as a sort of necessary corrective to our current market-driven art world. I wouldn’t disagree, but it should be pointed out that while it’s hard to imagine Weiner’s work being hammered down for tens of millions at auction, he’s done pretty well for himself thanks to private and public commissions (again, mostly in Europe). His career has afforded him, for example, a very nice townhouse in the West Village. This point is worth mentioning because, like a lot of the ’60s counterculture, Weiner’s work evinces numerous contradictions, especially in its mix of Madison Avenue hucksterism and apparent naïveté.

Recently, the critic Charlie Finch sent up Weiner’s work as stoner art in Artnet, and, yeah, seeing something like WHAT IS SET UPON THE TABLE SITS UPON THE TABLE on a wall can remind one of those late-night epiphanies made while passing around the bong; reading it, you can practically hear Keanu Reeves in your head. But while many in Weiner’s generation have abandoned idealism for the trading floor, he has stuck to his conviction that stripping things down to their bare essentials is the path to transcendence. Even more than contemporaries like Minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, Weiner pared down art not to just to pure form or language but to thought itself. In this sense, his art about nothing is, in fact, about everything.