This night Konrad Fischer Gallery was hosting a talk with Lawrence Weiner, one of the main actors in the field of Conceptual Art. His sculptures are mostly typographic texts as shown in his current exhibition.

Weiner was talking about art and society and their change in general, what art means or what art is not (something in secret for example is not art) what the artist does or wants (to put something in the world, make his art accessible and affect its environment - to not fuck up somebody’s day but somebody’s life, to not telling somebody something but show, …)

Here briefly what I extracted for myself of what he was talking about language as medium as well as his experience of working with type: (Partly in reference to his currently featured work)
Translation plays a significant role in his international exhibitions and he explains that one obstacle is that everything has a double meaning (e.g. end has several meanings and is therefore hard to use) and that sometimes it seems even harder to translate text than an image, but he wouldn’t want that just one language is spoken. (A question like “How do you handle something new?” for example almost couldn’t be translated into Arabic or Hebrew)
Language is just another tool - it’s his oil. He uses language also for the reasons that it is accessible and pragmatic. It says what it says.
Language is as sensual as touch. You don’t have language “inside you” - you don’t possess it like smell or touch. You rather have the object in you and as you start to name things you use language. (children speak in another language until they get forced to speak the commonly learned language) And to that level he brings his art - where you give things names.
The text is object.
Lawrence Weiner has no quotes in his work - he sometimes finds paraphrases appropriate but he clearly states that putting a phrase of Goethe on a wall doesn’t make an artist.
See it as a message in a bottle - it’s up to you what you do with the message and you can see the bottle as the society.
Besides words he also uses graphics or special characters such as parenthesis or brackets, they are also language and say things.
It always took some effort to find the right typeface after the last one got overused by communication design and he couldn’t manage to create an computable font himself.

Artist Series: Lawrence Weiner (Video by Hillman Curtis)