For his first American retrospective, the New York and Amsterdam based artist Lawrence Weiner approached the Geffen Contemporary as a “fairground,” and produced with curators Ann Goldstein and Donna De Salvo an exhibition that mines Conceptual Art’s relationship to theatricality. This exhibition, it seems, could be at home nowhere else but here; not since Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses planted themselves on the Geffen’s floor has this space felt so right for contemporary art and its content so effectively tied to the warehouse’s baroque interior logic. Weiner’s work sings here, bathed in light and producing in its unobtrusive conceptual density a kind of monastic calm.

The artist had a great deal of say aboout how this exhibition unfurled, and one senses that the whole experience is a kind of single, durational “work,” a performative reading of text and projection of situations. As part of Conceptual Art’s problematizing of conventional art objects in the 1960s, Weiner became interested in how art might prompt or outline a relationship between people, places, things. This tendency produced his signature text-on-wall pieces, simultaneously evasive and monumental, which shift the site of content from the work itself to the viewer’s experience in real space. That’s the kind of active, almost affronting demand of time and intellect we expect from art born of the historical avant-gardes; it’s good for us.