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Zipline Lois Weinberger died at the age of 72 on Tuesday night. It leaves wonderfully wild gardens.
His entire life was the world of Weinberger. Not the cultivated, but the overlooked, the peripheral. From this, he developed his own work. The Tyrolean, born in Stams in 1947, came late to art and only completed an apprenticeship as a locksmith and blacksmith. But as early as the 1970s he practiced what he later called his “research.” He painted over one of his sister’s school essays with red pencils to “make it even redder”: a subversive poetic tour guided by the absurd ad-absurdity of an authoritative marker, as he later practiced over and over again. In 1977, he decorated a large church tree with plastic sheeting. He saw his “tree festival” in the tradition of folk art, which was so typical of his thinking, that in a wonderfully subtle way he involved highly political discourses in his art. When he left Stams in 1988, he planted a garden in Vienna. There he planted weeds, as he had to pull them up on his parents’ farm. In Salzburg, he once tore a piece of asphalt to allow nettles and other spontaneous vegetation to grow freely. In documenta X 1997, he planted a disused railway track at the Kassel cultural station with plants from the Balkans, it was the most notorious contribution. In the last documenta 2017 I met him next to the track. He examined his thistles and took out some other plants; allowed a little order. He once wrote “Precise Carelessness” in one of his garden poems, a perfect motto for his walk with nature.
Until recently, Weinberger was interested in rough plants, which are often described as invasive, which he also politically understood as an image for migration. When is there a plant at home, where does the strangeness begin, where do the borders run? In 1998 he created a “garden” in Innsbruck: closed and at the same time protected, limited and wild, it has proliferated here ever since. It is reminiscent of his previous painting in the exercise book: the exaggeration of the authoritarian fence to its opposite, in protection against the will to organize. And remember the joy of supposedly useless things like in the “Tree Festival”. He was not interested in cultivation, but in the “invisible nature”, the “nature of the spirit”, he explained to me on the occasion of his great retrospective in St. Etienne in 2012. His maps of the city could also be seen there. The streets are named after plants: liver flower, peony, mullein. Some of these cards have only part of the name, shoe, candle, foot, north: “Words free images” he wrote in one of his great poems. This also contains the line “intertwining with each other”: these are words that we can read as a motto of his art. “Be extremely vigilant even for distant edges” continues: Lois Weinberger is now on her way to the most distant edge. We will miss him here.
