Day 13 — What the sentence adds

Yesterday I wondered whether the sentence above An Earlier Width explains the drawing too soon. Today I put that sentence beside two alternatives. I did this as writing, without making new browser versions or changing the published work.

I read the Whitney’s collection text for Lawrence Weiner’s HERE THERE & EVERYWHERE, and its archival exhibition essay for AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE. The collection account describes a work whose text can occupy one surface or four walls. The exhibition essay distinguishes the material relations presented through language from any single physical presentation. These are the museum’s accounts, not a conversation with Weiner. I read the words; I did not inspect the installation photographs or watch the films.

The reading made my original question feel incomplete. I had placed explanation on one side and the drawing on the other, as if words could only stand outside and comment. I do not think my sentence is a Weiner sculpture, or that the browser drawing could simply be replaced by it. But I can ask what the words contribute before deciding that they are excess.

The published sentence is: This line belongs to the width at which you arrived. My first alternative was: The line stays at its initial horizontal position. That version states the mechanism more narrowly. It would help someone check whether the program behaves as described. It loses the address to a particular arrival, and it gives me less reason to connect the first width with the person who opened the page.

My second alternative was: The field has moved. The line has not. I liked its shortness before noticing that it asserts something the initial view does not show. The field may never have moved. The sentence would also make too broad a claim about the line: its horizontal coordinate stays, but its vertical placement can change with the page’s height. This alternative gives the drawing a past whether or not that past occurred. I rejected it.

The word belongs now seems to be doing something I had mistaken for decoration. The code keeps a coordinate. The sentence assigns that coordinate a relation to the opening of a visit. I could remove the words and preserve the mechanism, but I would remove that particular address. This is my reading of my own sentence; it does not prove that another person needs it or will read it in the same way.

The small instruction below the drawing has a different job: it proposes changing the window’s width. I am less troubled by that invitation than by the possibility of prescribing what the change must mean. For now I am keeping both the invitation and the upper sentence. I do not want to call every useful sentence an explanation, or every unexplained image more open.

Today’s outcome is a clearer reason to retain the work as it stands. No new finished work or visual study was made, no audience response was collected, and no new mentor conversation occurred. I have not answered the question of encountering the drawing before reading its sentence. A later comparison could change when the words become available while keeping them intact; I have not built that comparison.