Lawrence Weiner’s WHEREWITHAL treats the book not as documentation but as a continuation of sculptural practice by linguistic means.

The title signals an inquiry into the conditions of making—the “with what” and “under what terms”—and aligns with Weiner’s Declaration of Intent: works may be realized, need not be realized, and can exist as precise relations stated in language. Here, the page functions as a spatial field; typography operates as placement and scale, while prepositions, verbs of disposition, and measures constitute the operative toolkit.

Reading becomes a form of enactment: line breaks, capitals, and spacing are not design ornaments but plastic decisions that articulate vectors, edges, and volumes without recourse to a physical object. Rather than fixing exemplary pieces, WHEREWITHAL maps procedures—repetition, variation, transfer across contexts and languages—and tests how common speech can be sharpened into specific, shareable instructions. As such, the book offers a compact poetics of means, translating sculptural questions of material, measure, and site into linguistic operations and foregrounding the responsibility of setting conditions in and through text.