Looking back on his early sculptural work, Lawrence Weiner recalls he “was trying to take non-heroic materials” (such as plywood) and “give them their place within [his] world of art,” maintaining “strength” and “vigor,” but “without the heroics.” Likewise, his works that are more explicitly based in language disclose a desire to achieve a non-hierarchical—or in Weiner’s words, “non-macho”—relationship to the viewer: they hardly ever contain instructions or restrictions regarding how the artwork should look. Even his site-responsive works resist contextualization through syntactical and lexical ambiguities and unequivocally remain open to a multiplicity of interpretations.
DEEP BLUE SKY maintains a similar quality of openness due to its vaguely symbolic language and abstract drawn elements. Words, ovals, or individual cells from a grid move up along a diagonal line, and colors modulate between red, blue, yellow, pink, and shades of gray without any immediately discernible motivation. The “struggle” between an “oval” and a “triangle” is one of the underlying threads of the video, and could refer to a confrontation between genders or sexes based on their correspondence with the shapes of conventional public restroom signage. However, other possible interpretations remain on the horizon thanks to the artist’s plasticity of language. Indeed, as Weiner himself concedes: “When you are dealing with language, there is no edge the picture drops over or drops off. You are dealing with something completely infinite.”