Lawrence Weschler

Biography

Lawrence Weschler, a contributing editor to VQR, is the former director of the New York Institute for the Humanities and artistic director emeritus of the Chicago Humanities Festival. His books include Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint, 2011) and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences (McSweeney’s, 2006), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He is the author of a set of paired biographies of Robert Irwin (the revised edition of Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees) and David Hockney (True to Life), both released in 2009 from the University of California Press.

See Work

ESSAYS / Spring 2014

Tomaselli’s Times

By Lawrence Weschler

The noted artist finds visual poetry in the news.
ESSAYS / Fall 2013

David Hockney’s Timescapes

By Lawrence Weschler

Hockney’s entire production over the three decades since 1982 has been shadowed by death and in many ways can be seen as a direct response to all of that dying—​a defiant celebration of life (“Love life!”) in the face of annihilation, the...
ESSAYS / Summer 2011

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

By Lawrence Weschler

The more they’ve been shrinking, the bigger it’s been getting, though maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. The world’s great coral reefs, that is, and in particular Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, on the one hand—and, on the other, the...

Spring 2009

Double Vision: The Art of Trevor and Ryan Oakes

By Lawrence Weschler
Fall 2008

David Hockney: A Return to Painting

By Lawrence Weschler
PROFILES / Spring 2008

Embeddedness: Robert Irwin in His Seventies

By Lawrence Weschler

Hard to believe how I myself am now older, older by far, than Robert Irwin was when we first began having our conversations, coming on thirty years ago. Fresh out of college, a classic, overstuffed instance of surplus education, I had been...
ESSAYS / Fall 2006

A Berlin Epiphany

By Lawrence Weschler

And now, there it came looming into view: an austere block-wide low-slung hive of graphite-gray monoliths: monoface rectangular plinths arrayed in a regular perpendicular grid over gently undulating terrain—more than three thousand of them...

ESSAYS / Spring 2006

A Final Thought on Intelligent Design—and a Modest Proposal

By Lawrence Weschler
ESSAYS / Winter 2006

The Graphics of Solidarity

By Lawrence Weschler

The Solidarity logo was designed by J. and K. Janiszewski, two marginally employed graphic artists living in Gdansk, during the second week of the August 1980 strike at their hometown’s mammoth Lenin Shipyards. Within a month it had become...

ARTICLES / Fall 2005

Unfinished: On Vincent Desiderio’s Sleep

By Lawrence Weschler

The painting—a stunningly ambitious tableau, eight feet high, fully twenty-four feet long, and portraying twelve mostly naked figures, as visioned from above, arrayed, recumbent, one beside the next, knotted up in sheets and tossed by sleep...