“a syntax– not, it follows, a semantics. For whereas semantics concern the production of meaning and the various processes of signification, a syntax ‘merely’ concerns the art of ordering things, of arranging and locating things (with certain orders, of both objects and concepts, tending to produce certain meanings). Here, one could discern a shared attachment to the original enterprise of art as a decidedly open-ended, non-decidable affair.
It is not so much art’s business to produce meaning (as a semantic view of art would have it), as it is to allow for various meanings to be extrapolated from it by the viewer, the visitor, he or she who wanders among art’s proverbial building blocks.”
-Dieter Roelstraete on Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner’s “A Syntax of Dependency”