Summary
Training her camera on art's display and consumption, Louise Lawler combines elements of institutional critique and Conceptualism to probe and question the values of authorship and ownership in the art world. A member of the Pictures Generation, Lawler herself has adopted the term pictures to describe examples of her work, itself indicative of the way in which her practice has always deemphasized its authorial claims, inviting a question of who ultimately may assert the right to an artwork once it has left the artist's studio. Aside from her signature photographs, often taken behind closed doors of art collectors' private residences, auction houses, or museums, Lawler's oeuvre has from the start included such ephemera as matchbooks, glass paperweights, engraved tumblers, or phonograph records - all an intrinsic part of her larger emphasis on art production's inseparability from the world of commodities and commercial exchange.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
Untitled (Swan Lake Invitation Card) (1981)
However, even though on an official level the invite changes nothing, it still mediates the experience of those going at Lawler's invitation, creating a community of her guests in amongst the other theatre-goers. As curator Douglas Eklund suggests: 'Lawler's gesture recast the quintessential uptown "elitist" event as a conspiratorial, wittily invisible infiltration of a black-tie audience with double-agents, who would naturally oscillate between viewing the performance through Lawler's "quotation marks", as it were, and succumbing to the guilty pleasure of watching the ballet'. Here an act of appropriation is at work, not only of the visual language of the invitation, but of the ballet itself, claiming tenuous ownership of this particular performance. Her photograph, Swan Lake, Lincoln Center, taken from her seat at the performance further asserts this, acting as an index of her presence.. Through this appropriation, Lawler draws our attention to the networks through which culture operates, using the techniques of conceptual art in order to examine the construction of audiences and reception, and the ways in which cultural capital operates.
Arranged by Barbara and Eugene Schwartz (1982)
Although this act of representing works of art as they are displayed in collectors' homes is clearly concerned with the ways in which collecting and arranging change the meanings of artworks, Lawler's position on this remains indeterminate. She resists easy indictment of the ways in which artworks become commodified through the market and instead focuses attention on the question without attempting to resolve it. With her selection of a view of the Schwartz's presentation of their collection, framing becomes a major theme; the thin rectangular frames that sit around Sherman's photographs are echoed by the doorway, making the domestic spaces intrinsic to the display of the work. The question of art's status as decoration is certainly in play here, but is by no means resolved; the artwork is not degraded by its context but is mediated by it, framed and re-presented by its proximity to other work and the interior domestic space in which it is placed. Furthermore, the works on display frustrate attempts to draw simple conclusions about what is being said in Lawler's photograph. Barbara and Eugene Schwartz were eminent collectors of the Pictures Generation, collecting work from Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Lawler herself. That Lawler focuses on the collection of patrons to herself and her contemporaries implicates the artist in the very networks that she reveals. This is typical of her attention to the systems through which art operates, not didactic in the same way as practices of Institutional Critique were made in the 1960s and '70s by artists like Hans Haacke, Lawler's work remains ambiguous and open, raising questions about art that remain unresolved.
Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut (1984)
Working with a 35mm camera and natural lighting available at the site, Lawler's photograph is divided into two, the tureen - an 18th century Chinese porcelain dish designed for serving soup - is shown in full whereas Jackson Pollock's Frieze (1953-55) is sharply cropped, as artist Andrea Fraser suggests looking like 'little more than apocalyptic wallpaper'. In Lawler's presentation this important work of modern art, which was one of Pollock's last all-over canvases completed in the year before his death, is pushed into the background. It becomes yet another ornament amongst the many trinkets of wealth lined up in their opulent surroundings, a symptom of the taste of a collector couple whose class position is suggested through the title in which they are named Mr and Mrs Burton Tremaine. Inviting us to question the relative cultural value of the objects shown, the focus on the tureen rather than the canvas leads to a sense that Pollock's work has been rendered kitsch by its owners, reduced to the status of decoration in the same way as the overly ornate serving dish. Now recognized as one of the artist's most important works, Pollock and Tureen presents one of the best examples of what the historian George Baker has referred to as Lawler's "project of continual re-presentation - not representation - but the openness of the artistic object to be re-presented again, and to become different in that re-presentation".
Helms Amendment (1989)
Produced for an exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, this work consists of 94 panels: 88 uniform monochrome photographs of disposable plastic cups staged in a manner reminiscent of Edward Weston's photographs of sweet peppers, and six panels that include the words of the Helms amendment. The inscriptions under the 88 prints in this series bear the names of the senators who voted for the amendment, color-coded to correspond to their party affiliation, and originally arranged around the room alphabetically by state. The remaining six frames that show the amendment's text represent those remaining senators who either voted against or abstained from the vote for the amendment. As the artist noted of the piece, "The cup to me had a certain feeling of a medicalized environment, and it also had a classical element to it". To Lawler, the repeated images suggest anonymity and disposability reflecting on the ways in which those with AIDS were treated by a society that should have been supporting them. It is one example of how politics are an important part of Lawler's practice, particularly in relation to issues of social justice, and antiwar politics. Often nuanced rather than didactic propositions (perhaps excepting the announcement to her 2003 solo-show at Metro Pictures that stated 'No Drinks for Those Who Do Not Support the Anti-War Demonstration'), works like Helms Amendment and WAR IS TERROR (2001/2003) offer a complicated but still legible criticism of political decisions.
Untitled (Salon Hödler) (1992)
In Untitled (Salon Hödler) the mode of reception impacts this reception further; where a photograph mounted on a wall still inevitably evokes associations of fine art and artistic display, this placement within a trinket underscores the reproducible commodity status of art, inviting associations with a jewelry store display and tempting a viewer to handle the piece as one would at a novelty gift store. At the same time, the convex shape of the glass and the distortion it imposes on the image inside also reference the shape of a camera lens or a human eye, invoking the specific and isolated view of the world these devices impose. Art historian Rosalind Krauss points to the significance of this presentation, claiming it "also reminds us of the utopian aspects of the museum's early project insofar as the museum presented an original that in its material presence seemed to oppose itself [...] to the simulacral drive of photography". Here, Lawler considers the idea of the original, thinking about it alongside the medium of photography that following early-20th-century theorist Walter Benjamin's claims, has been understood to be without the aura of the unique art object.
Bulbs (2005-2006)
Pollock and Tureen (traced) (1984/2013)
Reduced to its barest form, the detail of the original representation of Jackson Pollock's painting and the ornate tureen is elided, leaving behind a simplified monochrome image. Drawing on the viewer's familiarity with the original, it invites you to fill in the gaps, imagining the rich color and depth of the Pollock and the delicate shading of the dish in a way that is suggestive of paint-by-numbers pictures, ghostly outlines, or newsprint negative. The form also develops Lawler's investigation into the gallery itself, expanding the photograph to the full size of the wall on which it is presented and flattening it down so as it resembles a trace or a shadow. The gallery's walls, then, become part of the artwork, not receding behind the unique object, but constituting an important part of its material presence.