Louise Lawler - Work

Work

Lawler has photographed pictures and objects in collectors’ homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. Along with photography, she has created conceptual and installation art. Some of her works, such as the "Book of Matches", are ephemeral and explore the passing of time, while others, such as "Helms Amendment (963)," are expressly political. Lawler's work, in its diverse manifestations (installations, events, publications, souvenirs...) addresses or confronts prevailing systems of establishing art, taste and style.

Birdcalls (1972/2008) is an audio artwork that transforms the names of famous male artists into a bird song, parroting names such as Artschwager, Beuys, Ruscha and Warhol, a mockery of conditions of privilege and recognition given to male artists at that time.

In 1979, Lawler presented A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. As the full-length soundtrack of The Misfits played, the silver screen remained unremittingly blank.

Lawler developed her individual style during the early 1980s, a time of intense growth in the overall economy and in the art market. In 1982, for her first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures, Lawler showed a small suite of artworks pulled from the gallery’s stockroom. The pieces were to be sold together, as a single work called Arranged by Louise Lawler, and it was priced at the literal sum of its parts, plus an extra 10 percent commission for Lawler; the piece did not sell.

Lawler's greatest coup came in 1984, when she was granted full access to the Connecticut home of twentieth-century collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine (as it turns out, just a few years before much of their collection was dispersed at Christie's in 1988). As sometimes happens in the history of photography, the artist serendipitously discovered in one place the crux of her entire project. Working in available light with a 35mm camera, she found treasures everywhere she looked, such as this decorator's duet between the tortured gestural slashes of a late Jackson Pollock and the filigree of a Limoges soup bowl. In Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York City (1984), a Robert Delaunay hangs above a television and a Lichtenstein bust, which has been turned into a lamp, seems to stare up and outward. In Foreground (1994), a gelatin silver print showing an open-plan living area in the Chicago apartment of art collector Stefan Edlis, Jeff Koons' Rabbit (1986) can be seen next to a refrigerator. By manipulating the focus and the view-finder of the camera, Lawler demonstrated how an artwork is determined by the paradigms of the art world: A label on the wall of an auction house would become the focus of an image, with only a small fraction of the work itself visible, and the idea of the artwork as a commercial entity would be brought to mind.

Photographing at Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach fairs, the Museum of Modern Art, Christie's and various galleries, Lawler later presented a behind-the-scenes view of art: the hoisting of a Richard Serra sculpture attended by uniformed handlers; white-gloved hands carefully transporting a Richter painting; Cattelan's giant Picasso head swathed in plastic sitting on the floor behind its disconnected body; another Richter painting lying on its side propped against the wall, its public exposure at MoMA at an end; a Hirst spin-painting glimpsed through a closet door. Lawler titled her 2004 survey show at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel "Louise Lawler and Others" in acknowledgement of the artists whose artworks she photographs. Lawler created Not the way you remembered (Venice) for the exhibition "Sequence One: Painting and Sculpture from the François Pinault Collection (2006–07)"; rather than contributing discrete artworks, these photographs were taken of the exhibition’s early installation process in Venice.