ART-PRESENTATION: Louise Lawler-Why Pictures Now, Part I

In many of her projects, Louise Lawler photographs artists’ works after they have left the studio, which allows her to comment on the way the art is lived with, exhibited, handled, stored, consigned, reproduced, repackaged, and/or ignored. She is most interested in the juxtaposition of the works with their settings more than the individual works themselves. But Lawler’s closely cropped photographs also frame specific ambiguities in art’s relationship to notions of longing, exchange, prestige, gender, and power (Part II)

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive

The exhibition “WHY PICTURES NOW” at MoMA spans the 40-year creative output of Louise Lawler, one of the most influential artists working in the fields of image production and institutional critique. The exhibition takes its title from one of Lawler’s most iconic works, “Why Pictures Now” (1981), a black-and-white photograph showing a matchbook propped up in an ashtray, it asks the viewer to consider why the work takes the form of a picture, and why the artist is making pictures at this moment. Lawler’s signature style was established in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, when she began taking pictures of other artists’ works displayed in collectors’ homes, museums, storage spaces, and auction houses to question the value, meaning, and use of art. Underscoring the collaborative quality of Lawler’s practice, what one sees first in her pictures, both then and now, is works by other artists. An intriguing aspect of Lawler’s practice is her process of continuously re-presenting, reframing, or restaging her work in the present, a strategy through which the artist revisits her own pictures by transferring them to different formats, from photographs to paperweights, tracings, and works that she calls “Adjusted to fit”. The tracings are large-format black-and-white line versions of her photographs that eliminate color and detail, functioning instead as “ghosts” of the originals. “Adjusted to fit” images are stretched or expanded to fit the location of their display, not only suggesting the idea that pictures can have more than one life, but also underpinning the intentional, relational character of Lawler’s farsighted art. Furthermore, in keeping with Lawler’s interest in each picture’s provenance and the institutional creation of values, each label in this exhibition includes the owners of the full edition of that particular work. In 2017, at a moment when the subject of truth and fake news came to the forefront of national discourse, the artist tweaked her “Adjusted to fit” images by adding a twisting effect to certain works, further distorting them as a reaction to the concept of “Alternative facts”, one of these new works is “Pollyanna (adjusted to fit, distorted for the times)”. The exhibition consists of a sequence of mural-scale, “Adjusted to fit” images set in dynamic relation to nonlinear groupings of photographs distinctive of Lawler’s conceptual exercises. Additionally, a deceptively empty gallery presents black-and-white “Tracings” of Lawler’s photographs that have been printed on vinyl and mounted directly on the wall. A display of the artist’s ephemera from the 1970s to today highlights the feminist and performative undercurrents of her art. The exhibition includes not only her trademark photographs, but also a popular sound work, “Birdcalls” (1972-81), in which Lawler chirps the names of famous male artists, including Joseph Beuys, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, and Gerhard Richter, among others.

Info: Curators: Roxana Marcoci and Kelly Sidley, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, Duration: 30/4-30/7/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:30-17:30, Fri 10:30-20:00, www.moma.org