Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, January 4, 2023: Louise Lawler, an American artist and photographer (#1743)

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Artist of the Day, January 4, 2023: Louise Lawler, an American artist and photographer (#1743)

Louise Lawler (1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer. From the late 1970s onwards, Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculpture in a gallery being viewed by spectators.

Along with artists like Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Barbara Kruger, Lawler is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.

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.

Lawler's work questions the traditional notion that any image - much less that any photograph - may ever be conceived of as having one stable, definitive, and unalterable meaning.

Emphasizing the contexts of display and circulation, she highlights the unintended meanings that artworks accumulate in the process of their reception.

In giving her works such titles, Lawler questions not only her own position as a creator of an image, but also the authorship of the (often famous) artists whose works appear in her images, reflecting the broader postmodernist questioning of the singular art object.

Drawing on the inadvertent ironies of domestic display of artworks, Lawler dispels the idea that art can be kept separate from the implications of the marketplace, instead portraying its inevitable condition as a commodity exposed to the same patterns of circulation and display as any other product.

Questioning the status and role of photography as artwork, documentation, and tool of communication and persuasion, she belongs to the Pictures Generation whose pioneering methods have radically transformed the way in which this medium came to be understood, as well as its place within the art world at large.

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