Louise Lawler

Instead, she borrowed a small 1883 portrait of a horse from Aqueduct Racetrack — it had been hanging over a Xerox machine in the offices — and mounted it on an empty wall at the gallery.

To highlight her appropriation, she installed two spotlights: one above the picture and another pointed out the window, at the building next door, hinting to sidewalk passersby that there was something of note going on upstairs.

This particular building was moreover a citybank.

It therefore added an economical meaning to the concept.

Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York.

In this series of work, Lawler photographed Jackson Pollock's Frieze (1953–55) and the filigree of a Limoges soup bowl in the Tremaines' New York dining room.

She earned a B.F.A. at Cornell University, and moved to Manhattan in 1969, where she soon took a job at the Castelli Gallery.

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 sculptures 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.

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.

The piece has been nicknamed “Patriarchal Roll Call.”

During her time working at Castelli Gallery, Lawler was making paintings, artist’s books, prints, and photographs of her own.

However, when she landed her first official gallery exhibition, in 1978 at Artists Space, she did not exhibit any of that work.

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.

A black card announcing the event stated the (self-explanatory) title of the work, and the venue and date of its screening.

There, she met Janelle Reiring, who would go on to co-found Metro Pictures with Helene Winer in 1980.

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.

Lawler developed her individual style during the early 1980s, a time of intense growth in the overall economy and in the art market.

In 1981 Lawler had her first West Coast gallery solo exhibition at Jancar Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles.

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.

The artist has reprised the piece on a handful of occasions, including in 1983 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City (using the 1961 film The Hustler and the 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc?) as part of a show organized by Robert Barry at the downtown alternative space Franklin Furnace called “In Other Words: Artists Use of Language” and, in 1987, in the C.W. Post College in a show organized by Bob Nickas called “Perverted in Language.” The piece was also performed as part of West of Rome’s “Women in the City” series curated by Emi Fontana at the Aero Theater in 2008, and in Amsterdam in 2012 at The Movies theater with Saturday Night Fever (1977).

Lawler's greatest coup came in 1984, when she was granted full access to the New York City and Connecticut residences of twentieth-century collectors Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine.

This opportunity occurred on the occasion of the 1984 Tremaine Collection exhibition, and Lawler was again invited to take photos of some artworks in that context.

In Living Room Corner, Arranged by Mr. & Mrs. Burton Tremaine, New York City (1984), Robert Delaunay's Premier disque (1912) hangs above a television and a Roy Lichtenstein bust, Ceramic head with blue shadow (1966), which has been turned into a lamp, and seems to stare up and outward.

The location was the Tremaines' New York living room.

Another work in this series is Monogram (1984), taken in a bedroom in the Tremaines' New York apartment, the monogram "ETH" being Emily Hall Tremaine, with Jasper Johns White flag (1955–58) photographed over the bed.

The pieces place valuable works among household objects, exploring how environments shape our "reading" of art.

Regarding other works, Fragment/Frame/Text (#163) (1984), Lawler photographed a museum wall label next to a landscape painting by Claude Lorrain; only a fragment of the landscape appears in the photo.

Further, this occurred just a few years before a significant part of their collection was auctioned at Christie's in 1988, and Lawler was permitted to take photos of some of the Tremaine works at auction.

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) (1989), 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.

She is, however, less interested in the original process of creating a work of art than in the context lying beyond the artist's sphere of influence and in which the work is subsequently situated.

Often framed as “appropriation art” or “institutional critique”, Lawler’s photographic work lays bare the day-to-day operations of the art world and its circulation and presentation of art works.

Her work is interested in the intersection of art and commerce.

In 1994, Lawler created Foreground, and presented it in Tate Gallery in 2009.