Thomas Lawson

Thomas Lawson (born 1951, Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist, writer, editor, and from 1991 to 2022 was the Dean of the School of Art & Design at California Institute for the Arts.

Lawson emerged in the late 1970s as part of "The Pictures Generation" artists, which included Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and David Salle, among many.

Their work was broadly unified by its critique of modernism's avant-garde myths and embrace of postmodern art-making strategies, media imagery, pop-culture references and simple, sometimes crude, technique and presentation.

This approach was bolstered by critical writing from Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Hal Foster, and Lawson, who in Artforum, Flash Art and REALLIFE called for art that deconstructed dominant media and cultural representations in the face of what he termed "a growing lack of faith in the ability of artists to continue as anything more than plagiaristic stylists."

As a teenager, he took classes at the Glasgow School of Art, but found it too conservative and enrolled at the University of St Andrews, where he studied English Language and Literature (graduated, 1973).

He was active in the art scene there, creating an art club and organizing an exhibition of Scottish painter Pat Douthwaite.

After enrolling in the Art History graduate program at the University of Edinburgh, he traveled to New York to interview Jasper Johns for his thesis, before graduating in 1975.

Lawson next moved to New York and enrolled in the Art History and Criticism PhD program at CUNY Graduate Center, where he studied with Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Robert Pincus-Witten, and alongside postmodern writers Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens.

He arrived ahead of the convergence of a flourishing downtown art/punk scene, new critical-artistic practices such as appropriation, brewing ideological debates, and an art-market explosion.

While at CUNY, Lawson began exhibiting art at Artists Space (1977, 1979) and the Drawing Center (1978).

He also co-founded REALLIFE Magazine in 1978 with his wife, writer Susan Morgan, and contributed essays to Artforum, Art in America and Flash Art.

He emerged as a central figure in ideological debates at the turn of the 1980s about the viability of painting through critical essays, such as "Last Exit: Painting" (1981).

He has been described as "an embedded correspondent [and] polemical editorialist" who articulated an oppositional, progressive position for representational painting from within an increasingly reactionary art and media environment.

Artforum called his approach to the medium "one of the most cogent and controversial" in the 80s.

Lawson has received awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Rockefeller Foundation.

His paintings have been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums including Metro Pictures (New York), Anthony Reynolds (London), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), and Le Magasin (Grenoble).

In 1981, he began showing at the newly opened, influential Metro Pictures with artists such as Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman, and later in the decade, showed at the Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery in Los Angeles.

Surveys of Lawson's work have since been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), the Battersea Arts Centre (London), and Goss-Michael Foundation (Dallas).

He is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles.

In "Last Exit: Painting" (1981), Lawson championed appropriationist painting as "the perfect camouflage" (due to its very unlikeliness) to infiltrate the art-world and expose stereotypes and conventions, maintaining that the work's hand-made subjectivity and expressive tools tempered its ironic and detached tone.

Crimp (and the others) denounced contemporary painting's "reactionary expressionism" as fatally compromised; they favored photographic work, like that of Richard Prince or Cindy Sherman.

Lawson argued such work was too declarative, obvious, and likely to lapse into a "bureaucratic continuation" of Conceptualism that would be marginalized in esoteric, avant-garde ghettoes outside the mainstream.

Lawson's own early work was situated at the crux of photography and painting, and combined deadpan, crudely modeled media archetypes (representing family, passion, violence and national iconography), which he isolated on modern, painterly fields of gestural marks or monochromatic grounds.

Decontextualizing overused painting techniques and snapshots drawn from tabloid stories, he sought to reconstitute and question their lost meaning and to expose the hollowness and insensitivity of conditioned responses to spectacle and tragedy.

Critics variously described his work (e.g., Don’t Hit Her Again or Shot for a Bike, both 1981) as haunted and difficult to like but worthy, and "hard-headed and thoughtful [...] with a punk rock and painterly awareness."

Holland Cotter deemed it "painting out on strike," with an "obdurate, stonewalling quality that read like provocation"; others, such as Carrie Rickey, found the ambiguity of the work's intention to be troubling.

In 1983, Lawson began using photographic images of classical architecture and mountain landscapes that connoted institutionalized culture, power and mysticism, which he obscured with veils of painterly, scumbled brushstrokes (and later, dots, pills and paisleys).

Reviewers generally placed works such as Metropolis: The Museum (1983) or The Temple of the Kultur Critic (1984), among Lawson's most alluring, but differed on their political efficacy.

Ronald Jones wrote that Lawson successfully subverted cultural expressions of authority, "prov[ing] them too slight to thrive outside their incubated logic."

In 1991, Lawson was appointed Dean of the School of Art at California Institute for the Arts (CalArts).

In addition to teaching, Lawson has curated or co-curated shows and lecture series at MoCA, PS1, Artists Space, White Columns, the Renaissance Society, LACE, REDCAT Gallery, and Los Angeles Municipal Gallery.

Lawson is arguably better known for his critical writing and tenure as Dean at CalArts than for his painting.

However, critics in the 2000s, such as Andrew Berardini, began suggesting that his painting was due for a reassessment for its role in broadening the parameters of appropriated imagery and offering a nuanced, critical alternative to conceptual art and neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s.

His career is best understood in its entirety, with his complementary practices of artmaking, critical writing, magazine editing, curating, and educating collectively addressing key ideological debates of the time.

Lawson's essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals such as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art and October; an anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2004.

He has also edited or co-edited the contemporary art journals REALLIFE Magazine, Afterall and East of Borneo.

Lawson currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Edinburgh, Scotland.

Lawson grew up in Glasgow and developed an early interest in the language of painting.

He work was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, "The Pictures Generation" (2009), and "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation" (1989) at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA).

He has also created temporary public works in New York City, Glasgow, and Newcastle upon Tyne.