“Art is part and parcel of a cumulative and collective enterprise viewed as seen fit by the prevailing culture.”
—Louise LawlerAmerican artist Louise Lawler is perhaps most well-known for utilizing photography as a conceptual tool to explore the production, circulation and presentation of art. A prominent figure in The Pictures Generation – a collective of artists known for appropriating images from media, cinema, television, music, magazines, and even other artworks – Lawler reinterprets traditional forms of representation through her unique lens. In the early 1980s, Lawler established her distinctive approach by photographing artworks created by other artists in diverse contexts, including museums, storage facilities, auction houses, and private collectors’ residences. Through these images, Lawler critically challenges the value, significance, and function of art, highlighting the ways in which contexts of display and circulation shape the meanings of artworks.
“A work of art is produced by many different things. It isn’t just the result of an unencumbered creative act. It’s always the case that what is allowed to be seen and understood is part of what produces the work. And art is always a collaboration with what came before and what comes after you…No work is really produced alone.”
—Louise LawlerExecuted in 1987, Untitled 1950-51 captures a Joan Miró painting on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Created in the format of a triptych, this 3-part work serializes this curious photographic capture. The photograph, boldly cropped to reveal only the lower half of the Miró painting, centers attention on an ultra-polished wooden bench positioned in front of the work, ironically – or unironically – reflecting the work upon its surface. Strategically placed by MoMA, this bench subtly establishes the painting as a masterpiece worthy of focused and prolonged contemplation, contributing to the value-production process through viewers’ reception. As Claude Gintz observed, “While shifting to reframe a fragment of a work to include a piece of its outside, the eye of [Lawler’s] camera negates the very notion of individualized work as totality, and the emphasis is put on the field of inscription…within which it is shown.”i In a clever play on the image, this triptych was in fact exhibited with an almost-identical bench to the one in the photo in MoMA’s Enough. Projects exhibition in 1987, and later at Larsen Warner in 2023.
Lawler, by deliberately framing the Miró painting from this distinct angle, makes tangible the generally invisible mechanisms by which the museum’s arrangement of artworks orchestrates the viewer’s experience, inviting viewers to reflect on the very institution and how its display strategies influence the reading of a work of art.