Louise Lawler

Untitled (Swan Lake Invitation Card) (1981)

Artwork description & Analysis: Lawler's interest in all aspects of the art world started in her early career and included attention to the ephemera that help to frame and promote it such as invitations, posters, and matchbooks. Here, the artist issued a direct invitation to Swan Lake by the New York City Ballet to a mailing list of art world figures, printed in an elegant serif font which adopts the visual language of promotional documents of this kind. Unconnected with the performance, this invitation was unauthorized, a fact asserted where on the bottom right hand side in place of an instruction to admit the invitee, Lawler's invite states 'tickets to be purchased at the box office'. Offering none of the status normally associated with being invited to cultural events, instead it offers the invitee the chance to attend as the guest of someone with no authority, who can grant them no tangible privileges over any other non-invited guest.

However, even though on an official level the invite changes nothing, it still mediates the experience of those going at Lawler's invitation, creating a community of her guests in amongst the other theatre-goers. As curator Douglas Eklund suggests: 'Lawler's gesture recast the quintessential uptown "elitist" event as a conspiratorial, wittily invisible infiltration of a black-tie audience with double-agents, who would naturally oscillate between viewing the performance through Lawler's "quotation marks", as it were, and succumbing to the guilty pleasure of watching the ballet'. Here an act of appropriation is at work, not only of the visual language of the invitation, but of the ballet itself, claiming tenuous ownership of this particular performance. Her photograph, Swan Lake, Lincoln Center, taken from her seat at the performance further asserts this, acting as an index of her presence.. Through this appropriation, Lawler draws our attention to the networks through which culture operates, using the techniques of conceptual art in order to examine the construction of audiences and reception, and the ways in which cultural capital operates.

Arranged by Barbara and Eugene Schwartz (1982)

Artwork description & Analysis: Arranged by Barbara and Eugene Schwartz comes from one of Lawler's earliest exhibited series of photographs documenting domestic and institutional display of works of art. With the image centered on a doorway that leads between rooms, we can see Cindy Sherman's Untitled No. 88 (1980) and Untitled No. 100 (1982) hanging in a room visible through the open door, and an abstract landscape that hangs on the wall next to the entrance. Neither work is named by Lawler, instead the collectors Barbara and Eugene Schwartz are credited for having arranged the work, given prominence in the title as active creators of the scene on display. By shifting the viewer's focus from the artist to the collector, the artist makes visible the ongoing reception of art work, presenting this display to the viewer in a way that puts the work into the context of both its exchange value and its cultural status. No longer property of their creator, they instead are seen here as representative of their owner's tastes and personality.

Although this act of representing works of art as they are displayed in collectors' homes is clearly concerned with the ways in which collecting and arranging change the meanings of artworks, Lawler's position on this remains indeterminate. She resists easy indictment of the ways in which artworks become commodified through the market and instead focuses attention on the question without attempting to resolve it. With her selection of a view of the Schwartz's presentation of their collection, framing becomes a major theme; the thin rectangular frames that sit around Sherman's photographs are echoed by the doorway, making the domestic spaces intrinsic to the display of the work. The question of art's status as decoration is certainly in play here, but is by no means resolved; the artwork is not degraded by its context but is mediated by it, framed and re-presented by its proximity to other work and the interior domestic space in which it is placed. Furthermore, the works on display frustrate attempts to draw simple conclusions about what is being said in Lawler's photograph. Barbara and Eugene Schwartz were eminent collectors of the Pictures Generation, collecting work from Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, and Lawler herself. That Lawler focuses on the collection of patrons to herself and her contemporaries implicates the artist in the very networks that she reveals. This is typical of her attention to the systems through which art operates, not didactic in the same way as practices of Institutional Critique were made in the 1960s and '70s by artists like Hans Haacke, Lawler's work remains ambiguous and open, raising questions about art that remain unresolved.

Gelatin silver print - Private Collection

Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut (1984)

Artwork description & Analysis: Developing her consideration of the nature of collecting, in 1984 Lawler took her iconic image, Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut. Two years after her first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures gallery in New York, the artist was granted full access to the Connecticut house of collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine who had amassed a significant collection of modern and contemporary masters as well as valuable antiques. Pollock and Tureen considers the ways in which these interact, putting Modernist painting and its associated claims for formalist purity (made by critics such as Clement Greenberg) into relationship with decorative objects associated with the upper classes.

Working with a 35mm camera and natural lighting available at the site, Lawler's photograph is divided into two, the tureen - an 18^th century Chinese porcelain dish designed for serving soup - is shown in full whereas Jackson Pollock's Frieze (1953-55) is sharply cropped, as artist Andrea Fraser suggests looking like 'little more than apocalyptic wallpaper'. In Lawler's presentation this important work of modern art, which was one of Pollock's last all-over canvases completed in the year before his death, is pushed into the background. It becomes yet another ornament amongst the many trinkets of wealth lined up in their opulent surroundings, a symptom of the taste of a collector couple whose class position is suggested through the title in which they are named Mr and Mrs Burton Tremaine. Inviting us to question the relative cultural value of the objects shown, the focus on the tureen rather than the canvas leads to a sense that Pollock's work has been rendered kitsch by its owners, reduced to the status of decoration in the same way as the overly ornate serving dish. Now recognized as one of the artist's most important works, Pollock and Tureen presents one of the best examples of what the historian George Baker has referred to as Lawler's "project of continual re-presentation - not representation - but the openness of the artistic object to be re-presented again, and to become different in that re-presentation".

Silver dye bleach print - The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York City