Colecciones de arte

Trajectory

Bronxville, New York (USA), 1947

Together with Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, Lawler belongs to the group of artists who, during the late seventies and early eighties, deployed photography as a means of critique with which to question the social function of art and the economic and political eliteÕs use of artworks to legitimise a traditional notion of history as an immobile and monolithic concept reinforcing the power structures and the dominating classesÕ discourse of authority.

After graduating with a fine arts degree from Cornell University (Ithaca), Lawler moved to New York. In 1982, she had her first exhibition at the legendary Metro Pictures Gallery, her daring proposals confronting the commercial trends favouring new expressionist painting. The show consisted of large-scale photographs of works, mounted on coloured rectangles, by artists she felt drawn to and with whom Lawler shared some of the suppositions she would base the development of her work on, artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, Holzer, McCollum -with whom she would collaborate-, Mullicaan and Nadin. In addition to these, there were images of paintings, by Degas, Monet, Stella and Schnabel, hung in museums. She also appropriated pieces by some of the Pictures artists, including them in her installation, thereby emphasising their value.

These strategies were a response to a crisis occurring in conceptual art -to which the artist is in debt- caused by its being assimilated by the system. She partook of a current defending the de-materialisation of the artistic object, a movement promptly and smoothly adapted to the traditional channels of commercialisation, exhibition and conservation, thus restoring its mercantile value.

By using works of art and their modes of exhibition as the subject of her photographs, Lawler was pondering the meaning the works acquire through the contexts in which they are placed, generally unlike the contexts the artists themselves would choose to situate them. The way museums, galleries and collectors show their acquisitions conveys more about the tactics of power and prestige than it does about art itself. Therefore, Lawler employs a photographic style of minimum resources in which, from an almost journalistic point of view, in an effort to obtain an effect of neutrality, she portrays the works of art surrounded by all the informative paraphernalia that, in the museums, galleries and auction houses, completes their meaning and conditions the spectatorÕs glance. On other occasions, they are presented in the privacy of a collectorÕs home, in relation to different valuable objects, which converts them into precious items for the consumption of the privileged. Lawler disintegrates the utopian idea of art as a unique personal experience with intrinsic value, thus demonstrating that it will never be free of external influences. S. R.