Louise Lawler
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.

Combien pour ce chapeau?, 1987
Combien pour ce chapeau?
AN OLD HAT
Musée Jules Verne, Nantes, 1987

Since the early eighties, Louis Lawler’s work reflects upon the value of art in the social sphere, its use as merchandise and how the mode of exhibiting an artistic object connotes the meanings it may have.
Combien pour ce chapeau? is a series of three identical images portraying a top hat left on an armchair next to an old book and some open spectacles. Each of the images has a small caption underneath it conferring meaning on it for the beholder. In the first is a question: How much for this hat?; the second is a label: An old hat; and the third is informative: Jules Verne Museum, Nantes. The text, or rather, the context in which the piece of clothing is situated, indicated by each of the three captions, is what determines the value of the thing represented. One single object, a hat, may be a garment about to be discarded due to its age; or it may be a museum piece, the hat worn by the French writer of adventure novels when he went out for a stroll; or it may be a product of industrial manufacture.
Lawler addresses the power inherent in the museum system to bestow aura and prestige upon objects. The title of the series immediately elicits the idea that all objects, including works of art, have a value and it is society that determines it. If the hat we see in the photograph were merely an old hat and it was not included in the museum setting, it would be worth close to nothing, and would be appreciated even less due to the fact that it has been worn out, used. It is its inclusion in the reconstruction of an nineteenth-century ambience in the exhibition rooms of a museum that renders it interesting. It becomes a piece to conserve, to keep, to archive. Its introduction into this context gives it new meaning: it is indeed an old hat, but it is the one used, or which may have been used by an important personage of French literature. This new sense, offered by the social space in which it is situated, makes it an exception, a unique object, extracting it from its first condition and introducing it into the discourse of history. S. R.

Combien pour ce chapeau?


AN OLD HAT


Musée Jules Verne, Nantes, 1987