Louise Lawler

Louise Lawler (born 1947) is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York City. Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculptures in a gallery being viewed by spectators.

Along with artists like Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Barbara Kruger, Lawler is considered to be part of the Pictures Generation.

Lawler was born in 1947 in Bronxville, New York. She attended Cornell University, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.

In 1969, after graduating from Cornell University, Lawler moved to Manhattan, where she took a job at the Castelli Gallery. While there, she met Janelle Reiring, who went on to co-found Metro Pictures with Helene Winer in 1980.

Lawler has photographed pictures and objects in collectors’ homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage. Along with photography, she has created conceptual and installation art. Some of her works, such as the "Book of Matches", are ephemeral and explore the passing of time, while others, such as Helms Amendment (963) (1989), are expressly political. Lawler's work, in its diverse manifestations (installations, events, publications, souvenirs...) addresses or confronts prevailing systems of establishing art, taste and style. She is, however, less interested in the original process of creating a work of art than in the context lying beyond the artist's sphere of influence and in which the work is subsequently situated. Often framed as appropriation art or institutional critique, Lawler’s photographic work lays bare the day-to-day operations of the art world and its circulation and presentation of art works. Her work is interested in the intersection of art and commerce.

Birdcalls (1972/2008) is an audio artwork that transforms the names of famous male artists into a bird song, parroting names such as Artschwager, Beuys, Ruscha and Warhol, a mockery of conditions of privilege and recognition given to male artists at that time. The piece has been nicknamed "Patriarchal Roll Call."

During her time working at Castelli Gallery, Lawler was making paintings, artist’s books, prints, and photographs of her own. However, when she landed her first official gallery exhibition, in 1978 at Artists Space, she did not exhibit any of that work. Instead, she borrowed a small 1883 portrait of a horse from Aqueduct Racetrack — it had been hanging over a Xerox machine in the offices — and mounted it on an empty wall at the gallery. To highlight her appropriation, she installed two spotlights: one above the picture and another pointed out the window, at the building next door, hinting to sidewalk passersby that there was something of note going on upstairs. This particular building was moreover a Citibank. It therefore added an economical meaning to the concept.

In 1979, Lawler presented A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture at Aero Theater in Santa Monica, California. As the full-length soundtrack of The Misfits played, the silver screen remained unremittingly blank. A black card announcing the event stated the (self-explanatory) title of the work, and the venue and date of its screening. The artist has reprised the piece on a handful of occasions, including in 1983 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City (using the 1961 film The Hustler and the 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon What’s Opera, Doc?) as part of a show organized by Robert Barry at the downtown alternative space Franklin Furnace called “In Other Words: Artists Use of Language” and, in 1987, in the C.W. Post College in a show organized by Bob Nickas called “Perverted in Language.” The piece was also performed as part of West of Rome’s “Women in the City” series curated by Emi Fontana at the Aero Theater in 2008, and in Amsterdam in 2012 at The Movies theater with Saturday Night Fever (1977). In 1994, Lawler created Foreground, and presented it in Tate Gallery in 2009.