Presentation: Louise Lawler

When I started looking at Louise Lawler's work, my first thought was that it was fancy plagiarism. What's special about taking photographs of someone else's work? Why call that art? However, the more I read about Lawler's work, the more I realized I had taken the bait, as Leah Pires said for Art News. It's the same trap I imagine critics viewing Marcel Duchamp's urinal fell into. Why call it art, you ask? To find out what happens, that's why. Enough said.

The artist.

I found I related more to Lawler than I thought I would. I, too, am interested in how to reach viewers outside of the gallery context, and I too want to know what happens if you remove art from the white cube. It turns out that photographing a Warhol is way more subversive than I expected. I didn't get a chance to talk about this in my presentation, but I thought that her ideas of editioning and re-presenting her works were both very interesting. In my own work as a printmaker, I reflect often on the non-uniqueness of my work. I'm used to making unique art objects, and I've even drifted towards that in printmaking with variable editions and monoprints. It's a cultural value I'm unable to escape. On the other hand, there's something subversive in the multiple that Lawler is playing with, especially since her photographic subject matter is often one-of-a-kind objects. It seems to me she's figured out how to take away cultural capital from the original object and confer it onto her own creations, yet she reduces it because she makes multiples of each one and denies them their original uniqueness. 

Big (adjusted to fit). 2002/2003/2016. Source.

Why do we place such value on the "unique"? Is it because we're so confused by the signs and simulations and lack of realness that we hope a one-of-a-kind item will be, for once, real? Do we hope that uniqueness means we don't have to think about whether or not something's a double-bluff, it just is because there's nothing else like it? But at what point does the real collapse under the weight of illusion? And at that point, isn't it all real? As Baudrillard says on page 38, “[s]imulation is infinitely more dangerous, however, since it always suggests, over and above its object, that law and order themselves might be nothing more than a simulation.” But we still behave as if they're real regardless, so does this mean the real has indeed collapsed? To stave off my impending existential crisis, I'll stop here for now- but I will be thinking about these questions for the foreseeable future.