Twice Untitled and Other Pictures ─ Looking Back

For the past two decades Louise Lawler has been taking photographs of art in situ,from small poignant black-and-white images of art in people's homes to large format glossy colorpictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she has produced a variety ofobjects--paperweights, etched drinking glasses, matchbooks, gallery announcements--all of whichcleverly describe how art comes to accrue value as it moves through various systems ofexchange.Lawler's oeuvre was essential in creating an expanded field for photography, it was crucialin postmodern debates over theories of representation, it remains indelible within the field ofinstitutional critique, and it has always been trenchant and witty in its sustained commitment to afeminist vision of art, art history, and contemporary art practice. But Lawler is also anold-fashioned "artist's artist," long overdue for the kind of serious reconsideration andrecognition that this volume affords. The very self-effacing nature of Lawler's practice, however,her continual suspicion about notions of authorship--and her sly disregard for museologicalconventions--have meant that she has resisted precisely the usual mid-career retrospective. TwiceUntitled and Other Pictures, published in conjunction with Lawler's first major museum exhibition inthe United States, organized by the Wexner Center for the Arts, eats away at the standard museumpractices of chronology, linear development, and the presentation of masterpieces, opting instead toexplore such dynamic themes and undercurrents in Lawler's practice as her relationship to sculpture,her long history of collaborative projects, her production of such ephemera as napkins, matchbooks,and announcement cards, and the steady political dimension of her work--which culminated mostrecently in works that are deeply critical of the American invasion of Iraq. With essays by arthistorian and political theorist Rosalyn Deutsche and curators Ann Goldstein and Helen Molesworth,Twice Untitled and Other Pictures promises to be an essential volume for anyone interested in latetwentieth- and early twenty-first- century art.