Louise Lawler at Sprüth Magers

Louise Lawler, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

For over four decades, Louise Lawler has investigated the institutional framing of art through her photographs of artworks in settings such as museums, auction houses, art fairs, private collections, and storage facilities. By concentrating on these privileged spaces, Lawler exposes the power dynamics within the display, promotion, acquisition, and valuation of art. For instance, she frequently photographs work made by white men, foregrounding the institutional exclusion of women and people of color.¹ In her current exhibition at Sprüth Magers, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS, Lawler alludes to the circulation of art—from its production, to its display, to its inevitable digital dissemination—to foreground the many contexts that determine our experience with art today.

In her swiped series (2022–present), Lawler produces blurry photographs by physically shifting—or swiping—the camera during exposure. Taken at venerated art museums and galleries, Lawler’s shaky photographs distort our view of iconic works in their collections. In Three Flags (swiped and moving) (2022), for example, we see the Whitney Museum’s Jasper Johns painting Three Flags (1958) bleary and at an extreme oblique, its stars and stripes smeared onto the wall upon which it hangs. The movement conjures the motion of swiping through digital images on social media. As the institutional framing of art now includes online marketing, Lawler captures the fleeting and disembodied feelings that attend our digital engagement with art.

Dominating the upstairs gallery is Lawler’s traced series (2013–present), black-and-white tracings of her older color photographs printed as wall-mounted vinyl. For these works, Lawler outsourced the tracing labor to children’s book illustrator Jon Buller. In Bulbs (traced) (2005/2006/2019), Buller reduces Lawler’s 2005/6 color photo of an uninstalled Felix Gonzalez-Torres light bulb piece to a network of black outlines. Lawler’s interest in motion reappears here: just as Gonzalez-Torres displaced artistic labor with mass-produced objects, Lawler shifts the labor to Buller. But since Lawler provides flexible instructions for fabricating these works each time they are exhibited, the labor shifts again, this time to the gallery staff. Yet these stripped-down restagings of her own work also make it impossible to discern the settings of the original photographs. They could have been captured within the walls of a private foundation, a museum, or a mega-gallery. By reducing these environments to lines, Lawler calls to mind the blurring of distinctions between these spaces. The labor of institutional decision-making, Lawler seems to suggest, is itself moving from curator to collector.

While reconfiguring our ideas of artistic production, reproduction, and display, Lawler also addresses our movement through the spaces in which we view art. Three red arrows, each titled Alizarin (Terrorists are made, not born) (2023), are displayed around the gallery, once at the building’s entrance and twice upstairs, underscoring how institutions instruct our understanding of the artworks they present. As globally connected interests rapidly gain influence over our experience with art, Lawler’s focus on the way that art moves from artist to institution to viewer allows us to slow down and question not only what we see, but who ultimately profits from our attention.

Louise Lawler: GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS runs from November 10, 2023–February 10, 2024 at Sprüth Magers (5900 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036).

Louise Lawler, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, Three Flags (swiped and moving) (2022). Dye sublimation print on museum box, 48 × 85.25 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, Tribute (swiped) (2022/2023). Dye sublimation print on museum box, 48 × 72 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS (installation view) (2023–24). Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Louise Lawler, Bulbs (traced) (2005/2006/2019). Adhesive wall material, dimensions variable to any scale determined by exhibitor. Image courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

Thomas Duncan is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at UCLA. He is currently at work on his dissertation, “’The Right Bad Picture’: Failure and Relationality in Andy Warhol’s Photography, 1969­–1979″.

More by Thomas Duncan