Dietmar Elger

Louise Lawler

Artwork by Louise Lawler. Contributions by Thomas Weski. Text by Dietmar Elger.

For Sale

Douglas Crimp

With photographs by Louise Lawler On the Museum's Ruins presents Douglas Crimp's criticism of contemporary art, its institutions, and its politics alongside photographic works by the artist Louise Lawler to create a collaborative project that is itself an example of postmodern practice at its most provocative. Taking the museum as the paradigmatic institution of artistic modernism, Crimp surveys its historical origins and current transformations, from the plans for the Berlin Museum in the 1820s to reinstallations of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modem Art in the 1980s. But it is the breakup of this modernist paradigm that is the central subject of On the Museum's Ruins. The new paradigm of postmodemism is elaborated through analyses of art practices broadly conceived, not only the practices of artists Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Serra, Sherrie Levine, and Robert Mapplethorpe - but those of critics and curators, of international exhibitions such as Documenta and Zeitgeist, of new or refurbished museums such as the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. Louise Lawler's photographs expand the investigation to include private and corporate collecting, art auctions, and the banishment of objects to museum storage. Douglas Crimp is Visiting Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and Visiting Professor of Lesbian and Gay Studies at Sarah Lawrence College. His previous books include Aids: Cultural Analysisl/Cultural Activism and AIDS Demo Graphics. The essays: Photographs at the End of Modernism. On the Museum's Ruins. The Museum's Old, the Library's New Subject. The End of Painting. The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism. Appropriating Appropriation. Redefining Site Specificity. This Is Not a Museum of Art. The Art of Exhibition. The Postmodern Museum.

On the Museum's Ruins

Johannes Meinhardt

For the past 20 years, Louise Lawler has photographed art as it is "presented" in private homes, museums, galleries, auction houses, public buildings, and museum and gallery storage areas. From an exhibition of Degas' masterpieces to an Andy Warhol installation, this book invites you to discover Lawler's unique vision of modern and contemporary art. She is fascinated by what "happens" to the art object after it leaves the artist's studio -- where it goes, how it's displayed, how it's valued, and what it means. Lawler shows how the environment that surrounds a piece of art affects our perception of it and how that perception, in turn, affects all aspects of the environment.

An Arrangement of Pictures

Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel

Philipp Kaiser

Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel

Louise Lawler subjects the concept of art to critical analysis by re-photographing her own drawings, paintings, and sculptures and incorporating aspects of their immediate surrounding into these "copies." Viewed with a certain detachment, her demystified reproductions also reveal the contextual and situational connotations of her artworks, which recede to a certain extent into the background. Lawler also applies these methods to the work of other artists, photographing their art pieces, particularly as they are mounted in private collections. These contextualizing photographs retain fragments of their surroundings, thus clarifying how the presentation and interpretation of artwork is never free of value judgment or environmental influence. This publication offers the first retrospective overview of the artistic accomplishments of Louise Lawler over the past 20 years. Included are a number of very recent works, some of them created especially for this book.

Louise Lawler

About

Books

Join the club