METRO PICTURES With Something About Time and Space still I'm Not Sure What It Is.

METRO PICTURES

With Something About Time and Space still I'm Not Sure What It Is, 1998 Conceptual photographer Louise Lawler deftly explains the dilemma that confronts each artist at midcareer: how to build forward past successes without simply repeating them. This irregularly titled installation, the centerpiece of her latest solo display both rhymes perfectly with her earlier work and takes facing in a new direction.

Since the early '80 Lawler has focused her camera onward well-known works of modern and contemporary art. unless unlike the photographers employed at auction houses and museums to document their holdings, Lawler foregrounds the artwork's physical setting, the specific words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of its display (the Pollock from one side of to the other the sideboard in the collector's house, the Richard Prince nearest to the computer terminal, the Frank Stella considered in the varnished museum floor). The make submissive of Something About Time and Space is Andy Warhol's Silver mists an installation of mass-produced, inflatable pillows first shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966 In keeping with her signature strategy, Lawler present to views Warhol's silver balloons in situ, as it were: floating in midair in a gallery. She also alludes to Warhol's space of production, to the aluminum-foil walls and psychedelic lights of his infamous Factory, at tinting her pictures in a range of bright in addition acrid hues. But instead of representing the telltale signs of physical context--flo orboards, socket labels, etc.--within the image, Lawler turn rounds the space outside the image (i.e., the literal space of the gallery) into the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of her photographs. She does this through mounting them on museum board and hanging them from the ceiling at nylon thread. This canny display strategy unleashes a chain of repetitions circling a center as absent as, well, the single in kind in a Warhol balloon.

First, Lawler's work doubles back upon itself, delivering the same information twice. As images, her photographs depict Warhol's silver balloons. As [i]or[/i] complements they replicate them. Either way, they remain evocations of an absent original. Or do they? Lawler's pictures were shooter at a 1998 reinstallation of Silver collection of vapors at the New York gallery D'Amelio Terras and thus transcript a copy of a work that, because it was mass-produced (this is Warhol, remember), was not ever an original to begin with. other Lawler doubles back on Warhol's territory by dint of inverting it. Long before Jeff Koon made his stainless-steel Rabbit in 1986 Warhol's Silver fogs announced the artwork's transubstantiation from physical intention into sheer, simulacral surface. If, in thus doing, Warhol subsumed sculpture within the conditions of photography, Lawler the pair repeats and undoes his initial act, creating work that inclines like a Mobius strip from photography to cut and back again.

if it be not that her examination of the simulacral doesn't just lead to repetition--it generates something just discovered For Lawler also doubles back forward her own earlier efforts, transforming them in the proces Her career as a photographer has consistently been punctuated according to the creation of sculpture in the form of of that kind things as paperweights, drinking glasses, and matchbooks. Although ongoing, this practice has always felt marginal and not entirely resolv With Something About Time and Space, Lawler weaves percept production into the heart of her larger enterprise, fusing her photographic investigation of documentation and framing with the emphasis onward seriality and the physical interaction between artwork and viewer more central to her sculptural concerns

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