Louise Lawler: Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back)

Softcover | 19.05 x 1.6 x 25.4 cm | 192 pp

MIT Press | 2006 | 9780262622066

For decades Louise Lawler (b. 1947) 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 colour pictures of art in museums and in auction houses. In addition she has produced a variety of objects - paperweights, etched drinking glasses, matchbooks, gallery announcements - all of which cleverly describe how art comes to accrue value as it moves through various systems of exchange. 

Lawler's oeuvre was essential in creating an expanded field for photography, it was crucial in postmodern debates over theories of representation, it remains indelible within the field of institutional critique, and it has always been trenchant and witty in its sustained commitment to a feminist vision of art, art history, and contemporary art practice.

The very self-effacing nature of Lawler's practice - her continual suspicion about notions of authorship and her sly disregard for museological conventions have meant that she resisted the usual career retrospectives. 

Twice Untitled and Other Pictures was published in conjunction with Lawler's first major museum exhibition in the United States and eats away at the standard museum practices of chronology, linear development, and the presentation of masterpieces. Instead, it explores such dynamic themes and undercurrents of her 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. 

PLEASE NOTE: This title has been remainder marked by the publisher - a small stamp on one outer edge. See images.