Tag Archives: Louise Lawler

LAWLER, QUAYTMAN, AND ROWLAND AT BUCHHOLZ

When Metro Pictures asked me to do a show in 1982, they already had an image. They represented a group of artists whose work often dealt with issues of appropriation and was often spoken of and written about together. A gallery generates meaning through the type of work they choose to show. I self-consciously made work that “looked like” Metro Pictures. The first thing you saw when you entered my show, Arrangements of Pictures, was an arrangement of works the gallery had on hand by “gallery artists” Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Laurie Simmons, and James Welling. A wall label titled it “Arranged by Louise Lawler.” It was for sale as a work with a price determined by adding up the prices of the individual pieces, plus a percentage for me. I went to the collectors to whom Metro had sold work and photographed the Metro artists’ works in those contexts. I printed the resulting images a “normal” picture size and titled them “arrangements,” too—for example, “Arranged by Barbara and Eugene Schwartz, New York City.” The Metro situation at that time formed that work, and it also formed a way of working for me. — Louise Lawler*

Invited to exhibit together for the first time, Louise Lawler, R. H. Quaytman, and Cameron Rowland present new work along with selected older pieces for a group show in Cologne, now in its final week.

LOUISE LAWLER, R. H. QUAYTMAN, CAMERON ROWLAND

Through October 24.

Galerie Buchholz

Neven-DuMont-Strasse 17, Cologne.

*“Prominence Given, Authority Taken: An Interview with Louise Lawler by Douglas Crimp,” in Louise Lawler: An Arrangement of Pictures (New York: Assouline, 2000).

Louise Lawler, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Galerie Buchholz, September 4, 2020–October 24, 2020, from top: Louise Lawler, Water to Skin (catalogue size), 2016/2017, digital Fujiflex print face mounted to Plexiglas on museum box (The Swimming Pool, 1952, Henri Matisse, gouache on paper, cut and pasted on painted paper, installed as nine panels in two parts on burlap-covered walls, photographed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City); Louise Lawler, Water to Skin (traced), 2016/2020, vinyl adhesive wall material (the work is as a tracing by Jon Buller available as a PDF vector file for production and installation at any scale as an adhesive wall graphic); Louise Lawler, Corner (distorted for the times, perturbée), 2014/2018, digital Fujiflex print face mounted to Plexiglas on museum box (A work by Jean-Michel Basquiat photographed at Yvon Lambert’s office, 108 Rue Vieille du Temple, Paris); Cameron Rowland, Management, 2020, time horn clock; Cameron Rowland, Out of Sight, 2020, 19th-century slave iron, 19th-century slave iron with missing rattle; R.H. Quaytman, Spine, Chapter 20 [Fraser, Anastas, Lawler], 2010, oil, silkscreen ink and gesso on wood (featuring the silkscreened image of Andrea Fraser viewing Louise Lawler’s The Princess, Now the Queen—utilized in four paintings from Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters, Chapter 8, 2006—combined with a second silkscreened image of Rhea Anastas—utilized in two paintings from Ark, Chapter 10, 2008. Two black bars and the cropping orthogonal of the Andy Warhol painting in Louise Lawler’s photo delimit the silkscreened imagery along with overpainting in Marshall’s photo oils. Down the center is a line of red, green and blue. This line was placed on all paintings in Chapter 20 that reused a silkscreen for a second time.); R.H. Quaytman, + ×, Chapter 34 [V], 2018, indigo distemper and gesso on wood; Louise Lawler, Position (noun), 1982/2020, gelatin silver print, installation view. Images courtesy and © the artists and Galerie Buchholz.

NICK MAUSS — TRANSMISSIONS CATALOG

I came upon the word transmissions while thinking about how the ethereal, corporeal, and technical dimensions of ballet resonate in the artworks and souvenirs it produces. Transmissions are subject to interference and interruption. Ballets are conveyed to us through mediations, anecdotes, and bodies. And often when I’m watching ballet in its contemporary manifestations, I wonder how these transmissions have occurred.

I started looking into the history of ballet in the twentieth century… Through a web of genealogies, I eventually arrived at the flamboyant intersection of ballet and art in New York, beginning in the 1930s. There the avant-garde experiments of the previous decades in Europe incited a particularly intense cross-contamination, an overt articulation of homosexual erotics long before the emergence of a public language around queerness. Looking at modern American art of this period through the prism of ballet reveals a tangle of interrelationships, collaborations, derivations, and hybrid aesthetic programs that still feel surprisingly contemporary. Nick Mauss*

Two years after the close of TRANSMISSIONSNick Mauss’ multimedia installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art—the museum and Dancing Foxes Press have published an exhibition catalog that beautifully extends the show, combining performance and exhibition images from the Whitney with an extensive selection of new illustrative and textual documentation.

Essays by Mauss, Joshua Lubin-Levy, and exhibition organizers Scott Rothkopf, Elisabeth Sussman, and Allie Tepper—as well as a conversation between Mauss and the dancers who performed during the run of the show—round out this essential volume, a complement to and in dialog with recent catalogs by Jarrett Earnest (The Young and Evil—Queer Modernism in New York 1930–1955) and Samantha Friedman and Jodi Hauptman (Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern).

I drew multiple webs of interrelationships, elective affinities, and echo waves of influence, focusing as much on the social, professional, sexual, and collaborative points of contact as on transhistorical resonances that were in some cases perhaps fantasy—eschewing standard mappings of modern art… [embracing] anachrony and distortion over apparent objectivity…

My decision to insist on ballet as the fulcrum in TRANSMISSIONS was also a response to the ubiquity of postmodern dance derivations within the contemporary museum environment and the reductive version of modernity that these prequalified dance idioms signify and cement. Contemporaneity is reduced to a “look” of modernity. Modernist ballets make for engaging historical documents precisely because their own relationship to history is a kind of suspension of disbelief; they are intrinsically modernist, even if they don’t “signal” modernity to contemporary eyes.— Nick Mauss*

The world of the spectator, the receiver, was a primary lens through which I constructed TRANSMISSIONS, and the flux of the exhibition’s daily audience over the course of two months took on a central role within it. This book is similarly directed at the wholly different—private, rather than social—negotiations of the reader. — Nick Mauss*

NICK MAUSS, TRANSMISSIONS (Brooklyn: Dancing Foxes Press; New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2020).

See Benedict Nguyen on performing in Transmissions.

Listen to Fran Lebowitz and Nick Mauss in conversation on the occasion of Transmissions at the Whitney, 2018.

*Nick Mauss text—from the catalog essay “Gesturing Personae” and TRANSMISSIONS jacket copy—courtesy and © the artist.

Nick Mauss, Transmissions, Whitney Museum of American Art, March 16, 2018–May 14, 2018; exhibition catalog, Whitney and Dancing Foxes Press, 2020, from top: installation view, Whitney, 2018, photograph by Ron Amstutz; Carl Van Vechten, Janet Collins in New Orleans Carnival, 1949, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; George Platt Lynes, Tex Smutney, 1941, Kinsey Institute, Indiana University , Estate of George Platt Lynes; Transmissions performance photograph of Quenton Stuckey, March 13, 2018, by Paula Court, with Gaston Lachaise, Man Walking (Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein), 1933, at left; Dorothea Tanning, cover of Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s 1945–1946 program, Artists Rights Society, New York / ADAGP, Paris; installation view, Whitney, 2018, images on scrim, Lynes, Ralph McWilliams (dancer), 1952, Lynes, Tex Smutney, Carl Van Vechten slideshow on rear wall, dancers Brandon Collwes, Quenton Stuckey, and Kristina Bermudez, photograph by Amstutz; dancers Arthur Mitchell and Diana Adams, and (seated) George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky during rehearsals for Agon, 1957, choreographed by Balanchine for New York City Ballet, photograph by Martha Swope, Jerome Robbins Dance Division; Bermudez (left), Burr Johnson, Nick Mauss, and Fran Lebowitz, May 9, 2018, at the Whitney, photograph by Court; Pavel Tchelitchew, Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 1937, oil on canvas, collection of the School of American Ballet, courtesy Jerry L. Thompson; Louise Lawler, Marie + 90, 2010–2012, silver dye bleach print on aluminum, Whitney, courtesy and © the artist and Metro Pictures; (Mauss printed Lawler’s image of Marie, Edgar DegasLittle Dancer Aged Fourteen, circa 1880, on the Transmissions dancers’ white leotards); Lynes photograph of Jean Cocteau, Bachelor magazine, April 1937; Transmissions performance photograph by Paula Court; Paul Cadmus, Reflection, 1944, egg tempera on composition board, Yale University Art Gallery, bequest of Donald Windham in memory of Sandy M. Campbell, courtesy and © 2019 Estate of Paul Cadmus, ARS, New York; Cecil Beaton, photograph of poet Charles Henri Ford in a costume designed by Salvador Dali, silver gelatin print, collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody; artworks by Pavel Tchelitchew, John Storrs, Elie Nadelman, Gustav Natorp, and Sturtevant, and photographs by Ilse Bing, arranged in front of Mauss’, Images in Mind, 2018, installation view, Whitney, 2018, photograph by Amstutz; Mauss’ re-creation of costume designed by Paul Cadmus for the 1937 ballet Filling Station (choreographed by Lew Christensen), fabricated by Andrea Solstad, 2018, and Nadelman, Dancing Figure, circa 1916–1918, installation view, Whitney, 2018, photograph by Amstutz; Man Ray, New York, 1917 / 1966, nickel-plated and painted bronze, Whitney;, courtesy and © Man Ray 2015 Trust, ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris; Mauss and Lebowitz in conversation at the Whitney, 2018, photography courtesy and © Izzy Dow; Murals by Jared French exhibition brochure, Julien Levy Gallery, 1939; Transmissions performance photograph of Anna Thérèse Witenberg, March 13, 2018, by Court; Dorothea Tanning, Aux environs de Paris (Paris and Vicinity), 1962, oil on linen, Whitney Museum of American Art, gift of the Alexander Iolas Gallery; Maya Deren, The Very Eye of Night (1958, still), 16mm film, Anthology Film Archives, New York.

ABORTION IS NORMAL — PART 2

Recognizing the ongoing threat to reproductive rights in the United States, ABORTION IS NORMAL—sponsored by the Downtown for Democracy Independent Expenditure Committee—is an “emergency art exhibition curated by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol and organized by Marilyn Minter, Gina Nanni, Laurie Simmons, and Sandy Tait.”*

Part 2 of the show opens this week at Arsenal Contemporary in Manhattan.

Contributing artists include Allison Janae Hamilton, Ameya Marie Okamoto, Amy Khoshbin, Andrea Chung, Arlene Shechet, Barbara Kruger, Betty TompkinsCajsa von ZeipelCarrie Mae Weems, Carroll Dunham, Catherine Opie, Cecily Brown, Chloe Wise, Christopher Myers, Christen Clifford, Cindy Sherman, Delano DunnDerrick Adams, Dominique Duroseau, Elektra KB, Fin Simonetti, Grace Graupe Pillard, Hank Willis Thomas, Hayv Kahraman, Jaishri Abichandani, Jack Pierson, Jane Kaplowitz, Jon Kessler, Jonathan HorowitzJonathan Lyndon Chase, Judith Bernstein, Judith Hudson, Katrina Majkut, Louise Lawler, Lyle Ashton HarrisMarisa Morán Jahn, Michele PredMiguel Luciano, Mika Rottenberg, Nadine Faraj, Nan GoldinNarcissister, Natalie Frank, Rob Pruitt, Ryan McGinley, Sahana Ramakrishnan, Sarah Sze, Shirin Neshat, Shoshanna Weinberger, Shout Your Abortion, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Suzy Lake, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Viva Ruiz, Walter Robinson, Wangechi Mutu, Xaviera Simmons, Yvette Molina, and Zoe Buckman.

New editions by Paul Chan, Rashid Johnson, and Richard Prince are also available.

ABORTION IS NORMAL*

Opening Night

Tuesday, January 21, 6 pm to 8 pm.

Exhibition runs through February 1.

Arsenal Contemporary

214 Bowery, New York City.

Abortion is Normal, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York, January 9–18, 2020, Arsenal Contemporary, New York, January 21–February 1, 2020, from top: Nadine FarajYo Aborte, 2016; Judith Bernstein, Abortion is Normal, 2019; Lyle Ashton HarrisBillie #21, 2002; Cindy Sherman, Untitled, 2019; Marilyn MinterCuntrol, 2020; Shoshanna WeinbergerHair Between the Legs, 2015; Arlene ShechetTo Be Continued, 2018; Nan GoldinGeno by the lake, Bavaria, Germany 1994, 1994; Christen CliffordI Want Your Blood, 2013–2020 (detail); Rob Pruitt, American Quilts 2018: Neighbors, 2018; Catherine Opie, Nicola, 1993; Natalie Frank, Portrait 1, 2019; Laurie SimmonsMother Nursery, 1976; Ameya Marie OkamotoThe Notorious RBG, 2018; Barbara KrugerWho will write the history of tears?, 2011. Images courtesy and © the artists, the photographers, Downtown for Democracy, and Abortion is Normal.