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Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Nancy Princenthal

How do paintings look after-hours? Offstage? Is there indignity in being moved around like a crate of perishables? And--key question--do photographs leach value from art (the Benjaminian chestnut) or bestow it? Louise Lawler has addressed these issues for more than 25 years in photographs that generally catch artworks off guard. Over that time, changes in the culture at large, and in Lawler's own work, have shifted her address from head-on institutional critique to more oblique forms of visual analysis. In her recent show at Metro Pictures, she even seems to have become interested in the secret life of inanimate objects (for which the relevant text is not Benjamin's but Freud's, on the uncanny).

This inclination is most apparent in photographs showing portraits in gallery settings. Among the likenesses are a photo of Duchamp in blurry profile, and, in mesmerizing frontality, Gerhard Richter's painting of the physicist James Franck, in a work Lawler titles White Gloves. Semaphore of good manners and of mime, the white gloves here belong to a shadowy art handler, who makes Franck appear before us as if she were pulling him from a hat. There is also Maurizio Cattelan's huge Halloween mask of Picasso, whom Lawler presents as a tyrant seen at third hand and under plastic, regarding in helpless outrage his own corpse, in the form of a costumed figure stretched out before him on the floor. Laid sideways against the wall in another photograph, there is Richter's nude walking down the stairs, descended--doubly and triply--from Duchamp's famous painting of the same subject. Uncanniest of all are images of Yoshitomo Nara's cuddly but snarky figurines, whether staring into empty spaces or reveling in bubbly clouds of light.

But Lawler's primary subject remains art's circulation through the system of retail and display, and what that transit reveals about the contingency of value. The current images (from 2002 to 2004) were taken at art fairs, auction houses, galleries and museums. Some of the spaces Lawler frames are empty, or nearly so, and she uses them as staging areas for the contemplation of art's minimum conditions. She also sports with the non-uniqueness of photographs, in one case by creating a chapel-like space in which two copies of a photograph of a framed drawing face each other, the chandelier reflected in each making us look up in vain for the glitzy light. Another repetition is Lawler's small jewel-like photo of a photo of a nude torso, matted in yellow, shown on a black wall, seen through a green doorway. Installed in three places in the exhibition, it became a marker of photography's ability to be at once precious (visually) and negligible (we've seen it before).

This was a substantial show and a vigorous workout, not only for the challenges the photographs pose, but also because in Lawler's work, nothing is inconsequential. The installation mattered, of course, but so did the press release and checklist (some information was given, much withheld). We could not help wondering whether it would be appropriate to peek into the office of the gallery, or into its storage racks. An exercise above all, then, in boundary maintenance--with all psychological associations surely intended--Lawler's work has remained unsettling for an uncannily long time.