DECONSTRUCTINGORIGINSTORIES

SHERRIELEVINESSHOESALEAT MERCHERSTREET(1976)ANDTHESTORIESABOUTVANGOGHSSHOES In 1976, one year before Douglas Crimp curated the Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, Sherrie Levine conducted a sale of seventy-five pairs of shoes at the Mercer Street Store. "They were all nearly identical, odd little things, sized for a small child but designed to look like those for an adult male, the kind of standard footwear worn by businessmen. Levine had bought them from a job lot in California, and sold them all at a slight profit in a single day" (Crimp 1977: 16). This is the same artist that we now remember mostly for her series of photographs "After Walker Evans" and "After Edward Weston," appropriating the original photographs by Evans and Weston by rephotographing and signing them as her own. Levines entire oeuvre has been marked by this gesture to crop out, copy, steal originals with no attempt to hide the unlawful appropriation. Whom then do these shoes belong to, that she was selling in seventy-five awkwardly shrunken pairs (they would have been too small to be her own)? Who, we might ask, is their owner and what is their story (Two questions that have often been confused)?
Sherrie Levine Snapshots of Shoes from Shoe Sale, Mercer Street Store, New York,1977

The only evidence that remains from Levines sale performance are a couple of Snapshots of Shoes from Shoe Sale, Mercer Street Store, New York (1977). Crimp included four of these photographic images of similar, almost identical looking pairs of shoes in the catalogue and wrote "these shoes were certainly not useful to their purchasers, nor were they particularly attractive, and they seemed singularly devoid of aesthetic interest. Were they intended as a latter-day species of Duchampian readymade? Or fetishistic objects of a Surrealist kind? Or was Levines statement simply Here are seventy-five pairs of little shoes?" Crimp did not answer these questions but in them he anticipated the discourse that was established around the work of Levine in later years: Is she following the Duchampian strategy of ridiculing the artwork for the fact that its so called aura is one always already constituted by its context? Or, does she, to the contrary, believe in the signifying power of the male gesture of the artist as the author god? Is her gesture motivated by penis envy, taking the thing (the work of the consecrated author) and supplementing it with her own lack (of signifying power) as a woman artist? Or is she simply, as Crimp suggested, making a statement, leaving the intricate journey of interpretation up to us? I would like to follow this last path, although it is not a straight one, because, as Crimp remarked, it is impossible to take Levines work just as a statement without any intended route of signification. "Seeing all of those shoes spread out on a table, one inevitably wished to animate them, to invent stories in which they became synecdoche characters" (Crimp 1977: 16). In her later photographs, she was stealing from well-known artistsEvans and West. And when I looked at the pictures of the pairs of shoes it was clear to me that Levine was not just selling any shoes, but was in fact selling shoes she had stolen from Van Gogh. I am speaking of Van Goghs Old Shoes with Laces. Already Walker Evans photograph Floyed Burroughs Work Shoes (1936) can be seen as an homage to the famous painting of Van Gogh. Levine must have known the Evans pair, although I am not sure if she ever rephotographed it. And most probably she was aware of the Van Gogh reference he was making. Although "Van Goghs shoes with Laces" are painted shoes, old shoes, or rather boots, that wear the traces of their use while Levines shoes are brand new, shiny office-style shoes that are hard to imagine being used due to their lilliputian size, there is an undeniable resemblance between the two artists images. The way in which the shoes are positioned in both pictures in the centre of a flat but unevenly lighted surface, the way in which the partially unlaced laces still upstage the shoes, guiding the eyes, connecting the pair. How they, then, wind like a snake their way through the right lower corner, out of picture. In one of Levines four photographs the lace follows exactly the same twists and turns the lace once painted by Van Gogh did. Coincidence? Probably so. But there are links other than the laces that tie Levines shoes back to those painted by Van Gogh and further tie them to the words that have been written about these shoes and whom they might have belonged to. On the second to last page in Derridas The Truth in Painting, in a chapter dedicated to the interpretation of Van Goghs painted shoes, I found the following paragraph that in our context could be read as an description of Levines Mercer Street Shoe Sale: All these shoes remain there, in a sale, so you can compare them, pair them up, unpair them, bet or not bet on the pair The shoes are always open to the unconscious of the other. Rented out, according to an other topic or the topic of another. Rented out, in a cut-price sale, up for auction, being gambled-for, to be taken however you can, but never to be possessed, still less to be kept. You can only give them back (rendre) if you think you have them, and you can only think youre giving them if you havent got them (Derrida 1987: 381). But of course Derrida did not write about Levines work but about Van Goghs (or rather about the writing on it by Marting Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro). Given that the piece was published originally in 1978 in no. 3 of the art journal Macula, within a group of articles on "Marin Heidegger and the Shoes of Van Gogh," and republished the same year in the book La Verit en peinture, Derrida could have known the piece that Levine performed in the streets of Soho in 1977 and maybe even have seen the photographs of it some month later in the Pictures exhibition at Artist Space. Interestingly enough, the original title of the essay was "La Verit en pointure" which can be translated into English as "Truth in Shoe Size." To know the truth in shoe size, or the truth about the shoe size of Leviness seventy-five abnormally small shoes, would mean to come a little closer to the truth /enigma about the work, to find out what it is all about. For Derrida the shoe size seems to be the crucial point (pointure) in rendering the truth of Van Goghs painting (Old Shoe with Laces) when tracing Heideggers and Schapiros dispute about them. Heidegger, in his seminal essay "The Origin of the Work of Art"Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkesoriginally presented

in 1935 and finally published in Holzwege in 1950) had taken the shoes depicted by Van Gogh for peasant woman shoes, invoking a whole world that otherwise is not visible in the picture: From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself (Heidegger 1971: 23-34/ Holzwege 22-23). In 1968, more than 30 years later, art historian Meyer Shapiro responded to Heideggers famous hermeneutic reading in an homage to Kurt Goldstein, a friend who had pointed out the Heidegger essay to him. "According to him, Heidegger gets both the painting and the shoes wrong. By attributing them to some peasant man or woman, he remains in error, in imaginary projection, the very thing against which he claimed to put us on our guard (He has indeed imagined everything and projected it into the painting)" (Derrida 1987: 275). Shapiro then, in a painstaking proof, shows that Heidegger is wrong and that he holds the truth, which he wants to give back to Van Gogh, to whom the shoes rightfully belong: the shoes that Van Gogh painted in the winter of 1986-87 must have been his own shoes, according to Schapiro, since Van Gogh had already moved from Anvers to Paris early in 1886. The shoes thus do not belong to the peasant woman but belong to Van Gogh himself. But if they are not a pair of peasant shoes, they would not evoke the peasant womans world and the call of the earth but rather the world of the artist, a "man of the town or city."

BRINGING BACK MEANING OR DERRIDAS DECONSTRUCTIVE PUN Derrida, who entitles the same essay "Restitutions" for the English translation of the book The Truth in Painting (1987), seems to want to "restitute" or bring back the truthful, lawful, original interpretation to the Van Gogh shoes. Of course we have to read Derridas contribution to the dispute some ten years after the first correspondence between Heidegger and Schapiro in 1965 as one of his famous deconstructive puns (on origin stories). In a short annotation before the essay, he unequivocally states that he took his "pretext from an essay by Meyer Schapiro" to write this essay as "a critique of Heidegger, or more precisely of what he says about Van Goghs shoes in The Origin of the Work of Art" (Derrida 1987: 256). In his epigram to the chapter Derrida quotes Czannes famous words originally written in a letter to his painter friend mile Bernard: "Je vous dois la verit en peinture et je vous la dirai." From the pathos of this promise to render the truth about painting made by Czanne, Derrida derives the title of the book La Verit en peinture. The essay that we have been looking at, "La Verit en pointure," (The Truth in Shoe Size) now titled, "Restitutions," figures prominently in the collection of essays that deal with the question of The Truth in Painting. By finding out the right shoe size, Derrida ironically claims to bring back the truth about the Van Gogh painting. With the little pun in the title he conflates the truth in (the Van Gogh) painting with the truth in size (of the painted shoes, Van Goghs or the peasant womans, in the case of the latter most likely of a smaller size). By substituting "peinture" with "pointure" Derrida points towards the snares of hermeneutic interpretation in Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art. He points up the need for wariness in connection with origin stories by putting into practice the critical strategies of deconstruction. Tracing the pedantic correspondence between Schapiro and Heidegger like a detective, Derrida does not want to leave anything about this shoe-size-scenario in the dark. Going even further than the two, Derrida does not shy away from the idiotic question: "is it really a pair?" If I understand aright, no title says pair of shoes for this picture. Whereas elsewhere, in a letter which Schapiro quotes moreover, Van Gogh speaks of another picture, specifying a pair of old shoes. Is it not the possibility of this unpairedness (two shoes for the same foot, for example, are more the double of each other but this double simultaneously fudges both pair and identity, forbids complementarity, paralyses directionality, causes things to squint toward the devil), is it not the logic of this false parity, rather than of this false identity, which constructs the trap? The more I look at this painting, the less it looks as though it could walk (Derrida 1987: 278). So in the end the question "is it really a pair," a question that seemed so appropriate to the entire project of finding out the truth about the painting, serves Derrida to disclose a trap in this way of proceeding (going on) that might bring the investigators to stumble and fall. He warns: "All the more reason to be wary here. The diabolical is perhaps already caught, a supplementary bait, in the limping of these two shifty shoes which, if the double doesnt make a pair, nonetheless trap those who want to put their feet back into them precisely because one cannot-must notput ones feet in them and because that would be a strange trap" (Derrida 1987: 275). We do not know the size or sizes of Levines seventy-five pairs of shoes, nor if they really were pairs, as Crimp had immediately taken for granted. They, too, might as well have been one hundred and fifty single shoes that Levine or the merchant from the job lot in California whom Levine had bought them from tied together into random pairs. In any case, what is clear from Crimps description, as well as, from a

look at the Snapshots, is that trying to put them on would not be a good idea. "Precisely because" in Derridas words "one cannotmust not put ones feet in them and because that would be the strange trap." But that is exactly what Heidegger did. He put his own feet in Van Goghs Old Shoes with Laces. Hugh Silverman wrote on this "Autobiographical Textuality of Heideggers Shoes": Heideggers interpretation is indeed an interpretation. He offers a hermeneutic of the visible thingthe pair of peasant shoes in Van Goghs painting. He invokes the world that they disclose. He describes the meaning that is imbedded in the painting and that opens up a clearing (a Lichtung as he later calls it) that reveals a world and that sets a horizon for that world. This hermeneutic of the picture of peasant shoes is not only convincing, it is even instilling. Heidegger is able to bring out a world which he himself understood well. His peasant background made it possible for him to understand the world of the peasant woman. His early years were spent in Messkirch (Baden) and his later pastoral moments in Todnautberg (Schwarzwald) where he could observe, speak with, and even blend into the world of a peasant life in the Germany of the 1930s (Silverman 1994: 136-137). This background story seems to legitimize for us Heideggers interpretation but we have to remember that Heideggers personal background and agenda is exactly a context that remains hidden, outside the hemeneutic reading of the artwork. And Schappiro does not criticise Heidegger for attributing Van Goghs shoes to some peasant man or woman, per se. If Heideggers reading could have been proven, he would have accepted it. But "he remains in error," Schapiro finds, precisely because he conflates the origin story with his own story, an "imaginary projection, the very thing against which he claimed to put us on our guard". But also Schapiros story, though it claims to be the truth, the only truth, which is the truth of the authorVan Gogh himselfis not far from projection either. Schapiro, Derrida claims, opts for the metaphysics of subjectivity, "one that, since Descartes, tries to secure for itself, in subjectivity, a ground of certainty (an unshakeable rock or pedestal on which this time the adhering sole no longer slips)" (Derrida 1987: 372). The shoes stand in for the rightful owner of the artwork who knows the truth about it. Apparently both Heidegger and Schapiro imaginatively project themselves into the picture they claim to analyze and interpret objectively. Such a reading, one that takes for its premise that the work is a coherent whole with but one right interpretation, has been criticised by deconstructivist and semiotic art criticism for nurturing ideologically biased views, leaving out everything that does not contribute to the one right masterplot. The convention of unity is a powerful ideological weapon because of the pressure it exerts on the reader to choose one interpretation over another rather than to read through the conflict of interpretations, because it presupposes single-handed authorship and the authority that entails, and because it encourages the projection of masterplots that colonize or erase the marginal. (However, using the challenge to unity as a cover, or pre-text, for a resistance to interpretation may well be based on the same unifying fallacy it tries to avoid) (Bal 1990: 507).

IMAGINARY PROJECTION (NOW THAT THE AUTHOR IS DEAD) But is not imaginary projection the motor for any kind of interpretation? And how can we find out the truth about Levines shoes, borrowed from Van Gogh, or maybe just from Evans Floyed Burroughs Work Shoes, itself probably an homage to Van Goghs A Pair of Boots or Old Shoes with Laces. Or what is the meaning of her Evans and Westons, stolen for sure? Already in the originalsVan Goghs shoesit is hard to find and fix meaning, as we have seen. Already in Van Gogh paintings we trace meaning back to some origin outside the picturebe it peasant woman or city dweller. In this process of interpretation, the depicted shoes become straw men, stand-ins, fetishes, for the absent figure of meaningbe it the artist/author himself or some other projected story. How can we refrain from doing the same, projecting ourselves into the pictures (creating the one story in order to get it right and thus control them) when looking a Levine or a Lawler? Most of us solved this question by turning away from the images, not looking at them at all. Or, if we were indeed daring a peep, it would have been with embarrassment. Howard Singerman describes this circumspect and interrupted way of looking when encountering Levines work: "I found myself avoiding looking into Levines photograps After Walker Evans. I was pulling myself up and out of Evans images and insisting instead on the frames, the mat and the glass; that is on the Levines" (Singerman 1994: 80). Singerman compares his unease when looking at a Levine with that of being caught looking at pornography. In both cases we are confronted with a seemingly flat surface that says nothing beyond its sheer in-your-face visibility. In both cases there seems to be no author or intentional meaning hidden beyond the blatantly apparent. Everything is clear and it is only there for us. Only we complete the meaning of the image provisionally by filling the gap between the visible and the interpretation with our desire. The responsibility of what we are seeing and experiencing cannot be shoved onto the author or some signification in and around the work but rests upon us. We cannot make Levine responsible for our experience while looking at the image, because she is not the proper author and these works are not originally hers. By eliminating the position of the author, Levines work can be understood as a "refusal of the role of creator as father of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law" (Owens 1983: 73). Levine is subverting the law of the father by opening up the author/origin story for multiple possible readings. In my reading, her snapshots of the pairs of shoes from her Mercer Street Shoe Sale performance recall the famous Van Gogh pair and, with them, a discourse around the origin of and truth in the work of art. This discourse on the origin of the work is also Levines main theme. Taking up Van Goghs motif of the unlaced pair of shoes, doubling them into 76 pairs and selling 1977 them on the street in Soho to everybody (presumably not exactly an art world audience at the time), Levine can be compared with Derrida when he writes about the duel between Heideggeer and Schapiro in order to

find out to whom, in truth, are due the unlaced shoes of Van Gogh. We can conclude with Derrida that, single, paired, belonging to the artist himself or being sold by the artist: "The shoes are always open to the unconscious of the other. Rented out, according to an other topic or the topic of another. Rented out, in a cut price sale, up for auction, being gambled-for, to be taken however you can, but never to be possessed, still less to be kept" (Derrida 1987: 381). In other words they are still up for grabs. We dont have to give them back to any author or other prior owner. But neither can we keep them for ourselves. But, for a moment, now that the author is dead, we can for the first time look interested, projecting our own desire without pretending to be objective. Of course this can stir a feeling of unease and embarrassment because we are suddenly confronted with our own unconscious wishes and fears that previously were restricted to the exterior or margins of the work. A good example of how these interested looks that stray from objective routes of interpretations is Douglas Crimps anecdote about a photograph by Levine that he owns: For several years I had hanging in my bedroom Levines series of Westons photographs of his son Neil. On a number of occasions, a certain kind of visitor to my bedroom would ask, Whos the kid in the photographs? generally with the implication that I was into child pornography. Wanting to counter that implication but unable easily to explain what those photographs meant to me, or at least what I thought they meant to me, I usually told a little white lie, saying only that they were pictures by a famous photographer of his son. I was thereby able to establish a credible reason for having the photos without having to explain postmodernism to someone I figured given the nature of these encounterswouldnt be particularly interested anyway (Crimp 1995: 6).
Sherrie Levine (Untitled) After Edward Weston, 1981

Lets assume the visitor would have been interested, a young man with some basic knowledge in postmodern strategies. What would Crimp have said? "I like these images of a naked six year old because they are by an artist who has not really photographed them herself but has appropriated the image from some other famous male artist and is thereby illustrating the postmodern critical occupation with the politics of representation?" But we cannot follow Crimps argumentative trajectory further here because he immediately veers and admits that he "was forced to recognise that this question was not so nave as ...(he) had assumed. The men in my bedroom were perfectly able to readin Westons posing, framing, and lighting the young Neil so as to render his body a classical sculpturethe long-established codes of homoeroticism" (Crimp 1995: 6). Reading this story I cannot help but think that Crimp only recalls this event so vividly (not leaving out the sexually charged setting of it) because it confronted him with his own desires, which left him embarrassed and confused. Being addressed by his lovers about his connection to the works, he suddenly sees himself being seen while seeing Westons son Neil in Levines rephotograph. He cannot hide behind either Weston or Levine in the context of the situation and sees himself (for the first time, maybe) looking at the naked torso of the boy, wondering why he had put him above his bed. (And maybe understanding that it might have been not entirely coincidental that he had reserved for exactly this Levine a prime spot above the bed in the most private of his rooms). But the desire that is initiated by this image of Levines (of a Weston of his naked son Neil), does not come to closure when we finally get to the nude youth. When a friend told Levine that her works made him want to see the real Westons and Evans, she agreed: "Of course, and the originals make you want to see that little boy, but when you see the boy the art is gone." Crimp himself has described this endless deferral of the satisfaction of desire, the endless tracing of meaning. In Levines work the origin or truth cannot be located because they are "purloined, confiscated, appropriated, stolen" (Crimp 1995: 118). The search remains futile, but nonetheless has to go on. Crimp traces the origin of the images that Levine simply rephotographed from a poster published by the Witkin Gallery of the famous series by Edward Weston of his son as a study in the nude. Copyright would give the images to Westonor now to the Weston estate. But Crimp observes that the motif must be ascribed to classical sculpture, concluding laconically: "I think, to be fair, however, we might just as well give them to Praxiteles" (Crimp 1995: 118). Rosalind Krauss, deconstructing modernist myths like The Originality of the Avant-Garde takes up and agrees with Crimps reading. She focuses on Levines pirated prints as an example that radically questions the concept of origin by violating Westons copyright. "But as has been pointed out about Westons originals, these are already taken from models provided by others; they are given in that long series of Greek kouroi by which the nude male torso has long a go been processed an multiplied within our culture" (Krauss 1985: 168). Like the chief commissioner of the Paris police who tried in vain to find The Purloined Letter in Edgar Ellen Poes famous story of the same title, we are prone to fail in our attempts to find the origin of our desire of Levines purloined image if we only use the conventional methods. Roland Barthes, referring to The Purloined Letter, has remarked that such a search, if it want to be effective, has to be a multi-directional (vertical) enterprise. "Meaning is not at the end of the narrative, it runs across it, just as conspicuous as the purloined letter, meaning eludes all unilateral investigation" (Barthes 1977: 87). DOUBLING ORIGINALS and CRITIQUING INSTITUTIONS The story of Crimp, Krauss, and finally Singerman (some ten years later) trying to trace meaning in Levines photographs is a similar the one

Derrida told about Heideggers and Shapiros account of Van Gogh. Only, in the stories about Levine, the collapse of this endeavor to find meaning seems to happen much faster. While Heidegger and Schapiro needed Derrida to point out the pitfalls of their respective origin stories, Crimp, Krauss, and Singerman already follow in Derridas footsteps (barefooted one might add or at least not trying to put on the strange pairs of shoes). It seems that we have to double, copy, rephotograph the originals to disclose the fact that already in the originals an original cannot be found. Even if it was always already an endless tracing of meaning in Westons picture of his son, we somehow needed Levine to become aware of this. This is because citation never precisely repeats the absent original, as Judith Butler has pointed out (Butler 1993). Indeed, even a tendency toward alteration and modification exists within the process of repeating. LAWLERS RED RECTANGLE (1996): WHITE CUBE UNDER (DE)CONSTRUCTION

Louise Lawler Red (Rectangle),1996

Red (Circle),1996

Spearmint,1996

Pineapple/Butterscotch/Buddhist, 1996

Louise Lawlers photographs of famous artworks and their environments can also be read as citations. In contrast to Levine, whose rephotographs are often exact copies of their originals, Lawler seems to be more interested in the alterations and modifications that happen in the process of citation. Her work makes evident the fact that the immediate experience of the original artwork always depends upon its physical and institutional environment. Lawlers quoting of the originals is not as pure as Levines gesture, one might say. Rather than doubling, she is merely pointing to and including the originals in her own compositions. The fact that the market accepted Lawlers works as originals more easily, than Levines pictures is strange, because Lawler is as little "present" (in artistic gesture) in her pictures as Levine is in hers. She never constructs the situation she photographs. Rather, the different environments that compositionally envelope the originals in Lawlers photographs are also found situations. But it is also true that some of her photographs have almost painterly qualities. Interestingly enough, the photographs that look "the most original," or let us say, the most like art-photographas opposed to postmodern re-photography, to follow a distinction made my Abigail Solomon-Godeau (Solomon-Godeau 1991: 103-123)is a series that does not show works of art at all. Instead, Lawler photographed the empty gallery location in Chelsea still under construction, shortly before her gallery Metro Pictures moved there from Soho. Red (Rectangle) from 1996, for example (measuring 48x62,1/4"), ranges among the biggest cibachromes Lawler ever did. Not only does the title unequivocally recall Mark Rothkos abstract paintings such as Golden Composition (1949) or Untitled (Yellow, Orange, Red on Orange), (1954), but moreover the images themselves seem to be a reference to the color-field paintings of high modernism. Red (Rectangle) shows one wall of the empty gallery space. The wall is painted red from the ground up to a mans standing height. Above that, it is white or rather once used to be white. Now it looks grimy beige, probably up to the ceiling. But we can only see a short stretch of it (so three thirds of the picture are red one third beige). Other than a No Smoking sign in the middle of the wall and a ladder to the left there is nothing in the picture except some debris on the ground, leaning against the wall: two boards of plywood, a rectangular sheet of metal that reflects some light and some kind of fuzzy stuff, probably wadding. An outlet with a cable runs both vertically and horizontally over the wall. Red (Circle) shows the same wall, this time only with a tire leaning against it. Spearmint shows peppermint green colors in front of beige sheet rock, covered with white spots of surfacer. Finally, Pinapple/Butterscotch/Buddhist is a wall painted bright yellow delineated by a row of white masonry. In this first account, I simply described what the photographs show. Another description story of the photograph Red (Rectangle) might go like this: (It consists of) A structure as solid as Mondrians and entirely as transcendent in meaning, but simplified, clarified, and unified into a large-scale, full-colour holism never imagined by the Dutch master. Characteristically, this took the form of an oversized rectangular field, ... subdivided into two or three stacked or symmetrically ordered rectangles, each glowing like a veil of color-suffused light and hung against a continuous ground, or wall, of contrasting but closely valued hue. By extending the large interior shapes almost to the edges of the canvas and there feathering their soft contours into the ground, (the artist)... etherealized the formsstill stratified as so often before in this arists oeuvreyet fused them visually, as well as physically, to the flatness and format of the support. Consequently, the singleness of the image tends to yield a strange and tantalizing complexity, especially when contemplated at length, in an intimate space, and under a soft, subdued light. Clearly, these are not my words but stolen from Daniel Wheelers description of Rothkos Maroon on Blue (1957-60) (Wheeler 1991: 49-50). But I used them here to make obvious Red (Rectangles) similarities with the zenith of high modernist paintingtoday among the most prestigious and expensive artworks on the market. Although not physically copying any original art work, Lawler again could be accused of stealing the original gesture of high modernism. But Lawlers relationship to the originals is not unambiguous. She repeats their authorial gesture at a time when the New York art market was expanding again, occupying and gentrifying a new neighbourhood, ultimately turning every artistic gesture into a token of exchange value. By making large-scale photographs that resemble Rothkos color-field paintings, Lawler

actually reiterates the ultimate art-turned-commodity status of the originals: One year later the Whitney Museum of American Art featured a gigantic retrospective of Rothkos oeuvre. The works were gathered from the wealthiest collections. She is not copying the originals themselves, but re-enacts their surplus values as high art commodity fetishes. But the formalist reading of the flat planes of colour as an abstract composition suddenly collapses when juxtaposed with a perceptual model that understands photography as a "window to the world." From such a perspective we would see her photographs as a gallery space under constructionthe real material setting of the artworkstill bare and ugly. Showing the space before its restoration, without its purist coating of white color, Lawler highlights an aspect of the gallery system that is usually never seen. This is the actual process of rebuilding old warehouses into sleekly designed display places for high art. The modernist coating of white color is a gesture so pure and subtle that it usually escapes our notice. The whitewash becomes the unquestioned canon univocally seen as neutral, pure, zero degree, making us believe that the modernist white cube is in fact the natural environment for art (anything else is discredited as artificial). By showing the half-painted, stained gallery wall cluttered with garbage, Lawler makes the white wall (usually looked through) visible. Part of the look of modern transparency, the white gallery wall is the blind spot of high modernist art: It is the white wall that serves the autonomous artwork as a neutral backdrop from which it can stand out, while itself remaining unseen. Lawler seems to ask: "What is preserved by this blindness?" Corbusier, in his essay, "The Decorative Art of Today," understands the white wall as a token for pure authentic culture before the intrusion of the barbaric other who smeared the white walls with degenerate "decoration." According to him, "whitewash exists wherever people have preserved intact the balanced structure of a harmonious culture. Once an extraneous element opposed to the harmony of the system has been introduced, whitewash disappears..." (Corbusier 1960: 189, quoted in Wigley 1990: 85) Without a doubt, Le Corbusiers argument has to be seen in relation to the dominant role of whiteness in the extended history of the concept of cleanliness which, as Vigarello claims, "consists, in the last analysis, on the dominant theme: the establishment, in western society, of a self-sufficient physical sphere, its enlargement, and the reinforcement of its frontiers, to the point of excluding the gaze of others" (Vigarello 1988: 231, quoted in Wigley, ibid.). Lawlers Red (Rectangle) shows that the "smeared and chaotic barbaric other" is in fact always there first and will be the one intruded onto and expelled. The whitewash is not what is left behind after the removal of all superfluous ornament, as we had always believed. On the contrary, it is an active method of erasure. Coating over with white paint becomes a homogenizing gesture that eventually cleans, streamlines, and gentrifies entire neighborhoods (in the name of capitalism). Faster than ever, the last living neighborhoods in New York change into glitzy, open-air shopping malls. Making a place for art in a city goes hand in hand with attracting a prosperous clientele of collectors. Soon, fashion boutiques, other luxury item shops, and pricey restaurants follow. Property values and rents go up and the real estate market booms. Old tenants can not pay the rent anymore and have to move out. Over a few years the entire neighborhood is cleaned, whitened, homogenized, commercialized and thus finally erased. Superimposing the two diverging readings of Red (Rectangle), Lawler reveals a connection between them that is usually bracketed off. Only in the clean white cube gallery setting, "when contemplated at length, in an intimate space, and under a soft, subdued light," can we perceive Red (Rectangle), like Wheelers formalist reading of a Rothkoas "etherealized forms... fused visually, as well as physically, to the flatness and format of the support." This reading is only made possible at the price of a violent cleaning and streamlining of the environment the art object is shown in, a process which leaves the art work as a decontextualised fetish.

THE MYTH OF FLAT AND DEEP PICTURES, OR: WHERE IS MEANING? The two models of looking at Red (Redtangle) that I have followed here seem mutually exclusive: the first model tries to find meaning in the purity of the medium, the flat surface, the shape of support, the properties of color (this is of course the famous Greenbergian model), while the other model leaves the formal surface of the work behind, endeavouring to find meaning in the real space of the depicted world. Paradoxically, in our case of Red (Rectangle), soon after we have entered the space beyond the surface, our view into the world is obstructed by the alarmingly red wall of the gallery space, and we are caught once again in the small and restrained world of the art market. This second model can not escape the narrow confines of the art world either and is ultimately thrown back onto itself, onto its self-centred and formally reductive system. Lawler shows that we have not really moved far from Greenbergs self-reflexive law of purism, long criticised by postmodern artists and critics for not leaving any possibility of transgression and critique. Artworks still seem to embody an "autonomous, disengaged form of labour and consumption, freed from normal social commerce by virtue of their status as objects designed exclusively for visual pleasure" (Wallis 1984: xiii). One might add: designed for accumulation of symbolic capital as well, serving the ruling class as a means of distinction (Bourdieu). The ambiguity in Lawlers work arises out of the fact that she is simultaneously playing the game and questioning its hidden functioning. David Clarke has shown that both mimetic as well as formalist pictures resemble each other in claiming their unmediated access to transcendental truth, denying the fact that they cannot be perceived without a system for decoding them. They negate that they themselves represent two elaborate systems of perception. Someone who is only familiar with realist documentary photography for example, would not even know how to read a formalist art work. And even being able to read a representational picture such as a documentary photograph requires an education in its conventions. Lawler, by opening her photographs for these two incongruent interpretative models, shows us that we are never immediately perceiving, but that we first have to choose which model of reception we want to apply. We become aware of the fact that we are always already looking through one or the other fabricated set of glasses shading our perception in one or the other hue. While mimetic pictures try to extinguish the awareness in the viewer that they are only two-dimensional, dissolving the surface in order to set free the realist content depicted in them, formalist pictures on the other hand are only interested in mediating the materiality (immediate presence) of their

color and composition. But both kinds of pictures pretend that no time and mode at all is needed to understand them. They want to erase the awareness of this active labour of decoding which the viewer has to invest. Both kind of pictures, by either pointing to a referent outside of itself or by presenting itself as nothing but the materiality of its surface, try to locate the meaning of art and fix it, either outside or inside the picture.
Andy Warhol Diamond Dust Shoes, 1980

Frederic Jameson is following a similar binary interpretative model when he juxtaposes Heideggers deep hermeneutic reading of Van Goghs Old Shoes with Laces with his own reading of Andy Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes as impenetrably flat and depthless in order to distinguish the modern from the postmodern moment. For Jameson the adequate reading for the Van Gogh shoes is a hermeneutic one, "in the sense in which the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth," Whereas Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes remains on the level of sheer decoration. A hermeneutic reading (which he argues cannot be applied here) would have rescued and restored "some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges. Unless that situationwhich has vanished into the pastis somehow mentally restored, the painting will remain an inert object, a reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production" (Jameson 1991: 7). Jameson argues that this is exactly the fate of Warhols shoes. The meaning of Diamond Dust Shoes is right there on the surface, there is no deeper level possible, no feeling, no history. Jamesons Warhol interpretation fits neatly into the artists own propagated motto that the work is on the surface. The neat separation, which Jameson makes between a hermeneutic modern and a schizophrenic postmodern reading can be unmasked as another endeavour to fix meaning, that is, another privileging of origin stories. It, too believes in the one story that does not allow for any other reading. When trying to apply Jamesons alternative reading proposals to a Lawler or a Levine we soon notice that the story is not quite so simple. Is the origin and the meaning of Levines After Walker Evans and After Edward Weston still to be found in the Evans or Westons from which they are taken? And if yes, is it in Westons original, in the boy, or in Praxiteles, as Crimp and Krauss have suggested? Or, are they on the contrary only neutral surfaces of unvarying value "across which the eye glides without resistance" as Erich Franz has offered (Franz 1992: 98)? Is it true that Lawler "etherealized the forms... fused them visually, as well as physically, to the flatness and format of the support"? Or rather, is the meaning to be found deeper inside the image, behind it? Does the real meaning of Lawlers Red (Rectangle) lie in the depiction of the unfinished gallery space that makes us forget the actual place we are standing in, which paradoxically is exactly the space that the photograph shows? (Now of course, the gallery space is in finished white cube aesthetic.) Or can we rather relegate meaning to the realm beyond these first visual marks? To the context, taking the work as a subtle critique of the hidden socioeconomic motor that drives the art world?
Louise Lawler HVAC, 1996 Louise Lawler Every Other Picture,1990

The question is equally hard to answer in regard to Levines Snapshots of Shoes from Shoe Sale, Mercer Street Store, New York (1977). Her shoes are not as easily relegated to the realm of flat bodiless images of commodity fetishes as Warhols Diamond Dust Shoes are. They were in fact real shoes that Levine sold in a shoe sale performance in lower Manhattan. So they are not simply immaterial pictures of simulacrum culture. But they neither can be tracked down unproblematically with the tools of hermeneutics. This is probably due to the fact that we do not know "La verit en pointure," or more generally, to whom the shoes once belonged. We are unable, in Jamesons words, to "reconstruct some initial situation out of which the finished work emerges." Thus the copiously reproduced image of Levines shoes remains an "inert object, reified end product impossible to grasp as a symbolic act in its own right, as praxis and as production." As we have already seen, it is similarly difficult to decide for a single reading to give meaning to Lawlers photographs. Works like Red (Rectangle) (1996), Every Other Picture (1990), or HVAC (1996) are self-referential, intrinsic art objects in the tradition of high modernism. But at the same time they are documentary photography, indexes that refer to something outside of themselves. And on an even further level, they are neo-conceptual, postmodern photographs that unveil the artworlds backstage scenarios. Meaning can be found alternatively in them; behind, above or next to them; beyond them; or simply in the eyes of the beholder, according to which reading we prefer. The combination of symbolism, indexicality, and contextuality that these images offer as possible clues for readings deconstruct the assumption of an image as a coherent unity that can be perceived in one enlightened moment. Rather, we have to acknowledge a way of perceptual experience that is always temporal and located in time and space.

APPROPRIATION SIDES WITH THE OBJECT As I remarked before, the tendency of Lawlers and Levines works to stray from conventional routes of interpretation primarily lies in the fact that they double the originals. As Derrida remarked in Of Grammatology, In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself or its image. The reflection, the

image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference (Derrida 1976: 36). In a Derridian strategy of doubling, Levines and Lawlers photographs (and we might as well add the rest of the picture generation artists, such as Prince, Sherman, Longo, Brauntuch, and Kruger) rebel against Heideggers model in the Origin of the Work of Art. Heideggers search for origins is deeply entrenched in the Hegelian concept of expression, in which all articulation is realized by a medium, which in the end disappears under the realized representation. We see this occurring in Heideggers interpretation of Van Goghs Old Shoes with Laces, where the painting disappears to that which it gives us to see, that is, the peasant womans world. On the contrary, the pictures made by Levine and Lawler never disappear to what they show us. We cannot simply see the shoes, the nude boy, the gallery under construction, because these images always remind us of their status as images, as copies in the world. They do not allow an unmediated or transcendental approach. Why is that so? Gorgio Agamben has argued that the image produced by repetition is a means, a medium, which does not disappear to what it makes visible. It is what he has called a "pure means"a picture which shows itself as such: "The image gives itself to be seen instead of disappearing in what it makes visible." By copying original artworks Lawler and Levine are focussing on the difference between image and expression/meaning. Their pictures are never simply expression but something in between. They recall the expression the originals once claimed for themselves, but this expression is never fully reenacted. The expression that once was mediated by the originals can now, in the copy, only be reconstructed but can no longer be experienced. This does not mean, however, that expressionany kind of intention to render meaningis lost in their pictures altogether. Most of the Picture Generation artists do not negate expression per se. By repeating the once vibrant works of modern art that have long become dull and often expressionless objects of survey books and consecrated collections of museums of modern art, these artists seem to perform a kind of homage to the long-ago glory of unmediated expression. This is because repetition is never the return of the identical. It is not the same as such that returns in the pictures of Lawler and Levine. In Agambens words: "The force and the grace of repetition, the novelty it brings us, is the return as the possibility of what was. Repetition restores the possibility of what was, renders it possible anew; its almost a paradox. To repeat something is to make it possible anew" (Agamben 1996: 70). In their pirating of imagery from the history of Modernism, Lawler and Levine do not simply tear these images out of their original discourse and thus fragment and devalue the originals. The devaluation and decontextualization of the original art object already took place long before their act of appropriation. The modern art object is no longer autonomous but reduced to the status of the commodity fetish. Lawlers and Levines copy of the originals only makes this condition of everything being always already a copy more palpable. Paradoxically, by devaluing the object of representation a second time, the artists seem to attempt a salvation of the object. The allegorical mind sides with the object and protests against its devaluation to the status of a commodity by devaluating it a second time in allegorical practice. In the splintering of signifier and signified the allegorist subjects the sign to the same division of functions that the object has undergone in its transformation into a commodity. The repetition of the original act of depletion and the new attribution of meaning redeems the object. (Buchloh 1982: 42).
Louise Lawler Lawler How Many Pictures,1989 Widow,1989 Louise Given by the

Levine drains the current commodity status of art photography by Walker Evans and Edward Weston a second time by rephotographing them. Lawler depletes the commodity status of modernist art more generally in her recurring appropriations of Warhols, Stellas, Lichtensteins and other famous modernist worksrestating their status as already reproduced and bodyless images. We might think of the reflections of a monumental Frank Stella colorfield painting that Lawler photographed from the shiny wooden gallery floor. How Many Pictures (1989) shows only the bodiless reflection of the Stella that is given to us in the picture while the real material object of the painting is entirely outside the frame of Lawlers photograph. Or, Lawlers pictures of Hans Arps surrealist sculptures wrapped in semi-see-through plastic sheets come to mind. Almost unrecognizable behind the reflecting plastic, the organic-shaped sculptures look like amputated body parts on their rectangular pedestals. The blurriness of the photograph and milkyness of the light blue background renders the picture either an abstract, almost monochrome composition, or an otherworldly apparition. The only evidence of a realist picture is the piece of tape with the logo of a German art shipping company, Hasenkamp (pointing to the international jet-set destiny of the dead French Surrealists work, now apparently on a trip between Germany and New York). The title of the photograph, Given by the Widow (1993) increases the ghostly sensation we experience when looking at the consecrated and conserved artwork. We get the feeling that we are looking at something already dead, only preserved for postmortem autopsy. The hermeneutic meaning of the artwork, its embeddedness in a real historical context in which it is endowed with innate authenticity, and historical function is confiscated for a second time. The works of Lawler and Levine embody the ambivalence of acknowledging a loss that they are simultaneously mourning. But a return to the clarity of a hermeneutical origin story seems no longer possible. Their photographs no longer allow for a meaningful distinction between original and its copies by exposing the simulacral (repetitive, stereotypical) quality of every aesthetic gesture. By means of photographic appropriation, the images dislocate and decentralize the hierarchical subject of hermeneutic interpretation. Appropriation strategies rupture the totalizing gaze of the viewerthe "taking it all in" because the repetition of disconnected parts allows the viewer only a different kind of reading, that we might call "filling in the gaps." This is not a straight interpretative route. Rather, the viewer has to trace the tactility of the various sources and the authors of the quoted material. The new agglomerated material can only be given meaning by a viewer who follows through the palimpsest of layered meanings. This kind of reading is process-oriented and no longer believes in the notion of the single pregnant momentFrieds notion of "presentness is grace"of experiencing the sublime meaning of an artwork. Nevertheless this processual reading is not an entirely semiotic exercise but also based on a phenomenological perception of the body in the world. Roland Barthes described the process of reading as a sensuous, poetic experience in the

realm of the imaginary rather than a linear decoding of signifiers: "What he (the reader) perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colors, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, childrens voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away" (Barthes 1992: 943). In this Barthesian sense, appropriation art stresses the possibility of play, activity, and participation in the site of the work. Its meaning happens in the void between the work and the reader/seer. A work is a site or network of plurality, a site for discourse that implies desire and imaginary projections, if only preliminary.

SPECTERS OF MODERNISM

Louise Lawler Sargent, 1990

Three, 1984

Board of Directors, 1989

Louise Lawler Hand On Her Back, 1997 Louise Lawler Untitled (Collection of 60 Drawings), 1992/93

Four Between Two Doors, 1993/1998

Two weighty gold frames, back to back on a partition, do not reveal their paintings. It seems as if the baroque objects have accidentally strayed into the white cube of the gallery, decorated only by its thermostats. This display of the frameordinarily a discounted, peripheral itemas constituent and central is typical of Lawlers compositions: The autonomous art object is a myth, nurtured and sustained only by its protective environs. Louise Lawlers photographs of artworks and their context have frequently been interpreted as a pointed institutional critique and a re-edition of Duchamps endgame strategies. A closer analysis of her individual pieces not only seems superfluous but also contradicts her disavowal of the original and autonomous work of art. As a rule, Lawlers love of detail and the almost painterly composition of her photographs has been assiduously ignored. Or if it has been perceived, it has been criticized for its closeness to the abstract painting of classical modernismfrom Malevich to color field painting. One of Lawlers photographs shows half of Jasper Johnss WHITE FLAG on one side and the rough, unfinished shelves at Christies on the other. Art and business, half-and-half so to speak, while the monochrome WHITE FLAG painting and the shelves are not at aesthetic odds with each other but, in fact, harmoniously complementary. For the caption of the piece, Lawler merely lists the names of the board of directors at Christies. Her works impressively convey the loss of the aura in art, which, freed of its cult value, can now circulate on the market as a commodity fetish. At the same time, however, she tries to evoke a bit of that old aura, even if only in our memories. Like Walter Benjamin, who was one of the first to examine art in the age of reproducibility, Lawlers concern with the loss of the cult value of art is not entirely unambiguous. One of her crystal paperweights shows the reception desk of a gallery with its bank of computers cheek by jowl with a wall full of Allen McCollums small format drawings. None of McCollums drawings are exactly alike, and yet they cant be taken as originals either; they are endless, purely mechanical variations of a prototype. The caption Lawler opposes to this piece claims that "she made no attempt to rescue art from ritual." But the little yes-or-no boxes to be ticked off underneath the caption lend to this seemingly personal statement the innocent neutrality of a questionnaire. Louise Lawlers art comes out of a world of mass media, in which an endless flood of images is caught up in a maelstrom of simulation. Walter Benjamins optimism about images being liberated through the media has evaporated into the midst of this scenario. The society of the spectaclethe circulation of signs and the attendant osmosis between cultural and economic sphereshas become the self-evident premise of Lawlers work. Nonetheless, in her case as in Benjamins, a certain melancholy always creeps into her pictures of long outmoded theater

archives or the dusty cellars of a museum where classical Greek statues have come to rest between boxes and ventilators. Lawlers work seems to be driven by the unfinished task of mourning modernisms long buried promise of the autonomous art object. This is especially apparent in the above-mentioned paperweight. Allan McCollum has written off the autonomous work of art with his infinite series of replications. The gesture of rebellion expressed in the autonomous artworks aesthetics of refusal has burst like a soap bubble in McCollums work. All transgressive potential is manifestly smothered when the work of art moves into the commercial market. And when Lawler rephotographs McCollums "degree zero" art and calls it art again, something interesting happens: Photographic duplication kills an art object that is already dead. This double murder paradoxically resuscitates the object. While McCollums works liberate art from ritual, Lawler makes a credible claim that is camouflaged as a question: "She made no attempt to rescue art from ritual." In fact, works that explicitly address art world venues are practically the only objects in these places that could be said to be located in their natural habitatin other words, that are not decontextualized fetishes but rather works that depend on the museum context to unfold their full potential. This dialectic is further distilled in Lawlers art through her choice of the medium of photography. Sigfried Kracauer saw in photography a dialectics of representation and remembrance that lies between exhibition value and historical experience. Photography seeks to ban the memory of death, but at the same time, the referent is no longer present. With the help of photographic reproduction, Lawler makes manifest the disappearance of the physical object and its historical embeddedness. The shiny reflections that fascinate Lawler and that she captures in her photographs are the immaterial remains of the lost object world of modernism. These art objects used to be concrete items that viewers were able to experience as whole objects in space. In Lawlers photographs, we are left only with their amputated and disembodied ghosts. On the other hand, materials, textures, and tones that can be physically and sensually experienced keep cropping up in Lawlers work. These must be put into a context by the viewer so that the flat ahistoricism of her photographs can be relativized and the forms of historical remembrance released. Lawlers paperweights, for example, necessitate the experience of each object in time and space. In order to be able to read the photograph under the glass dome, the viewer must almost press his/her nose against the object. The space of the gallery is thereby completely blocked out and the viewer immersed in a wondrous miniature world. The viewers monadic standpoint and withdrawal from the world recalls the method of the camera obscura. Jonathan Crary presents a striking analysis of how the camera obscura has defined relations between viewer and world since the end of the fifteenth century, ultimately ushering in a new understanding of subjectivity. Lawlers paperweights evoke memories of the object world of the museum without returning to classical modernisms dualism of viewer and world, subject and object. Instead, in perfect postmodern fashion, categories become pervious when the supposed subject of the viewing, absorbed in the magic sphere, becomes the object at which other visitors gaze. Lawler undermines the control and autonomy of the viewing subjects who are drawn into the vortex of the omnipresent spectacle. The paperweights underscore this ambivalence: On the one hand, they embodyor are at least reminiscent ofthe classical objects of aesthetic contemplation that are traditionally displayed and preserved in museums. On the other, Lawler offers the same paperweights for sale as souvenirs in the museum shop. Not even museums can persist in denying the commodification of the modern art object; although museums take art off the market, the fetishized museum object still has a great deal in common with the alienated commodified world outside. The process of making a fetish of artworks, of replacing life with death, can be compared to the logic of the capitalist market. The glass dome of the paperweight converts the images it protects into petrified keepsakes. But that same glass dome also transforms the works into marketable souvenirs. Lawler illustrates the continuity between museum and market by demonstrating how museum methods of conservation turn every work of art into an object of curiosity and a luxury item, ultimately enhancing its market value.

Louise Lawler Storage, 1984

Glass Cage, 1991/1993

Glass Cage, 1991/1993

The equipment of conservationvitrines, glazing, display casesis a recurring motif in Lawlers work. One of her photographs shows the sculpture of a Degas ballerina with other small studies in dance and anatomy on different sized bases inside a glass display case. The wide black metal frame turns the glass cube into a cage and makes the dancers look like monkeys at a zoo frozen in acrobatic action. The caption of this piece is an anecdote: "The following year her glass cage remained empty for the first two weeks of the exhibition. When finally exposed she was likened by one critic to an expelled fetus which if smaller ...one would be tempted to pickle in a jar of alcohol." Lawlers photograph and text exemplify the institutional nightmare of killing a work by attempting to preserve it. The vitrines and other glass containers of the museum are indicative of a reaction to our increasingly fleeting visual experience of the world. The "preserves" that museums make must be understood as an attempt to arrest or freeze an increasingly kinetic perception of the world. In this scenario, the contemplative viewers themselves become fossils of long bygone days. In fact, the contemplative viewer has always been a myth, even in the museum, because the act of viewing is as short-lived as strolling through a shopping mall, a railroad station, or botanical gardens. The single object presented piecemeal next to, in front of, or behind other objects and images cannot be studied in peace. In Lawlers photograph of Degass ballerina, we see a section of the crowded museum gallery to the left and right of the centered display case. Here, too, the people are not viewers in absorbed contemplation, but fuzzy shadows. It is almost impossible to identify single viewers in the moving crowd. Through her use of long

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exposure times, Lawler reveals the anachronism of devising elaborate methods of conservation and presentation to encourage a meditative approach among viewers long accustomed to a different kind of visual behavior. A second photograph shows Degass ballerina at New Yorks Metropolitan Museum of Art, but this time without any viewers. Once again we, who now slip into the role of viewer, are not offered easy access to the object. Behind the display case, which contains only the dancer, is a second display case containing several smaller sculptures placed at different heights. The two glass cases can barely be seen in this photograph, creating the impression that the various and at times contorted bodies are suspended in space, to be viewed from above or below. Unexpected vantage points, cropping and sequencing, bodies never seen in their entiretythese devices are all familiar from the work of Degas himself. Lawler follows this decentralization of the gaze to its logical conclusion. Often we have two or three versions of an image: She may vary its cropping or angle or vision, she may use color or black and white film, and she presents her photographs with fragments of text in constantly changing combinations. Lawler uses the medium of photography to explore multiple means of accessing and positioning the subject. The objects in her pictures are never in the center of her compositions and never pictured in their entirety; they are always fragmented memories of an intact object and subject. Lawler has lost faith in the modern work of art and its subject, but she still mourns the unfulfilled promise of the autonomous artwork that stands in radical opposition to society. By emphasizing the break and the fragment, she links into avant-garde practices such as the aesthetics of collage and montage. But this back reference is not simply a matter of melancholy recollection. Rather, Lawlers work is sustained by the wish to escape death by asphyxiation in the museum. By choosing the sites of art as her natural habitat, she refuses to be caught up in the dynamics of decontextualization by these institutions. On the contrary, the transgressive potential of her oeuvre can flourish only in the context of the museum and the meanings it purveys.

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