Louise Lawler, “LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK”
Metro Pictures
September 29 - October 23 2021

There’s been a clip bouncing around the internet of a blonde woman teaching a group of Afghans about Marcel Duchamp’s landmark of modern art, The Fountain. The pupils’ expressions, which do, unlike the artwork in question, have some universal purchase, convey a mix of bewilderment and disgust. It seems to dawn on them in this moment that the people who invaded their country, ostensibly liberating them,  put toilets in their museums and call it art.

No, no, we argue! It’s conceptual! It burst open the field! Oh, the things it says about what art is! The impact on Kantian aesthetics alone! The things it casts into doubt! But, in the glow of a fuzzy slide projector on the other side of the world, all of that falls away rather quickly. Scott Reyburn at The Art Newspaper discussed this clip recently in a compelling report on art and emergent chatter of post-liberalism. But while illiberalism is making an irritatingly effective advance in all camps, I will, for once, play the optimist, and suggest that this moment need not signal the closure of liberalism itself, merely its iteration in art as 20th century conceptualism.

When I think of Louise Lawler my mind traffics in texts and concepts, the various modalities of 20th century theories — of the photograph, the author, the institutions of art — that make her work interesting. At the most basic level, Lawler takes pictures of works of art in situ. Her career of pictures of pictures never captured, for me, any of the actual experience of looking at or being with art. To the contrary, it was quite cynical, poking fun at its claims to profundity, revealing the emperor to have no clothes, making a copy of a copy of a copy of a feeling until the original need no longer be there at all. Which, of course, I understand to be the point. 

This is not so with “LIGHTS OFF, AFTER HOURS, IN THE DARK.” The title is the literal conditions under which she shot the collection of photographs of the 2020 Donald Judd show at MoMA, but it also expresses the aching melancholy at work in the collection of large-scale photographs printed in the most delicate of gloss in such subtle shades of darkness that they first appear as a collection of graphite monochromes. But soon shapes appear, reflections of a familiar-looking arrangement of cubes, crisp corners, moody caverns with haunting shadows and the occasional interruption of a glowing red — the exit signs. Judd’s primary colors and hard edges are transformed into a lush chiaroscuro.

All things end. On one photograph a fleck of white dust, lighter than air, dances across the surface on which my own ghostly reflection is captured. It finally disappears past the edge of the picture onto the crisp white wall, leaving me alone to haunt the whole legacy of the 20th century and its hope for a conceptualized and machine-made future as it bleeds into the dark.

It took the formula of one species of conceptualism to capture the swan song of another. But Lawler’s framework, too, is in its twilight, not its dawn. And Metro Pictures, which managed to seem like the hot upstart well into its last years, is soon to dim its lights as well. This is evidenced by the shelf of glossy monographs by the door, on sale for $5 apiece. 

Here we find that, when the lights go off for the last time, what’s left of conceptualism is a deep human sadness, a warm embrace of darkness under glowing exits dancing over brushed metal surfaces, a sense of loneliness sinking back into the body, to the soul where it belongs, liberated from the metal boxes and conceptual tricks it had hidden in for decades. “Today’s possibilities,” I recall Horkheimer noting, “are no less than the despair.”