While working on the previous Louise Lawler post and revisiting Harrison Kinnane Smith’s Lawler-engaging show Tracings and Arrangements at Emmelines last spring, I dug up the images of the Permanent Art Collection of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns the Emmelines building now called 660 Fifth Avenue. The Lawler traced works on view at Emmelines, in the busy subway station in Brookfield’s basement, were identical to those owned by Brookfield, and installed out of public view, in 250 Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. Kinnane Smith’s own editions, also in the show, were made using the Brookfield documentary jpgs of the Lawler installations [above, left]
For whatever reason, by the time the show opened and Johanna Fateman tried to find them, the Brookfield collection webpages had been deleted. I found them on the Internet Archive.
And that’s all setup for this image, which I found while rummaging through the rest of the deleted webpages of Brookfield Properties Permanent Art Collection, and which is also two works installed out of public view at 250 Vesey Street. I love this image and would Lawler the hell out of it.
I mean, I like the Wade Guyton Printed Matter fundraiser posters, too, and feel badly for the people in 2017 and 2015, respectively, who tried and failed to win the chance to buy them. Turns out Brookfield had a new building to fill with big, bold work on the cheap. But for all their wall power, they really come alive when photographed at a distorting angle in a generic conference room overflowing with other angles. I don’t know how it’ll look as a paperweight, but it feels like it would do very well traced.
Just in case Lawler wants to start appropriating images of installed art instead of shooting them herself, I’ll go slow, and try tracing it myself before searching for rogue coloring book illustrators.