Louise Lawler’s Pollock and Tureen (Traced), 1984/2013, is installed magnificently at MoMA right now, with three of Lawler’s paperweight photos round about. It’s a vinyl adhesive print of a vector file of an illustration by Jon Buller of Lawler’s iconic 1984 photo, Pollock and Tureen Arranged by Mr & Mrs Burton Tremaine, that invites consideration of all the mediations and transformations between an artwork and a viewer.
MoMA has Lawler’s AP from the edition of 10, and Roxana Marcoci included it among a dozen traced works in Why Pictures Now, her fascinating Lawler retrospective in 2017. The installation images are exhaustive and immaculate; for a Lawler show could they be anything else? The traced works are also all available as a PDF, with the idea that they’re for coloring, but that is entirely up to you.
As it happens, another of the edition was sold at auction just a few weeks ago, and it offers an appropriately Lawlerian view of the documentary apparatuses of exchange. Freeman’s included several photos of the traced work’s installation instructions, including wall preparation, printing specs—and approved printer contact info on two continents—and vinyl care and maintenance. There are also partial views of the certificate of authenticity, presumably the part with the details on how to determine the size of your installation. There is no photo, alas, of a USB stick or CD with the printer-ready PDF file of the image.
“Any issues that cannot be resolved onsite should be brought to the attention of the artist care of Metro Pictures,” the artist instructed in 2014. Though Metro Pictures closed in 2021, there is still a working email address, and the artist continues to show actively through other galleries.
Which, this extended encounter with Pollock and Tureen (Traced) turns out to be in continuity with an earlier exhibition of—or about—Lawler’s work, held just across the street. In February and March Emmelines staged a show in their subway concourse gallery by Harrison Kinnane Smith called Tracings and Arrangements, which included two Lawler traced works that are also in the corporate collection of Brookfield Properties, the owner of Emmelines’ building, 660 Fifth Avenue.
The Lawler works, from open editions, were installed at dimensions corresponding to Brookfield’s installations of their examples at 250 Vesey Street, the former World Financial Center. Kinnane Smith created editions using Brookfield’s installation photos, which were available on terms adapted from Jared Kushner’s corrupt transaction history with the building, when it was known as 666 Fifth Avenue, and he was bailed out of a failing mortgage by Qatari investors. Those sale and leaseback contracts were and remain on view.
The vectors mapped at Emmelines must have resonated favorably with Lawler, because she invited the gallery’s director artist William Wiebe to contribute a text to Speechless, a show at Good Books in Paris, that just closed.
Previously, related: Just the Tureen