“Reception makes the work.”
That is the opening line of the document Jason Hirata presented with his Dia Artists on Artists lecture on Louise Lawler a couple of months ago. [Sunday afternoon, May 31.] If I remember correctly, it comes from his email correspondence with Lawler; he’d wanted to make sure before he started that the reason there hadn’t been an Artists on Artists lecture on Lawler’s work before was not because she didn’t want there to be. Lawler’s response was, “Reception makes the work.”
If I’m vague on some of the details, it’s because the YouTube video for Hirata’s lecture is four and a half hours long, and it took me several days of disjuncted snatches of time to get through it, and it’ll take longer still to process.
Besides the length, the most obvious thing about Hirata’s talk is not the Zoom of it—by now that’s a normalized medium. [Though it does have a slight early pandemic aura, the video is actually produced to Dia spec: full speaker view only, comments formatted and superimposed in the editing, a Dia logo roll at the end.
No, it’s the coldest of cold opens. Hirata gives a huge nod to Andrea Fraser by entirely forgoing the daisy chain of welcomes, acknowlegments, introductions, and moderation that appear in Fraser’s Official Welcome. Somewhere near the end of the video someone had asked Hirata about the use of exclusion in his work, and I think that’s what happened at the beginning.
Though the beginning is not, it turns out, the beginning, but only the continuation, or the repetition, of Hirata’s original Lawler lecture, which was apparently slated for Little Island, Barry Diller’s private lily pad park on the Hudson. But that was closed by lightning, and so Hirata led a band of stragglers to Shake Shack under the High Line for burgers and discourse.
Even when there’s not, there’s a lot in there. Birdcalls makes recurring appearances in Hirata’s talk, which is not a surprise; it’s the only Lawler work at Dia, a long-term loan from the LeWitt Collection. The Daniel Buren Ballet and photos are there, too, and Christopher D’Arcangelo. I’ll probably do a separate post about Hirata’s reading of D’Arcangelo’s 4 Texts for Artists Space (1978), that was originally supposed to exist only in Artists Space. Texts have a funny way of not being so readily confined.
And because you might, in art world lecture convention, be inclined to bail out before then, I’ll link directly to Hirata’s discussion of Lawler’s Traced work, because I really like the one he discusses: Untitled (Traced), 2006/2013, which was based on a photo that was in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Anyway, I regret missing Hirata’s talk live. Both times. Or all three times, since—spoiler alert—he says near the end that he was going to give it again in Romania in a few days. [s/o Christian Alborz Oldham for the oblique heads up]