Thoughts on seeing Fitting At Metro Pictures — Louise Lawler’s show of pictures of installed and stored artworks — straight ones and others run through Photoshop so that they match the proportions of the walls they are affixed to height to height and width to width.  One — odd maybe — why not change the walls — change the building to fit the pictures?  And two — what is it about the unseen author — practitioner — of this art?

Adjunctive to both maybe questions of scale in the here-and-now.  Big billboards are everywhere.  Everyone’s got a huge TV and small screens so that it can be made certain that what’s on those big screens is never not seen.  All those displays carry the vibe and message of the in-place culture — crowding out what might mitigate against it. What does an artist coming from an adversarial place have left to do — not get bullied out of the argument?  Not just second — third — wave feminists jump up the scale of their work — whether it be big projected video and film or photos or whatever — notwithstanding the kiped gegaws of Olafur Elliason or Urs Fischer and the like — and is this looking like counter-talk or just part of the sheen — all just seamless now?

So juxtaposed to the straight pictures are the altered — stretched — squeezed — larger versions printed on vinyl — like advertising signs — adhered to the walls of Metro Pictures — one of the three hundred and fifty done-up galleries west of Penn South — the LIGWU houses out of the Mitchell-Lama program.  West Chelsea — current northern terminus of the High Line — whose boosters credit its change with bringing to 10th Avenue the world’s best chefs and apartment prices over two thousand dollars a foot in buildings by Jean Nouvel, Annabelle Selldorf and Neil Desari — all this helped along by the New York City adopted West Chelsea Zoning Proposal — is not the the Soho where Metro Pictures opened in 1980 and Louise Lawler’s work was seen early on.¹  Not the New York of the seventies and eighties where turf — vacant lots — given over to development now or occupation by the Guggenheim — mercifully absent the Gehry branding — and such — piers — the High Line — seemed up for grabs — de facto public places.  The “changing relationships between neoliberal urbanism and so called globalization…the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of…rather than a regulator of the market…the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction…gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint and local anomaly in the housing markets of command-center cities is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy…densely connected into the circuits of global capital and capital circulation”. ²   One might not get to pushing the bricks around — reconfiguring — refitting — the streets but there might be an urge.  When one walks through Chelsea — and other New York neighborhoods — and certainly if one is old enough to have known something different — perhaps even if one isn’t — there is a feeling that something is never not part of the trip.

So the goods move around these places — and who gets into the treasure houses to render the dosh?  In this work is there some compelling absence making for critique or an ambivalence about how one becomes — perhaps despite best efforts not to  — an agent of the spectacle?.  And how have the critiques of the eighties traveled into the present and what does it mean when someone talks about an artist’s practice?  Some assumption that when someone says an artist has a practice is there thought to be a whiff of praxis in what someone says they do — that whiff  a product of assenters happy to go along for the ride and the critical and academic infrastructures  — all supporting the trade as normative — and ultimately the larger cultural hegemony as well?

1. “The High Line Isn’t Just a Sight to See; It’s Also an Economic Dynamo”, New York Times, June 6, 2011, sec. 1,      A18.

2. Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy”, Antipode, 2002, 427-450.