Louise Lawler

It was really interesting reading about Louise Lawler's interesting perspective on photography and how her eccentric personality affected her artwork. An interview is such a great way to captivate the reader amost instantaneously. However, although Crimp's interview was interesting, I found the first reading to be fun also.

I really like how this whole class is wrapping together. Photography seems to be a world of its own where all artists are intertwined. However, I tend to see Walter Benjamin as the father of the analysis of photography. The classic debate over the validity of photography as an art was addressed by him as well as many other issues and predictions. Lawler takes on the aspect of how art becomes a commodity in the setting of its residence. Many times its abode is shared with a tureen or old wooden furniture. This makes the artwork a commodity, just like any other thing you could buy in the store. Rosaline Krauss talks about how the image has an original and a sign. The sign of the original is the second version that is identical to the original....but not really. The sign represents the many ways the original can function in places outside of museums. "The gleams and reflections that itnerest Lawler, as she photographs works of modernist art within their present conditions of commodification- ... are avatars of this pervasive condition of the sign."

Lawler tries to recapture Walter Benjamin's aura in her works of art, especially her paperweights. The paperweights are very much like photographic rerepresentations of works that have already been made. However, they recapture the aura, unlike other photographs, because they are placed under a tiny glass dome. The dome functions as the lens, focusing the eye on this tiny point of the room that would not be focused on if it werent for the picture. In untitled (Salon Hodler), the room's natural focus would be either the furiture or the pictures separately; however, the photo combines the two, but neither the furniture nor the pictures are completley shown. This picture "enacts the relationship to photography" beacuse "each crystal half-sphere presents itself as a lens, one through which one peers as through a camera's viewfinder." Lawler's work is both art and photography combined, and brings back Walter Benjamin's aura that so few photographs are able to capture.