Louise Lawler

In Rosalind Krauss's essay "Louise Lawler: Souvenir Memories," the concept of spectacle is explored and related to concepts introduced in Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Whereas Benjamin hypothesized that photography and mechanical reproduction would revolutionize art by diminishing the cult-value, or the spectacle, of the work of art, Krauss proposes that "Benjamin could not know what it would be like for these effects to have become the totality of one's experience." In the contemporary period, painting is no longer strictly opaque, and photography is not strictly transparent, but because of the spectacle's permeation into everyday life, the roles have been reversed. Media images have become opaque because of commodification, and the proliferation of such media images has permeated all parts of life, leading to the construstion of the spectacle in life.
Louise Lawler's works are related to the concept of spectacle in the sense that they consciously capture the spectacle in life by forcing a specific point of view towards works of art in their natural surrounding. The photographs are of other works of art in galleries, but taken in such a way that the fixed point of view puts another layer between the observer and the spectacle of the original. Lawler recontextualizes images in terms of spectacle and commodity, similarly to how Sherrie Levine recontextualized images in terms of gender. The observer is forced to acknowledge that the work of art is "a function of public space" rather than just admiring it's aura. Once the commodification of the art has been realized, it can be seen more clearly how art interacts with society.