RADAR
FOR 40 YEARS, American artist Louise Lawler has been asking why people make pictures. Like her peers Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, she’s part of a generation, born in the late 1940s and early 1950s, that has used photographs as a starting point to criticize the art world’s structures and limitations. At 70, she’s coming of age, as the Museum of Modern Art in New York holds its first solo survey of her work.
Starting April 30, “Why Pictures Now” has a serious purpose, investigating, at one level, the part images play in the construction of economic and political power. But more than that, Lawler’s work focuses on what happens to art once it leaves the artist’s studio, photographing or making ghostly line drawings of how pieces are kept and displayed in commercial galleries, auction houses, museums, storage units and homes.