Artists & Mothers was founded by artist Maria De Victoria and arts consultant Julia Trotta, who had been “workshopping an idea around a resource for artists who are mothers,” Trotta told ARTnews in an interview.

Initially, they thought the project could take the form of a residency program with studios and childcare, but ultimately they decided to “boil it down to the most impactful path, thinking about what really do people need and what we established that they needed was funding to be able to pay a childcare provider, flexible to their needs,” which can range from daycare to hiring a nanny, Trotta said.

The prize money was calculated at $25,000 based on what the average cost of full-time childcare in New York for a year. “We decided that we wanted it to really be something that would make a difference—$25,000 is really a lot,” Trotta said.

“I am grateful to Artists & Mothers for recognizing that social reproduction—or more simply put, the care work that holds us together as families and communities—is a vital part of what makes art possible,” Rodriguez said in a statement. “By addressing the crisis of care that so many of us are experiencing, Artists & Mothers stepped in to provide much-needed support that the professional sphere has long overlooked.

As the inaugural winner, Rodriguez will receive the funds over the course of the next year. As an artist, she is known for her research-based practice that examines the structures of the art world and how they facilitate the creation of work. She was also a founding member of the collective Reena Spaulings Fine Art, which she collaborated with for over a decade.

Among her best-known works is The Maid (2018), which was commissioned by SculptureCenter in New York and has been shown across the country, including in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. The film follows several “Newborn” sculptures by Sherrie Levine over the course of a day and their lives in different settings, including museums and private collectors’ homes.

Last month, Rodriguez opened her first institutional solo exhibition in Europe at the Kunstverein München in Munich, Germany. Titled “Imitation of Life,” the show presents a new video work that Rodriguez created during the first year of her firstborn’s life. (Trotta said that selected artists’ practices or forthcoming works do not necessarily have to revolve around motherhood in order to qualify for the grant.)

The exhibition, Trotta said, comes at a “critical juncture” in Rodriguez’s career, one of the main criteria for the prize. Artists often “have children, not at the very beginning of their careers, but [after] they’ve had some success, some attention, some momentum, at that moment, where you have to add this other very important, but very consuming, element to your life,” she said. “We want to make sure that that gap is filled, and that they’re able to still meet the projects, opportunities, and attention that they’ve received so far.”

The geographic restriction for Artists & Mothers, Trotta said, came down to the founders’ own experiences of raising children in the city, having to make decisions based on childcare costs, and “exponentially high costs associated with having a kid here.”

Similarly, the grant is currently restricted to artists with children under 3 years old because enrollment for universal 3-K beings at that age in New York. Trotta said that as the nonprofit grows, they will explore introducing additional programs that would accommodate childcare at different stages.

To help realize their vision, De Victoria and Trotta assembled an advisory board consisting of several other art world professionals that included artists Camille Henrot and Maia Ruth Lee, gallerist Bridget Donahue, communications strategist Sarah Goulet, and publisher Elizabeth Karp-Evans, all of whom Trotta described as important figures who “are leading with care.”

The founders and the board all work on a volunteer basis and have been actively fund-raising. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation, founded by artist Niki de Saint Phalle, provided funding for the inaugural 2024 grant, while the James Family Foundation has supported the 2025 grants. Additional donors include artists Sam Moyer, Hilary Pecis, and Arlene Shechet; curators Lumi Tan, Loring Randolph, and Carolyn Ramo; and dealers Hannah Hoffman and Martha Moldovan. “It’s a simple mission; I think people understand the need right away,” Trotta said of her experience soliciting donations. “There’s so much need out there, so, obviously, the more funds we can raise, the more grants we can give out.”

Trotta said the inaugural grant was designed as a pilot program and would differ from subsequent years. For the first year, artists were nominated and selected by the board as a way to “almost move things along faster,” she said. “There was this urgency to getting this project launched,” she said.

Going forward, the grants will have an open-call application that will be decided by an anonymous jury. For 2025, the foundation will dole out at least two grants, though that cohort could rise to three. Trotta said the open-call is key to the program because the board or invited nominators “don’t necessarily know who has children or who doesn’t” and will allow for us to “expand the net wider.”

She added that the application will not be too labor intensive, as “we understand everybody applying to this will already be extremely busy trying to juggle their professional life and their home life.”

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.

Today’s show: “Carissa Rodriguez: The Maid” is on view at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, through Sunday, July 29. The solo exhibition presents two video works and a series of photo-based works by the New York–based artist that all look to examine “the material and social conditions in which art is produced and reveals how the canonical figure of the artist is reflected in—and reproduced by—the products of her labor,” according to a press release. The titular work tracks a sculpture by Sherrie Levine as it moves from various locations in New York and Los Angeles.

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Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Maid, 2018, 4K video with sound, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Girls, 1997–2018, Hi8 video (digitized), installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Girls, 1997–2018, Hi8 video (digitized), installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, The Girls, 1997–2018, Hi8 video (digitized), installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, All the Best Memories are Hers, 2018, gelatin silver prints from LVT negative, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, All the Best Memories are Hers (detail), 2018, gelatin silver prints from LVT negative, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

Carissa Rodriguez, All the Best Memories are Hers (detail), 2018, gelatin silver prints from LVT negative, installation view, at MIT List Visual Arts Center.

PETER HARRIS STUDIO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KARMA INTERNATIONAL, ZURICH/LOS ANGELES

The Maid, which played on a large screen in the main gallery, is titled after a 1913 short story by Robert Walser in which a maid searches for years for a child to whom she had once served as caregiver. The video centers on two of Sherrie Levine’s remakes of Brancusi’s Newborn, a small egg-shaped sculpture of an infant’s head, rendered in marble in 1915 and cast in bronze in 1920. This century-long chain of dialogue between artists is one of many linkages found in Rodriguez’s twelve-minute video, which crafts a narrative of circulation and reproduction: of artworks, art histories, and capital.   

In a review of Levine’s 2011–12 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Roberta Smith noted that Levine’s take on the Brancusi head “veers too closely to museum-gift-shop fare.” Yet the two examples that Rodriguez filmed in collectors’ homes assume a magnetic aura. The camera lingers on and circles the pieces, one of which is in frosted translucent crystal and the other in opaque black glass. They are depicted lovingly and seem almost to have an innocent quality, recalling the child in Walser’s short story, who was “delicate as a moonbeam, pure as freshly fallen snow, and as lovable as the sun.” At other points, we see art handlers with gloved hands gingerly unpacking the works in a sterile storage facility. Languid shots pan over other works in the residences (On Kawaras cast in a late-afternoon light, Warhols hung in a wood-paneled room), and sweeping aerial views show the exteriors of the homes (a glassy modernist box in Los Angeles, a parkside apartment building in New York). What might otherwise be a cold sociological view of the inner workings of an upper tier of society develops an odd emotional resonance. In the video’s final moments, the instrumental soundrack swells to an affecting melodic crescendo.

But a din bled into the gallery from the side space where The Girls was screened, a reminder of the world outside that in which The Maid immersed us. With The Girls—filmed early in the artist’s career—Rodriguez’s role as observer and even interloper is more conspicuous. She shot the footage on a playground in Manhattan’s Chinatown—not far, in fact, from Reena Spaulings Fine Art, where she was a director from 2004 to 2015. Children move within and around a play structure with metal slides. Her close-roving handheld camera zooms in curiously on details (cartoon illustrations on clothing, a mother’s hand on a stroller), but returns to the gestures and expressions of particular children. In one series of shots, a girl wearing pink sweatpants and Velcro shoes peeks out from behind her mother and stares directly at the camera. She appears wary of its presence, looking to Rodriguez with a seriousness that breaks from her otherwise playful interactions.

Both videos concern the products of various types of relationships—artistic, financial, sexual, or otherwise. We know that Levine’s renditions of Brancusi’s Newborn will continue changing hands along secure circuits of the cultural elite. We know that the children from the playground would now be adults, and that the neighborhood they were filmed in has been gentrified in part because of the relationships between the artistic communities Rodriguez belongs to and real estate development. But lodged somewhere in these portrayals of the odd innovations that result from artistic exchange and of the chaotic activity of children is the sense that the outcome of any coupling is largely unpredictable, just as a reproduction is never an exact copy.

Zach Blas, Jubile 2033, 2017, still from video.

COURTESY THE ARTIST

TUESDAY, JANUARY 23

Talk: Zach Blas at School of Visual Arts
Ahead of the opening of his first New York solo exhibition on Friday at Brooklyn’s Art in General, Zach Blas will give a talk at the School of Visual Art. Known for his work addressing the intersection of digital technology and queer and feminist subcultures, Blas will bring his new video Jubilee 2033, which previously showed at Gasworks in London, to New York. Starring the artist Cassils, it envisions a future in which the internet has collapsed and the world’s inhabitants must reimagine their lives. Surveillance, control of information, and big data are also explored. In addition to his SVA talk, Blas will stage a performance-lecture at E-flux called “Metric Mysticism” on Saturday.
School of Visual Arts, 214 East 21st Street, Room 120, 7–9 p.m. Free with RSVP

THURSDAY, JANUARY 25

Exhibition: Derrick Adams at Museum of Arts and Design
Much of Derrick Adams’s work has dealt with reanimating black history by finding ways to revise and remake it via performances, collages, videos, and sound pieces. His Museum of Arts and Design exhibition, titled “Sanctuary,” looks back to the mid-20th century. With The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guidebook intended to help black American travelers find safe spaces, in mind, Adams has created a new series of mixed-media collages, sculptures, and assemblages. Though the book was initially written for a Jim Crow–era audience, Adams sees it as having importance today, when laws and regulations continue to affect the everyday lives of black Americans.
Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, 10 a.m.–9 p.m.

Thornton Dial, Setting the Table, 2003, shoes, gloves, bedding, beaded car-seat cover, cloth carpet, artificial flowers, crushed paint cans, found metal, frying pan, cooking utensils, chain, wood, Splash Zone compound, oil, and enamel on canvas wood.

COURTESY DAVID LEWIS, NEW YORK

Opening: Thornton Dial at David Lewis
Thornton Dial has been termed an outsider artist, a vernacular artist, and a folk artist—but any of those labels might be a misnomer, since the late painter’s work has been gradually moving into the mainstream art world’s view in the past few years. This week, Dial’s work will be the subject of a survey at David Lewis. Titled “Mr. Dial’s America,” the show focuses on the various ways Dial portrayed historical events in his work, tackling the O.J. Simpson trial as well as more personal struggles. Among the works on view will be a painting of Ground Zero that renders the aftermath of 9/11 in bursts of blood-red and fiery orange.
David Lewis, 88 Eldridge Street, 5th Floor, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Fabio Mauri at Hauser & Wirth
The late Italian artist Fabio Mauri spent more than five decades exploring power, media, and politics—in particular, the atrocities of World War II—through an eclectic variety of approaches including painting, sculpture, performance, film, and installation. Mauri’s inclusion in the 2015 Venice Biennale helped shed new light on a body of work that during the artist’s lifetime was relatively obscure outside of his home country. As part of this posthumous exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, the gallery will re-stage some of Mauri’s performances. Notably included in this show is 1971’s Ebrea, a powerful study of identity and perhaps the artist’s most famous work.
Hauser & Wirth, 548 West 22nd Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Amy Sillman at Gladstone Gallery
To call “Mostly Drawing”—Amy Sillman’s varied show of works on paper at Gladstone Gallery’s uptown outpost—a provocative title might be a reach, but at the very least it invites discussion. Works in the show blur disciplinary contours; in any given piece, you might find printed, drawn, and painted elements. They suggest narratives and pure abstraction simultaneously. The influential artist has been playing with these poles for decades, and the show comes on the heels of Sillman’s 2017 book The ALL-OVER, released in celebration of an exhibition staged at the Portikus exhibition hall in Frankfurt, Germany.
Gladstone Gallery, 130 East 64th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982, acrylic, spray paint, and oilstick on canvas.

©ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT/LICENSED BY ARTESTAR, NEW YORK/COLLECTION OF YUSAKU MAEZAWA

FRIDAY, JANUARY 26

Exhibition: Jean-Michel Basquiat at Brooklyn Museum
Last spring at Sotheby’s contemporary art auction, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa purchased the Jean-Michel Basquiat painting Untitled for a record-setting $110.5 million. Less than a year later, the collector is bringing the painting back to the artist’s home turf of Brooklyn for a single-work exhibition, which also counts as the painting’s first institutional showing. “It is my hope that through the exhibition and extensive programming accompanying it, the young people of the borough will be inspired by their local hero, just as he has inspired so many of us around the world,” Maezawa said in a statement.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 27

Symposium: “Collecting Medieval Art: Past, Present, and Future” at School of Visual Arts and Luhring Augustine
Maybe you’ve always wanted to buy medieval tapestries, stained glass pieces, icons, manuscripts, and artifacts, but you weren’t sure how to start. Thankfully, there’s a symposium for that. Luhring Augustine and the School of Visual Arts will co-host this event in Chelsea, which features talks from experts about displaying medieval objects and respecting their heritage. Curators from the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries are among those expected to talk at the event. In between their presentations, visitors are invited to walk a couple blocks west and visit Luhring Augustine’s exhibition “Of Earth and Heaven,” which brings together privately owned medieval works.
School of Visual Arts Theater and Luhring Augustine, 333 West 23rd Street and 531 West 24th Street, 9:30 a.m.–4 p.m. Free with RSVP to rsvp@luhringaugustine.com

Analisa Teachworth and Jonas Wendelin, Dependency Demographics, 2017, performance view.

HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

SUNDAY, JANUARY 28

Performance: “Anti Bodies” at MoMA PS1
The website and curatorial platform Topical Cream presents a packed Sunday afternoon program of performances, readings, and installations inside of and around the VW Dome at MoMA PS1. Topical Cream provides voices for female-identifying and gender non-conforming persons; the show will take a look at various forms of resistance through creative expression and collective action. Highlights include video screenings presented by Jacksonville artist Redeem Pettaway, poetry from Natasha Stagg, and a live performance from the electronic punk band Deli Girls.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 2–6 p.m. Tickets $13/$15

Opening: Carissa Rodridguez at SculptureCenter
Between 2004 and 2015, the artist Carissa Rodriguez was a director at the Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art, the elusive Chinatown gallery that has at times questioned issues related to creative agency, market value, and labor within the art world. For her first solo institutional show in New York, Rodriguez will present a new video work that continues these investigations by following the lives of “related” artworks. In broad strokes, the piece takes a look at artistic reproduction and technology through the lens of familial dynamics.
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens, 5-7 p.m.

Throughout her four-decade career, Louise Lawler has quietly upended inherited notions of what artists do, where their work is displayed, and how they relate to other artists.

In playing with shadows, of course, you’re also doing something Duchampian . . .

Yes. You can make suppositions about that, but you can’t necessarily ascribe them to the artist. You see connections, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s where the artist got them. But that also doesn’t mean that they’re not there. ¹

THE YEAR IS 1994. The journal October dedicates its pages to “The Duchamp Effect,” a special issue that codifies the French artist-trickster’s influence on contemporary art. Interviews with Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine—peers, early collaborators, and artists grouped with the “Pictures Generation”—are especially notable for the sharp divergence in the artists’ willingness to be enlisted in the task. Levine reinforces the affinities that art historian Martha Buskirk observes, supplementing them with her own: that Duchamp provided her with a way of making sculpture, and that certain of her works refer directly to Duchamp. “It’s very Duchampian, this idea of taking the original readymade and making it into a fabricated readymade,” Buskirk suggests. “Yes,” Levine concurs with characteristic deadpan. ²

Lawler offers more resistance; she repeatedly evades Buskirk’s attempts to place her work within Duchampian coordinates. Her reaction acknowledges the complex—and uneasy—relationship between artists and those who interpret their work. Lawler concedes that she possesses more than a passing knowledge of Duchamp’s activities (“I don’t want to play the dumb artist”), but her own relationship to it is remote: “[T]o me, Duchamp signaled a ‘bottle rack’ (who uses that?), a weird looking urinal, and a lot of pictures of him smoking and enjoying the sun with other people.” ³ The “effect” of his presence is distant, nebulous. 

Lawler and Levine adopt different roles: one recalcitrant, the other cooperative. Of course, this is partly an act. Lawler’s most recognizable photographs document other artists’ work (including Duchamp’s) in situ—not in pristine white cubes necessarily, but in quotidian contexts like homes and storage facilities, or transactional settings like corporate offices and auction houses. Pollock and Tureen, Arranged by Mr. and Mrs. Burton Tremaine, Connecticut (1984) depicts a paint-splattered canvas in the home of collectors who hung the painting above a complementary piece of antique china. The silkscreened tondo showing Marilyn Monroe in Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry? (1988) appears ready for sale in an auction-house preview. Here, the trademark tells of “a Pollock” or “a Warhol” become incorporated into Lawler’s own chameleonlike practice.

Levine’s apparent willingness to accept a Duchampian lineage should also be read as something of a ploy. She is best known for her impassive reproductions of modernist mainstays. “After Walker Evans” (1981), for example, is a series of rephotographed Evans images. Levine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), 1991, is a cast bronze urinal. Yet to dismiss these works as mere copies would be to take the bait. Levine’s project is a cool examination of the very meaning of originality and ownership. At a panel on postmodernism in 1981, she read a text cut-and-pasted from other artists’ statements. “Every image is leased and mortgaged,” she intoned—words borrowed from the German painter Franz Marc that have since been attributed to Levine. ⁴

To be sure, the work of Lawler and Levine is distinguished by the relationships it establishes to that of others. But these can hardly be reduced to “influence.” In her interview with October, Lawler explicitly questions how, and by whom, connections between artists’ work are made, and to what end. Returning to these questions is especially pertinent now that an exhibition culled from four decades of Lawler’s work is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Art historians and curators have coined the “Duchamp Effect,” the “Smithson Effect,” and the “Cage Effect” to describe how certain protagonists have left their imprint on subsequent art. But what does it mean to say that one artist’s work influences, prefigures, triggers, affects, induces, enables, or informs another’s?

Too often, such a framework overemphasizes apparent similarity at the expense of understanding the specificity and nuance of one artist’s ties to another. Establishing the significance of a work through its artistic lineage also reinforces patrilineal notions of authorship. As theorist Roland Barthes observed, “The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work”—a relation inscribed and enforced by the concept of intellectual property. ⁵ It’s no coincidence, as he notes, that the modern understanding of an author came into being in tandem with copyright law, buttressed by a capitalist understanding of ownership.

Upon its emergence in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Lawler and Levine’s work (along with that of their peers including Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman) was paradigm-shifting precisely for its reappraisal of authority, ownership, and value. These artists inaugurated, as critic Craig Owens puts it, the “refusal of the role of creator as ‘father’ of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law”; they interrupted an understanding of artistic tradition as “a contract between fathers and sons.” ⁶ Hence their cagey responses to the news that Duchamp might be their daddy.

WHAT DO WE OWN? What is the same? So reads the title of a 1980 print project, collaboratively authored by Lawler, Levine, and Kruger, that appeared in The Flue, a newsletter published by the artist-run New York nonprofit Franklin Furnace. Their title appeared along with four black-and-white photographs of an open book featuring a short story by the Italian author Alberto Moravia. The title articulates the core questions of visual and textual appropriation, the crux of much “Pictures Generation” work (so named for “Pictures,” a 1977 exhibition at Artists Space in New York, curated by Douglas Crimp). Yet in other works Lawler took these questions further, not only claiming ownership over images and texts produced by others, but also obscuring her own authorship.

In a 1980 group exhibition at Castelli Graphics in New York, Lawler presented a second photograph of the same book, this time cropped in a circle. The show included works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and other blue-chip artists. A wall label attributed Lawler’s contribution to “Anonymous.” This self-effacement was no mere act of modesty; it doubled as a subtle send-up of the overly large wall labels. Lawler again took aim at the currency of boldface names with her sound piece Birdcalls, recorded in 1981. Her voice transforms a roster of artists’ names (uniformly white and male, save for Holzer in one version) into a well-disguised call-and-response of warbles, chirps, coos, and squawks. Such gestures sabotage the authority of the proper name, which otherwise eases art’s circulation and exchange.

The notion of intellectual property relies on the authority conferred by the proper name: the two concepts interlock to designate the belonging of something to someone. ⁷ Lawler’s work examines the importance of propriety in maintaining this relationship. Andrea Fraser wrote in the pages of this magazine in 1985: “Lawler consistently challenges the proprieties both of place (the divisions of artworld labor that assign artists, dealers and critics proper places and functions) and of objects (the ideological mechanisms which establish the authorship and ownership of art).” ⁸ Indeed, Lawler’s work is both a sustained examination of positioning—of the artist, of the viewer—and a continual evasion of an artist’s “proper” place. This plays out in relation to an art context, but its implications are political: for whom is a given place available, and under what conditions?

One of Lawler’s first efforts, the books Untitled (Red/Blue) and Untitled (Black/White), both 1979, prompts these questions. In the books, a playing card motif is juxtaposed with a screenplay by Lawler’s future dealer, Janelle Reiring, about the Dutch double agent and courtesan Mata Hari. (Double agent and card player: these two figures rely on a keen awareness of how different positions and contexts can determine what is visible or invisible.) The books were sold at several unorthodox locations––a movie theater, a hair salon, a jewelry store—where they might not read as “art,” or at least not right away. Lawler was testing how shifts in context might recast the meaning of an object entirely.

In the early 1980s, Lawler began experimenting with different mechanisms for generating publicity. When she distributed, without permission, matchbooks with the words “an evening with julian schnabel” stamped in red foil lettering at an event of the same name at UCLA in 1982, the chintzy promotional materials (warmly received by the event’s organizers, as it turned out) came laced with double-edged commentary on the spectacle surrounding another artist’s appearance. Later that year, finding herself without a formal invitation to participate in Documenta 7, yet in possession of a copy of the florid, over-the-top letter that the curator, Rudi Fuchs, sent to desired participants, Lawler selectively edited the document and produced stationery printed with the text: “Dear ________, How can I describe the exhibition to you? The exhibition that floats in my mind like a star. . . . Who meets whom and where: that is our story which will tell about our experiences, our encounters in the forest of art.” The stationery was sold, along with other souvenir-like objects made by artists allied with the South Bronx organization Fashion Moda, at a booth outside the official Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany.

Such maneuvering—which might merely be coy, were it not so canny—would also come to characterize Lawler’s work for exhibitions at museums and galleries. “Arrangements of Pictures” (1982), her first solo exhibition at the gallery Metro Pictures in New York, included a hanging of works by gallery artists Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, and James Welling, selected by Lawler. The configuration was for sale for the cost of the constituent works, plus a 10 percent fee for Lawler’s arranging services. The exhibition also featured a group of photographs that contain the kernel of much of her later work: jigsawlike hangings of work by other artists staged against candy-colored backdrops. Titles such as (Holzer, Nadin, and Other Artists) Baby Blue (1982) playfully mimic the familiar verbal tic by which certain artists are named, while the rest are summarized as also-rans. Lawler here occupied multiple roles—artist, friend, documentarian, curator, art adviser––in order to reshuffle the economy of visibility around a solo gallery show.

Extending this line of thought, “Home/Museum Arranged for Living and Viewing,” Lawler’s 1984 exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, transformed a gallery into a genteel domestic interior, complete with a grandfather clock and lemon yellow walls. The walls were hung with an idiosyncratic selection of artworks drawn from the collection of the artist and the museum (Sol Lewitt had donated some of them, including Lawler’s Birdcalls, to the Wadsworth). The sole wall label for the installation emphasized the works’ displacement. The paintings and photographs had been “extracted from their locations in the museum (as they had been previously dislocated from the original contexts for which they had been made), in order to be relocated in this matrix.” ⁹

Lawler’s work is driven by a fascination with the movement of objects and people across contexts: public and private, alternative and commercial, critical and complicit. This interest is evident in her photographs of other artists’ work in museums, storage facilities, and collectors’ homes. But these images tell only part of the story. Her key move––finessing different roles and contexts—takes place behind the scenes, and can only be read through the traces left by seemingly marginal ephemera and documentation. This practice developed at a time when a clear division between “inside” and “outside” the institution (the battleground of early institutional critique) became untenable. Lawler straddled the roles of insider and outsider, playing each against the other.

LAWLER’S UNEASY relationship to visibility is worth reconsidering at a moment when her work can be seen in one of the most prominent contexts of all: the Museum of Modern Art. “Why Pictures Now” forgoes the tropes of a straightforward museum survey in favor of a nonlinear grouping. This format has recently come into favor for midcareer retrospectives of artists reluctant to appear on such terms. To cite two recent examples, Rosemarie Trockel’s 2012 show “A Cosmos” at the New Museum in New York and Kai Althoff’s 2016 exhibition “and then leave me to the common swifts” at MoMA both eschewed a chronological presentation of work and, in the case of Althoff, contextual cues like explanatory wall texts.

Lawler’s exhibition will surely introduce her work to a broader audience, bring to light aspects of her practice that have fallen out of view, and offer an opportunity for it to resonate anew in relation to the current moment. But, of course, as artists aligned with institutional critique have long made clear, the museum is also inescapably an apparatus of historicization, individualization, and above all, legitimation—modes that Lawler has persistently tested and tampered with.

“Recognition may be, may not be useful.” This phrase appeared on the cover of the May 1990 issue of Artscribe, overlaid on a photograph of Meryl Streep smoking a cigarette. The editors had requested a portrait of Lawler to accompany a feature article on her work, and she instead proffered Streep’s visage as a surrogate. The ambivalence of her textual addition resonates in the context of the exhibition at MoMA: the forms of recognition it affords may be, or may not be, useful. Declining to appear, or refusing to appear in the way that she has been summoned, is a hallmark of Lawler’s practice.

The conceit of a solo exhibition cannot readily capture what is most specific and compelling about Lawler’s body of work. Observations that the artist shared in conversation with Douglas Crimp twenty years ago offer insight into why: “A work of art is produced by many different things,” she said. “It isn’t just the result of an unencumbered creative act. It’s always the case that what is allowed to be seen and understood is part of what produces the work. And art is always a collaboration with what came before you and what comes after you. . . . [N]o work is really produced alone.” ¹⁰ Lawler’s emphasis on the larger field of relations that produce a work has been a shared point of focus among artists investigating the politics of art’s display and circulation in recent decades. Yet no matter how strenuously a monographic museum exhibition attempts to undo its own logic, its form isn’t adequate to the task of representing these relations in their full complexity.

Lawler’s work offers a model for thinking about artistic practices together—their positions in relation to one another, as well as to the spaces where they appear. This is represented in “Why Pictures Now” by objects Lawler produced while working with, or for, others: promotional materials from exhibitions and events she organized with Levine under the moniker A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything, production stills she took for a film by Lawrence Weiner, a business card she designed for Dan Graham, bronze wall reliefs she made with Allan McCollum. But the retrospective also hosts work by other artists. A poster stack by Felix Gonzalez-Torres features a photo by Lawler. Andrea Fraser’s May I Help You? (1991), a performance in which the artist embodies six different art-viewer archetypes ranging from an uncertain novice to a pretentious expert, was reprised amid Lawler’s show.

The exhibition also links Lawler’s work to that of a young artist with whom she has not formally collaborated. At the entrance of the exhibition stands Cameron Rowland’s New York State Unified Court System (2016), a readymade sculpture that comprises four court benches fabricated by incarcerated people at a New York State correctional facility. This captive labor pool is paid between 10 cents and $1.14 per hour to make products that are subsequently sold to government agencies in New York State. As the artist proposed in a text accompanying “91020000,” his 2016 exhibition at Artists Space where the benches were first shown, prison labor is part of an exploitative economy inseparable from the legacy of slavery. In this new context, the benches are a visual echo of Lawler’s prior solo at MoMA, “Enough. Projects: Louise Lawler” (1987). She created a tableau in which a standard museum bench stood in front of three identical photographs, each showing the same bench in front of a Miró painting—inviting a double take.

Rowland’s benches offer a different view entirely. They focus attention outward, beyond the space of the museum and into an arm of the contemporary prison-industrial complex that can be sustained only to the extent that it remains concealed from sight (or is tolerated by an informed public). Rowland’s production involves legal and bureaucratic repositioning of existing social structures. He leased the sculpture as opposed to selling it; the work is part of MoMA’s collection, but is not owned by the museum. This technical yet important distinction departs from the standard terms of exchange that govern the circulation of contemporary art as private property. The benches are synecdoches for the broader system in which they were produced. Indeed, even as Rowland’s work is represented by objects placed within museums and galleries, it is chiefly concerned with systems of racial and economic inequality that extend far beyond their walls.

While “Why Pictures Now” may acknowledge the context beyond Lawler’s work and its ties to other artists, the exhibition will inevitably secure the artist’s place within a certain art historical canon. (And of course, essays like this one are part of the same economy.) Lawler’s response to “The Duchamp Effect” invites consideration of how, beyond “influence,” we might understand the life an artist’s work takes on as it circulates in the world, including its reception among younger artists. In the exchange between Lawler and Buskirk quoted at the outset, the artist concludes: “This discussion of Duchamp seems a good opportunity to express my discomfort with too much referencing of authority that is restrictive, rather than acknowledging the work’s ‘kindling’ effect and use.” ¹¹

“Kindling.” It’s a word whose definition suggests transformative activity: n. easily combustible small sticks used for starting a fire. Material used as kindling instigates a process that will ultimately consume and overtake it. In emphasizing her work’s “‘kindling’ effect and use,” Lawler proposes a rather different relationship to younger artists than is normally suggested by “influence”: she emphasizes an artwork’s generative capacities, its potential for use. The term doesn’t suggest a circumscribable cause and effect, but rather captures the way an idea “catches”—with a certain degree of randomness, sparking combustion.

LAWLER’S FINESSING of visibility has been particularly generative in this way. Upending expectations about how and where artists appear, for example, has become central to Trisha Donnelly’s work. Her brief, storied appearance on horseback and in Napoleonic garb at the opening of her 2002 exhibition at Casey Kaplan gallery in New York inaugurated a myth that she would later manipulate as material. At a subsequent opening, at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany in 2005, another such “demonstration” (as she terms her actions) was rumored, but never occurred. The artist excused herself from dinner several times, stoking speculation; then word spread that the performance had already taken place. In the end, the circulation of misinformation constituted the event. At the opening dinner for the 54th Carnegie International in 2004, Donnelly embedded herself among the waitstaff rather than taking a seat at the table. Through these actions, the artist responds to art world recognition by seeding it with rumor and misrecognition.

In 2013, Donnelly organized an exhibition as part of the Artist’s Choice program at MoMA—a series whose very premise, of an artist selecting and arranging works by others, is consonant with Lawler’s practice. Like Lawler in “Home/Museum,” Donnelly assembled an array of objects from the museum’s collection in galleries usually reserved for chronological displays of twentieth-century art. Among the selections were avian photographs by artist-scientist Eliot Porter; computer-generated plot drawings of parts manufactured by IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s, some attributed to the corporations and others to industrial designer Sam Lucente; and a convertible Italian couch configured as a bed, designed by Alessandro Becchi. Through this installation, Donnelly undercut the conventions that quarantine different parts of the museum’s collection to their respective departments and attendant modes of viewing. She rendered palpable the codes that subtly guide the way we read objects in a museum––making distinctions between furniture and sculpture, for example—and offered a vision of how things could be otherwise.

If Donnelly rewires staid viewing habits, Carissa Rodriguez examines the value attached to (and generated by) different forms of labor within the art world. The conceit of “La Collectionneuse,” the artist’s 2013 exhibition in New York, is inseparable from its site: Front Desk Apparatus, a midtown art advisory service and branding consultancy that doubles as an exhibition space. Its tandem identities are enabled by discretion—appearing and disappearing as needed––and Rodriguez made this tension the centerpiece of her work. To the office-showroom’s nineteenth-century moldings, parquet floors, marble hearth, and fluorescent lights, Rodriguez added a claustrophobic set of walls painted “super white,” creating an antiseptic room within a room. Near the entrance, a rack offered a series of postcards resembling exhibition announcements. Some depicted the artist’s earlier work hanging in homes (belonging to collectors as well as the advisory service’s founder) while others showed an image of the cold white fluorescent lights overhead. Here, Rodriguez plays multiple roles: host, documentarian, publicist, and producer of objects; a split identity not unfamiliar to the artist, given her erstwhile role as director of the downtown gallery Reena Spaulings. Her focus is not just the immediate site, but the entire network in which it traffics.

Artists are frequently expected to code-switch depending on context: propriety dictates that the roles they occupy (beyond artist) to subsist and “make work”—as art handlers, fabricators, assistants, techs, and so on––remain largely unacknowledged in moments when they self-present as artists. The sculptor and dancer Yve Laris Cohen deliberately collapsed this division of labor in his 2016 exhibition “Embattled Garden,” at Company Gallery in New York. For the five-week run of the show, Laris Cohen was contracted for the hourly wage he normally received as a production assistant for the Martha Graham Company (he had held the part-time job since 2015) while he reconstructed an Isamu Noguchi-designed set that had been damaged in basement storage during Hurricane Sandy. Using the commercial gallery as a workshop, and keeping a schedule that corresponded to the gallery’s hours of operation, Laris Cohen worked to painstakingly replicate the set, which was to become the property of the Martha Graham Company for future use upon completion. (The questions “What do we own? What is the same?” echo here.) Laris Cohen, who briefly worked as a set and prop builder while pursuing his MFA at Columbia University, and who had studied the Graham technique while an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, was uniquely well-positioned to meld the roles of wage laborer and artist in this context; the result reflected both their consonance and their dissonance.

Lawler emphasizes that “what is allowed to be seen and understood is part of what produces the work.” ¹² This principle is not just implicit in the practices of Rowland, Donnelly, Rodriguez, and Laris Cohen. Rather, it becomes a prime mover in the production of their work. It is in this sense that Lawler’s practice has “kindled” an approach that has led to a fundamental reorientation in how the bounds of art production are understood.

The art world, even the very idea of art, has long been structured by the boundary between what can be seen and what should be hidden from view. This division is overwritten with codes, hierarchies, taboos, and expectations that most readily support prevailing approaches to producing, displaying, and circulating work. Art institutions are duly equipped to register the individual artist and the named collective (though the myths surrounding the former category have become tarnished of late, and membership in the latter is rarely settled without strife). But other forms of being and working together are less easily captured by their prevailing economies of visibility. To make work that takes a different approach requires sustained resistance.

Lawler’s efforts of the past four decades provide a case study in such resolve. Her practice at once resists familiar codes of display and modes of historicization, and takes an intimate knowledge of them as its precondition. To simply place Lawler’s work within an art-historical genealogy would be to miss its most distinctive qualities; her work offers a way of thinking about relationships between artistic practices that acknowledges the deep interdependence between any act of production and its discursive and material surroundings, whether or not they’re cited by the maker. “I think art is part and parcel of a cumulative and collective enterprise, viewed as seen fit by the prevailing culture,” the artist has observed. “Other work, outside work, makes up a part of this.” ¹³ In this sense, Lawler’s work presents what would seem to be a paradox: it is singular for the extent to which it insists that nothing ever stands alone.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW “Louise Lawler: Why Pictures Now,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through July 30.

LEAH PIRES is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University, New York.

Endnotes

1. Martha Buskirk and Louise Lawler in Martha Buskirk, “Interviews with Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, and Fred Wilson,” October 70, Fall 1994, p. 108.

2. Sherrie Levine in Buskirk, p. 98.

3. Lawler in Buskirk, p. 105.

4. Levine in Craig Owens, “Post-Modernism: A Symposium Presented by the Young Architects Circle, A Public Program of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies on March 30, 1981,” Real Life, Summer 1981, p. 4. Reprinted as Sherrie Levine, “Five Comments,” in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writing by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis, New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987, pp. 92–93.

5. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, New York, Hill & Wang, 1978, pp. 160–61.

6. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 182, 184.

7. See Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, and Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson vs. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations, Summer 1988, pp. 51–85.

8. Andrea Fraser, “In and Out of Place,” Art in America, June 1985, p. 125.

9. Wall label in “MATRIX 77: Louise Lawler, Home/Museum-Arranged for Living and Viewing,” organized by Andrea Miller-Keller, Hartford, Conn., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1984.

10. Lawler in Douglas Crimp, “Prominence Given, Authority Taken,” in An Arrangement of Pictures, New York, Assouline, 2000, n.p.

11. Lawler in Buskirk, p. 108.

12. Lawler in Crimp, n.p.

13. Lawler in Buskirk,  p. 105.

Installation view of Keith Sonnier’s Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent in MoMA PS1’s “Forty.” MoMA PS1 will have a party on Thursday night to celebrate “Forty” and its other summer exhibitions.

PETE DEEVAKUL

MONDAY, AUGUST 22

Screening: Dreams Are Colder Than Death at Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art
Arthur Jafa’s 2013 documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death casts a broad net with its subject, the meaning of blackness in a post–Martin Luther King Jr. America. Working with filmmaker Khalil Joseph, Jafa decided to interview talk to various black artists, among them Kara Walker, Wangechi Mutu, and director Charles Burnett. Told in a lyrical style, the film poses questions without giving too many answers; it’s perfect, then, that a discussion will follow this screening.
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, 177 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, 6–9 p.m.

Screening: “Surveillance: Short Film Program” at Anthology Film Archives
Part of Anthology Film Archives’s series “Voyeurism, Surveillance, and Identity,” this screening program features three short films about privacy and moving images. The program kicks off with Deborah Stratman’s In Order Not to Be Here (2002), a “new genre of horror movie,” in the filmmaker’s words, about being watched in suburbia. Sophie Calle’s Unfinished (2005), a video about money exchanges in the surveillance state, follows. The program concludes with Harun Farocki’s I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts (2000), a single-channel edit of an installation that parallels surveillance footage from a maximum security prison in California.
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, 7 p.m. Tickets $7–$11

THURSDAY, AUGUST 25

Jessica Stockholder, Detached Detail, 2016, industrial metal fencing, dance floor tile, leather, vinyl, rope, hardware, floor tile, floor mat, masonry square tile, bent metal rod, acrylic, oil paint.

©JESSICA STOCKHOLDER/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND MITCHELL-INNES & NASH, NEW YORK

Opening: Jessica Stockholder at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
The fall art season seems to start earlier with every passing year, and this time, it technically begins at the end of summer with this Jessica Stockholder show, her third at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. (An official opening reception follows during the real fall season, on September 15.) On view will be more of the Chicago-based artist’s oddball installations, which typically assemble various colorful, unlike objects. You could easily be tricked into thinking that these are all found objects, and that Stockholder put them all herself, but not so—she often deliberately selects her objects and relies on readymade materials. At stake in these works, some of them called “Assists,” in reference to how her objects are propped against or attached to other ones, are questions of dependence. Can these objects stand on their own, or do they require each other to be whole?
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Opening: inHarlem at Marcus Garvey Park
Organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, this new project will feature four new site-specific projects installed across four Harlem parks. Kevin Beasley, Simone Leigh, Kori Newkirk, and Rudy Shepherd have produced new work for this new initiative; their pieces will remain on view for the coming year. Of particular interest is Leigh’s work, an installation that evokes Zimbabwean clay-and-thatch structures that normally can be entered, but here are presented without doors as a symbol of diaspora and displacement. Likewise, the other three projects will reflect on a rapidly changing Harlem and the nature of blackness in the neighborhood.
Marcus Garvey Park, 5–7 p.m.

Party: A Night at the Museum at MoMA PS1
To celebrate its summer shows (which include an excellent Cao Fei survey and a fascinating Vito Acconci exhibition), MoMA PS1 is throwing a party. Organized by Meriem Bennani, whose installation FLY is also currently on view at the museum, the party will have music by the artist, and food and drinks. According to PS1’s website, the party has 50 hosts. We’re confused about how that could be possible, but head over to the museum’s site for the star-studded list, which includes Spike Jonze, Cindy Sherman, and Mickalene Thomas.
MoMA PS1, 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens, 8 p.m.–12 a.m. Tickets $18

FRIDAY, AUGUST 26

Film still from Alex Keshishian’s Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991).

©1991 MIRAMAX, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Screening: Madonna: Truth or Dare at Metrograph
Alex Keshishian’s 1991 cult favorite Madonna: Truth or Dare will have a theatrical run this week after a recent restoration. This documentary is essentially a concert film, featuring both black-and-white and color cinematography, and showing Madonna both on the road and performing live. What distinguishes the film from others like it is, as would befit its subject, the film’s lax depiction of sexuality. (When it was released in Europe, the film was called In Bed with Madonna.) Among other things, this film is worth seeing for its bizarre cameos, including appearances from Al Pacino, Antonio Banderas, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street, screenings at 2 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 7 p.m., and 10:15 p.m., and throughout the week

Screening: Amadeus at Film Society of Lincoln Center
In what must be one of the final outdoor screenings of the summer, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is showing Milos Forman’s 1984 masterpiece Amadeus. Starring F. Murray Abraham as Antonio Salieri, the film chronicles one composer’s quest to mentor—and then, ultimately, to be better than—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, played here by Tom Hulce in an excellent performance. This epic, told with a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor, is one of the great films creativity and art. Here, it will screen for free in Lincoln Center’s plaza.
Film Society of Lincoln Center, Lincoln Center Plaza, 7:45 p.m.

Madeline Hollander, Drill, 2016, performance.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SIGNAL

SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

Opening: Madeline Hollander at Signal
For a new performance called Drill, Madeline Hollander will have somewhere between two and seven performers show visitors how to use evacuation procedures typically found on airplanes and in movie theaters. The performers will continue looping through the gallery, exiting it and entering it over and over again, while aircraft evacuation slides hang above them. Could Hollander’s performance be some kind of institutional critique–style statement about the gallery as temporary entertainment space? A release keeps it vague, and notes that the performance will keep happening throughout the show’s run.
Signal, 260 Johnson Avenue, 7–10 p.m.

Performances: “It’s Already Started” at Artists Space Books & Talks
“Stories stand in for us; they capture us, too. / Stories hold us accountable. / Are other’s stories ever told as they should be?” That’s from the cryptic release for this performance program at Artists Space, organized by No Total. It’s hard to know what to expect here, other than that there will be performances by Jordan Lord with Carissa Rodriguez, Emma Hedditch, and Mariana Valencia throughout the evening. Each performance is accompanied with a brief description—all are available on Artists Space’s website.
Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, 7:30 p.m. RSVP to no.total.here@gmail.com

PHOTO BY WADE GUYTON

The premise of Design Within Riche stylist Avena Gallagher and artist Carissa Rodriguez’s fashion-into-art performance at Guyton-Walker’s temporary exhibition space Burning Bridges, entailed the communal aspects of such an event.  A nonedescript, evidently Asian-in-descent model appeared and Guyton-Walker’s one-off lamps of constallations of coconuts, accompanied by a pulsing soundtrack that one might automatically associate with a runway show. The model was dressed in a silver shift dress from Prada’s spring collection, with a silhouette of a palm tree as a small tropical detail. The presentation organizers and the model are all from the same island in the Philippines, which as a nation is presumably a general stand-in for the rote labor that goes into making ready-to-wear clothing. The country’s best known consumer in a Western context, Imelda Marcos, was invoked on the invitation by a memorable quotation, “Nouveau riche is better than no riche at all.” She is the unparalleled example of rapid, unsophisticated consumption.

But all of the details about clothing and the lamp were really just that, details. The invitation, after all, had only listed the space and the artists, and they were the product being consumed in the event. She didn’t convey product, as the dress was from Spring, and so had already been on racks for weeks (which probably would not have been identified by the audience assembled anyway, who were by and large not trade fashion professionals).The model’s activity was dictated not by the demands of showing movement in clothing, but by effecting the attitude of an audience member channeling the affectation of a model—someone self-aware about being looked, and not appearing as such. The audience watched her until her novelty faded and she became boring, and then was integrated into the audience, which kept going and consuming until late into the night. It was an exercise in procession without direction, and the welcome disruption of novelty.