From 11 October, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne is showing a major retrospective of Louise Lawler's work, Adjusted. The works are scattered throughout the building, in dialogue with the connection.
In addition to, among many other things, two new large-format photographs that have been stretched to match the proportions of specific walls, the exhibition also comprises a series of ten "tracings" that recast her photographs in a form that recalls children's colouring book.
The catalog contains texts by curator Philipp Kaiser, Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster and myself. My essay "'Not Stone'" departs from the notion of arrangement in Lawler's work, but does not focus on the iconic photographs of artworks that have been "arranged by" their owners.
Rather, I focus on her practice in general as constantly arranging and rearranging objects, subjects, contexts, events. I place particular emphasis on "ephemeral" pieces such as His Gesture Moved Us to Tears (with Sherrie Levine) and An Evening With Julian Schnabel and on various forms of printed matter in her work.
The Dutch magazine Open, which had to cease publication due to the cuts, is now online as Open! under http://www.onlineopen.org/ As before, Open! continues deal critically and theoretically with intersections of art, media and activism as a way of charting the transformations of publicness and the production of commons. In addition to new essays (and links to the old issues), the site is publishing a series of short columns that take stock of the situation and/or propose new projects. I contributed one of these columns, "The Conversation."
