Louise Lawler. Pollyanna (Adjusted to Fit), Distorted for the Times, 2007/2008/2012; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York. © 2017 Louise Lawler.

Part of the “Pictures Generation” of the late 1970s, Louise Lawler receives far less recognition than her contemporaries—Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and David Salle, to name a few. Known for her portraits of other artists’ work, Louise Lawler’s first major survey, which spans forty years of creative output, is at the Museum of Modern Art through July 30. As part of one of the first generations of artists raised with television, Lawler’s work anticipates mass media’s ability to inject particular meanings into its consumers, or in the case of art, its viewers. By rephotographing existing images outside of their original context, Lawler draws to our attention an essential question of the digital age: how meaning and reality is constructed through presentation.

Born in 1947 in postwar America and a volatile cultural moment, Lawler grew up with the influences of affluence, Hollywood movies, ad-packed magazines, and the rise of consumerism. While abundance pervaded, anxiety and tensions belied the seemingly placid age. Drawn to mass-media culture and the very idea of originality, Lawler employed the examining power of photography to scrutinize our relationship with a media-saturated society.

Lawler’s Adjust to Fit series, the most conceptually powerful body of work in the MoMA show, presents a sequence of mural-scale images of famous artworks that have been appropriated and restaged. These works are exemplary of Lawler’s career-long approach to recording the secret life of art. By revealing how a Murakami, Warhol, or Richter are displayed in a crowded narrow space, Lawler raises the question of how installation challenges our understanding of art, its value, and the market. The title, Adjust to Fit, nods to Lawler’s manipulation of work to fill the space available. The reformatting strategy that the artist employs in this series accentuates her interest in the relationship of artwork and its display space, and how integral these decisions are to the viewer’s experience.

Louise Lawler. Why Pictures Now, 1981; gelatin silver print; 3 × 6 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired with support from Nathalie and Jean-Daniel Cohen in honor of Roxana Marcoci. © 2017 Louise Lawler.

Sometimes Lawler’s pieces portray artworks still in process, while others show finished work hanging on the walls of a billionaire collector’s office, or at other privileged venues. On one hand, Lawler uses photography satirically to give a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the art market, and the transactional nature of artworks being de-installed from a museum show and sold to private collectors. On the other hand, she powerfully examines how one medium can interpret another. Prevalent in Lawler’s photographs are works by artists like Warhol and Richter, whose own reproductive methods with screen-printing and photography are themselves layered. The additional layers that Lawler instills in her works point the viewer toward things already in the world, and throw light on the implicit meanings in the original works that we oftentimes neglect.

With much poignancy, the exhibition provides an answer to the timely question of its title: Why pictures now? In an age when images and social media flood our everyday lives, Lawler’s works speak to a new era of mass media—the digital age and its oblique construction of reality.

Louise Lawler: Why Pictures Now will be on view through July 30, 2017.

Hoi Lun Helen Wong is an independent curator, writer, and art advisor based in New York. In 2013, she co-organized the exhibition Rationalized Vision—Xia Funing at the National Art Museum of China.

Exhibition view, November 1 – December 21, at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Artists and Casey Kaplan Gallery.

This is not to say that the works on view are not compelling, either taken together as they are here, or considered individually. Whereas much of Lawler’s previous work has focused on artworks in various locales—be they the pristine white walls of a museum, the opulent home of a collector, or an unidentifiable art-storage site packed in with crates and cases—the works on view at Kaplan diverge from her usual approach. Lawler’s photographs have long fascinated the art-inclined, offering glimpses of works we may know and love in unusual settings, while offering subtle prodding gestures toward questions of value, circulation, commoditization, and use. Here, however, Lawler swerves a bit from her usual path. In these newly manipulated works, two of Lawler’s photographs are transformed. Her 2010 image Life Expectancy, which captures carefully clipped segments of works by Carl Andre, Richard Serra, and Gerhard Richter, sets the stage, and is paired with an elongated version of itself, stretched into long pulls of color and line. Beyond the wall break, another of Lawler’s images, this time depicting Degas’ Little Dancer, receives a similar treatment. In each of these new works, the single image is lengthened to the extreme, creating abstracted images that guide the viewer deep into the show, their expanses stretching along walls and into corners.

Exhibition view, November 1 – December 21, at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York. Courtesy of the Artists and Casey Kaplan Gallery.

The effect of these pulled images is quite beautiful, as they degrade into swaths of abstract, softened color. But the content seems a bit perplexing to those familiar with Lawler’s usual, succinct imagery. What is the purpose of these elongations, and what metaphor can be found in these aesthetic experiments? As Lawler’s taffy-pulled photographs wrap along the gallery walls, the images do more than stretch out—they also break down. What began, in both works, as recognizable, even iconic images of art become visually incomprehensible, referentially divorced. If we apply the metaphor of time to these elongations, Lawler’s pulls begin to point toward the distancing effects of history, the disintegration of meaning, and the aestheticization of ideas.

Louise Lawler, Chicago (Placed and Pulled) (detail view), 2011/2012/2013; vinyl wall adhesive, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Casey Kaplan Gallery.

While Lawler’s photographic pulls seemingly frame the gallery space, Gillick’s contributions to the show dominate the rooms themselves, carving out large blocks of impenetrable space as they hang heavily from the ceiling. While messages might break down in Lawler’s works, Gillick asks us to read his work, formed through stylized letters in shining black. While Gillick’s sustained interest in design and photography is of course present here, this work takes a narrative approach. The 30 phrases of Övningskörning (Driving Practice Parts 1-30) are challenging to decipher, their difficulty requiring the viewer’s rapt attention. Gillick’s phrases seem to string together into sentences or paragraphs in places, but some key information is missing. Weaving together these intentionally partial fragments, we can construct a sketchy narrative about labor and usefulness in a stressed capitalist system.

Liam Gillick, Övningskörning (Driving Practice Parts 1 – 30) (detail view), 2004; powder-coated aluminum, 30 elements, each approximately 96 x 12 x .5 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Casey Kaplan Gallery.

One block of text in the center room of the installation reads, line by line: “all former employees without work | especially the older ones | a relatively progressive company | generous severance payments | and time to consider what to do | money runs out increasingly anxious | increasingly alienated from society.” Though Gillick’s work was made in 2004, its subject seems more current than its age, its words evoking familiar images and feelings related to the recession and economic uncertainty of the past five years. While Gillick’s installation corresponds, originally, to a visit the artist made to a Swedish Volvo manufacturing plant some years ago, this specificity seems not to matter. Gillick’s phrases pull us in through their halting, matter-of-fact elegance, allowing us to imagine countless associations, images, and scenarios linked to the crises of late capitalism.

The works presented in November 1 – December 21 remain staunchly separate from one another, though fibers of connection begin to emerge if one looks for them closely. If Lawler’s images deal with the breaking down of an image, the recession of understanding, then Gillick’s words can be seen to somehow echo a similar degradation, the erosion of a labor-based economy. As the press release for the exhibition argues, both Lawler’s and Gillick’s works deal with time, but here time does not have a neutral quality; instead, it ushers in and lays bare the breaking down—of systems, and of understanding.

November 1 – December 21 is on view at Casey Kaplan Gallery through December 21, 2013.