What Else Could I Do

A single candle burns brightly within Louise Lawler’s glossy double image What Else Could I Do. Executed in 1994, Lawler’s photograph frames the greenish hues of a Gerhard Richter candle painting that hangs on the wall. What Else Could I Do is part of Lawler’s ongoing and celebrated series of knowing photographs that capture works of art in various cycles of display: held in museum storage, exhibited in galleries, or on view in the homes of collectors. By imaging various forms of displays, these photographs offer a conceptual critique that interrogates the mechanisms of the art world. Contained within these works is the embedded acknowledgement of their own uncertain futures and unknown destinations. Lawler came to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, the loose grouping of artists that included Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, among others. Superficially quieter than the splashy images of her peers, Lawler’s photographs are suffused with a determined emotional force; she is, what critic Roberta Smith described, ‘an artist of stealth, wit and elegant understatement, adept at playing the art world against itself… Behind Ms. Lawler’s shape-shifting works lies a poetic intelligence, a political sharpness and an understanding of the artwork as a form of value, but also as a source and an object of love’ (R Smith, ‘Stealth Aesthetic, Muted Aura’, New York Times, 12 May 2017, https://www.metropictures.com/attachment/en/58986e4c5a4091a0008b4568/News/591624672fd850a81ef819d9).