one pic tuesday. Louise Lawler

Lawler_helms-amendment

detail from Helms Amendment, 1989
94 black-and-white photographs, vinyl wall texts, grey painted wall
image courtesy the artist and Blondeau & Cie

With the ‘Helms amendment’ piece, I knew what I was doing in a different way than I often do. There were reasons that determined my choices. It was produced for an exhibition at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston at a time when there was much controversy over the content of photographs by MAPPLETHORPE and SERRANO in exhibitions funded by the NEA.

I made ninety-four prints of a black-and-white photo of a plastic cup sort of archetypal Weston peppers-, with bright whites and dense blacks. They were matted with the name of each senator in press type on the mats–red for Democrats, blue for Republicans. They were installed in pairs, one above the other, alphabetically by state around the room. The frames were dark wood, and the wall was painted gray. In the six spaces where there was no photo there was an excerpt of the Helms amendment which stated that no federal funds could be used to support AIDS educational material that condoned a homosexual lifestyle. The text stood in place of the four senators who abstained from the vote and the two who voted no.

The cup to me had a certain feeling of a medicalized environment, and it also had a classical element to it. You don’t know how people are going to perceive or read it they wouldn’t necessarily think about anonymity, and what gets taken when you’re always drinking from a plastic cup in .1 hospital. But the work in general was very much a product of its times. The codes which produced. conventions of display pictures, text, paint, quantity– embraced braced the issues wholeheartedly with a fervor that is hopefully recognized and felt.LOUISE LAWLER in conversation with MARTHA BUSKIRK, June 14 1994

Helms Amendment by LOUISE LAWLER has been shown at Art Unlimited 2016 in Basel that closed a few days ago.



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