coffee mug with image
unlimited edition
description: Is Painting Over? (for Louise Lawler) is a tribute piece to the work of conceptual artist Louise Lawler, who in the early 1980’s, produced numerous series of matchbooks for specific contexts and distributed them in galleries and cultural venues. Lawler used the matchbook, a form that is continually placed, replaced, and displaced, as a way to challenge the notion of place (divisions of labor within the art world) and of objects (the ideological mechanisms which establish authorship and ownership of art) that constitute the art world. The particular matchbook (and its subsequent photo documentation), Why Pictures Now?, referenced here was inspired by the media hype that surrounded a 1982 lecture by Julian Schnabel. Acting as a “publicist,” Lawler produced and distributed the matchbooks at the event, effectively using a publicity tool against itself and encapsulating the exaggerated spectacle of the event in a disposable souvenir. As Andrea Fraser notes, “the immediate effect of such matchbooks is one of vulgarization: by employing a format usually used to promote restaurants and driving schools, Lawler amplifies polite art market mechanisms into travesties of consumer culture,” (Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, Andrea Fraser, MIT Press, 2005).
Is Painting Over? was a lecture delivered at the Hirshhorn by Lucy Hogg, an artist and the wife of the Washington Post’s chief art critic Blake Gopnik. Using one of Lawler’s photographs of her matchbooks as a template, I re-staged the photographic event with Hogg’s lecture as the matchbook title, adding a self-burning cigarette as an additional layer of metaphor. To move the critique beyond the subject of the artist lecture as public celebrity experience, I appropriated the coffee mug format as a contemporary form of the same “vulgarization” of Lawler’s concern, a form that summarizes the current state of hyper-marketing and branding of art museums.
Over the last decade, the museum store has become as central of a site within the museum space as the permanent collection itself. Lines between the “real” and “stand-in” or, simulacrum experience of art within the museum setting have been blurred and destabilized, as the merchandise offered for consumption are not only magnets emblazed with Monet’s artwork, but also the logo and color scheme of the museum itself (some examples: The Smithsonian, MoMA, Tate museums) are peddled on everything from coffee mugs to t-shirts to umbrellas. By using the coffee mug as the object of art, the economic and social critique is turned in on itself, imploding a flood of significations and objections. - Kathryn Cornelius, 2004