Arranged by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage, Cheryl Bishop at Paine Webber Inc., NYC (adjusted to fit)

The idiosyncratic image maker Louise Lawler began her career in the early 1980s, at a moment when the art market began to partake of the speculative frenzy of Wall Street. Expanding upon the legacy of institutional critique initiated by an earlier generation of Conceptual artists, and upon methods of appropriation advanced by her peers of the Pictures generation, Lawler photographed other artists’ works of art on view in auction previews, private homes, and corporate boardrooms. These images expose the art world’s usually invisible machinery of possession, display, and circulation, laying bare its participation in a network of wealth and power. In addition to producing new photographs, Lawler consistently remakes–or rather recontextualizes–her existing work in different media, formats, colors, and for distinct venues. Her "adjusted to fit" series, begun in 2006, revises her previously made photographs as images "adjusted" to match the dimensions of a particular wall. These works diminish her own authorial agency as an artist, instead leaving decisions of scale and proportion to an exhibitor, whose choices directly affect the way the work of art is produced and seen. This work recreates Lawler’s 1982 photograph Arranged by Donald Marron, Susan Brundage, Cheryl Bishop at Paine Webber Inc., NYC, but de-constrained from its original proportions, reproduced at a large scale using adhesive vinyl, and skewed to conform to the dimensions of a gallery wall. Lawler has captured a work on paper from Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities series installed at Paine Webber Inc., an investment bank and stock brokerage firm. Rather than citing the artist whose work is depicted, the artwork title names instead the location of its installation and those responsible for acquiring and arranging the work, namely the CEO of Paine Webber (Marron), a representative from the artist’s gallery (Brundage), and the curator of the company’s art collection (Bishop), making systems of acquisition, collection, and display the subject of the work.