![]() The company announced its intent “to stop making and selling slide projectors” by June 2004. In September 2003, with little fanfare (or warning), the Eastman Kodak Company issued a press release that sent shudders through slide libraries, art-history lecture halls, and studio classes everywhere. I was recently reminded of Lawler’s work, made nearly twenty years ago, because the medium it puts on display is about to go the way of the magic lantern. It’s no accident that this teaching device finds its basis in the methodological underpinnings of art history and the totemic figure of Heinrich Wölfflin, who founded the comparative mode of analysis that rescued entire periods of art from aesthetic and historical obscurity. Setting the photographic panels side by side, Lawler mimes the structure of the dual slide projection, a pedagogical tool used by art historians to make claims for aesthetic judgment by means of comparison. Equipment and Entrenchment, however, implicitly suggests that the collecting of art, its estimation and installation, is guided by its literal projection elsewhere and that the move from projection to perception to valuation is a slippery slope. Initially the diptych might seem a departure from Lawler’s usual photographic métier: Rather than picture works of art displayed like so many trophies in Park Avenue living rooms or crated up in storage gathering dust, here she has chosen to represent the equipment of representation itself-that is, the little-considered equipment of banal, photo-based technologies and their equally mundane archives. On the right panel, workaday dual-projection screens stand at the ready in a classroom. The left side of the piece-let’s call it the “Equipment” half of the equation-pictures a small stack of filing cabinets whose contents are announced by a slide carousel placed on top. Less discussed, but no less important, is the oblique contribution light plays in the evaluation of works of art, a far more slippery proposition, it turns out, than treating light as a medium in and of itself.Ī diptych by Louise Lawler titled Equipment and Entrenchment, 1986, sets the stage for some thoughts to such ends. The historical roll call of these developments-which typically includes Vermeer and Moholy-Nagy, Flavin, Turrell, and Holzer-stresses the role of light as a medium no less secure or self-evident than oil paint, clay, marble, or canvas. IN THE EVER-EXPANDING universe of art engaging technology, an encounter with light seems a no-brainer: an absolute in those histories that begin with Renaissance optics, reach a crescendo with the emergence of photography, and of late, dally with the light-emitting diode.
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