Baffles,Binds and Blind Alleys

Abstract

Scottish-born artist and writer, and occasional curator, Thomas Lawson, is the Dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California, and co-editor of Afterall, an art journal co-published by CalArts and Central Saint Martins in London. Since his move to New York in 1975 he has chronicled the development of the `Pictures' (1977) generation (Pictures exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp), providing an embedded critique of the context in which their practices were evaluated and then assimilated within the western art market's wider culture of appearances. A fellow traveller, Lawson wrote, often poignantly, of the corrupting linkage between art and the market while focusing on the effective strategies in the early work of Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein and David Salle for Artforum. A selection of these writings, including the seminal essay `Last Exit: Painting' (1981) and those from his own magazine, REALLIFE Magazine, have recently been collected in the 2004 anthology Mining for Gold: Selected Writings, 1976—2002, edited by Bovier and Stroun. Lawson is an exponent of representational practices and politics, notably within the New York art scene of the early 1980s, and a trenchant critic of the purities of minimalism and conceptualism, commenting `it has always seemed to me that the positions staked out by [Daniel] Buren and [Olivier] Mosset and the others are always just that, “positions taken, poses struck”. I have always found it difficult to accept the political content of their work.' In a further position, outlined while interviewing Allan McCollum, he suggested McCollum's `Individual Works' (1987—8) re-inscription of `recognizable objects' managed to get past the complexity that modernist avant-garde activity has created: the reliance on a complex barrier to understanding as part of its working method [web.mit.edu/allanmc/www.amcarticles/ mccollumpdfs.htm].

The range of Lawson's practices provides an early model of the sustained practices of the artist—curator or artist—critic, hyphenated terms now fully accepted within contemporary art but appreciated in the early 1980s perhaps within the corollary of conceptual art. Lawson's development as an artist resulted in a problematized position in which the independence of his critical evaluations was thrown into complex relief, concurrently avoiding the culs-de-sac of his own practice through intriguing, self-conscious shifts in emphasis, such as his transposition of representational critique from gallery-based painting towards panoramic forms and public art commissions. Rooted within the vernacular, his interest in smaller artist-run galleries, cultural re-appropriation and the examination of the politics of the art-world have remained prescient and influential advocacy. In this interview, which took place in October 2005 and April 2006, I asked Lawson to reflect back upon recently republished statements, re-examine paintings and current practice, and discuss the implications of his editorial and published work. As he states in this interview, he is now returning to `the unanchored contemplation of possibilities' of studio practice.