User:Lbattich/Andrea Fraser, 'In and Out of Place' 1985

Lawler consistently challenges the proprieties both of place (divisions of artworld labor that assign artists, dealers and critics proper places and functions) and of objects (the ideological mechanisms which establish the authorship and ownership of art).

For an artist to write reviews, curate exhibitions or run a gallery is a contemporary artworld commonplace. But these occupations are usually regarded as secondary; the artist is identified primarily as a producer of a body of works, which other activities only supplement. By abdicating this privileged place of artistic identity, Lawler manages to escape institutional definitions of artistic identity, Lawler manages to escape institutional definitions of artistic activity as a autonomous aesthetic exploration. Her objective is not so much to uncover hidden ideological agendas, but to disrupt the institutional boundaries which determine and separate the discrete identities of artist and art work from an apparatus which supposedly merely supplements them. From: Andrea Fraser, 'In and Out of Place' 1985

She locates [institutional power] in a systemized set of presentational procedures which name, situate, centralize.

Establishing authorship, ownership, pedigree and, ultimately, value, such museum labels are the most conspicuous instance of the institutional exhibition of proper names.

[See Lawler's Patriarchal Roll Call, 1983, where she plays with artist's names, turning them into bird calls.]

Signifying the essential yet imaginary identity of a unified ego, the proper name, individuals are inscribed within power relations and come to identify with and be identified by positions therein. The conventional organization of art practices around a signature – everything which allows a work of art to be identified as a "Pollock" or a "Warhol," etc. – institutes the proper name as interior to the art object; thus, artists are locked in a structure of institutionalized subjectivity. And the institutional exhibition of proper names, designating the authors and owners of objects, defines that subjectivity in terms of consumption and ownership.

[Art criticism], especially monographic art criticism, which often functions retroactively to inscribe unruly objects within an institutionally acceptable position, to recover from a heterogeneous practice a unified ego – the subject of a signature.

If Lawler manages to escape both marginalization and incorporation, it is because, whatever position she may occupy, she is always also somewhere/something else.

Signifying the essential yet imaginary identity of a unified ego, the proper name, individuals are inscribed within power relations and come to identify with and be identified by positions therein. The conventional organization of art practices around a signature ... institutes the proper name as interior to the art object; thus, artists are locked in a structure of institutionalized subjectivity.