Louise Lawler would be the first to admit that an exhibition of her work is a product of forces beyond her control. For twenty-five years, most often with the aid of a camera, she has demonstrated that an artwork on the wall in front of a viewer—hers included—is a nodal point in a dense network of social and financial coordinates. With a matter-of-fact tone, Lawler's editorial slant (to use Robert Storr's phrase) has illuminated the tendrils of that network as they reach outward from art objects across both time and space. This is perhaps why her exhibitions have often been installations—'Arrangements of Pictures,' as she terms them—that lay bare the contingencies of an artwork's 'uniqueness' and the authorial stamp that deems it so. 'Looking Forward,' Lawler's first solo exhibition since her appropriately titled mid-career survey 'Louise Lawler and Others,' held this summer at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, comprises many of her trademark gestures: the photographs depict other artworks in contexts unfamiliar to a casual art viewer (being handled, in transit, behind closed doors); multiple prints from a given photographic edition are on view simultaneously; the arrangement is not uniform (some works hang close to the floor while, elsewhere, spot-lit expanses of wall were devoid of their pictures). These signals, along with Lawler's noted self-effacement and occasionally disarming sense of humor, can make it difficult for viewers and critics to see beyond the well-rehearsed tropes, mostly intellectual, that surround her work: that it is an act of 'institutional critique,' that it illustrates Walter Benjamin's maxim about the loss of an artwork's aura in an age of mechanical reproduction, that Lawler in effect exercises the powers of the collector in her meticulous acquisition of images of collections.

The photographs, shot on location at the ArtBasel and ArtBasel Miami Beach art fairs, the Museum of Modern Art, Christie's auction house, and elsewhere, work admirably as transmitters of this intellectual content. But something comes through on a different wavelength in this exhibition, a parallel signal that, in harmony with the cerebral meaning of her pictures, amplifies what Lawler calls the 'poignancy' of her images. Several of the photographs in the two larger galleries feature artworks that depict bodies; in the flux of transition, those bodies experience upheaval or are torn asunder. Take, for instance, down (2002/2004), which portrays the mannequin used in John Millers' sculpture Mannequin Love (2002) lying in pieces amid bubble wrap on the floor; Nude (2002/2003), which features Gerhard Richter's Ema (Nude on a Staircase) (1966) lying unceremoniously on its side during the de-installation of the painter's MoMA retrospective; and 2 Heads (2004), which shows Richter's Two Sculptures for a Room by Palermo (1971) seen from the side in a packing crate, minus their pedestals. Lawler outlines for us how the artworks lose their aura in another way, as a kind of violence (rooted in neglect) is visited upon them when not on display. As impassive as her eye may be, it's hard not to imagine that Lawler laments the loss. This thread is most complicated and explicit in Big (2002/2003), a photograph of Maurizio Cattelan's caricature sculpture of Picasso lying decapitated on the floor of an art fair booth; behind it, on the wall, is a Thomas Struth photograph of museum visitors admiring a classical statue, also headless. Lawler's mastery of form comes into play: the decapitated body stretches from the left edge of the frame, as if Lawler's crop had sliced off its head, while the audience viewing her photograph ostensibly becomes a mirror image of the one in the Struth picture. The photograph implicates all of us—Lawler included—in the confluence of events that led to the scene her lens found.

In this view, the austerity of Lawler's vision becomes a kind of defense mechanism, as the work's conceptual and formal rigor offsets a latent emotional content. As Jack Bankowsky asks in a recent essay, aptly playing on two of the artist's titles: Does Louise Lawler make you cry? It is possible to retroactively apply this contrapuntal reading to Lawler's output, bringing forth a richer understanding of her practice. It may have taken two decades and a survey exhibition, but, having caught up to Lawler, we are all now 'Looking Forward' at what is to come.