Last month, Hammer Director Annie Philbin, curators Anne Ellegood and Aram Moshayedi, and the Hammer Patrons gathered for a studio visit with L.A. artist Paul McCarthy.

Read more on our blog: http://bit.ly/RB0dJI

Love our Barbara Kruger lobby wall? Get some Barbara Kruger sunglasses at the Hammer Store, and then you can take some über-Kruger selfies!  CONTEST: take a #KrugerSelfie with your new sunglasses, share it on Instagram and tag us, and be entered to win a special gift from the store! Contest ends May 18, when Take It or Leave It closes.

Louise Lawler. Slides by Night: Now That We Have Your Attention What Are We Going to Say?, 1985. Digital slides. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

This projection work was originally on display only at night, visible through the storefront windows of Metro Pictures’ gallery in SoHo to passersby on the street when the gallery was closed. When the three images match up, the “jackpot” is Lawler’s photograph of classical sculptures shot at a plaster-cast museum. Equating the gallery that represents her with both a shop and a casino, Lawler effectively called the art market a commercial gamble, and by aligning her own work with the mechanisms of retail and gambling, prompted viewers to consider art’s position in relation to any other item up for sale.

This work is part of the exhibition Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology. 

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Jenny Holzer, Inflammatory Essays, 1979–8. Posters. Courtesy of the artist.

Jenny Holzer uses language to interrogate the effects of rhetoric, engaging viewers in fundamental questions such as “Who is speaking?” “Where does this text come from?” and “What does it mean?” Yet her texts—whether directives, confessions, or observations—elide authorial intentionality and unlock a sort of societal subconscious, from which bits of ideology, desire, fear, humor, and hatred pour forth. Holzer has authored dozens of textual series that—while distinct in personality, tone, and subject—often resurface in various material forms over time. Originally presented anonymously on the streets of New York City, the mass-produced short texts that make up Inflammatory Essays cover a variety of subjects that have been ongoing concerns throughout Holzer’s career, including power, social control, abuse, consumption, and sex. Declarative and forceful in tone, they embody her distinctively crafted voice, one that is omniscient, detached, and yet enraged, shifting between multiple identities. 

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Tom Burr. Propped Perfume, 2008. Plywood, paint, steel hinges, steel thumbtacks, vintage magazine ads, feather boa, steel cable. Collection of Barbara and Howard Morse, New York.

For this work, Tom Burr began with a simple geometric shape, a nod to minimalism’s basic forms, and then embellished it with a number of appropriated images. His formal inquiry into the medium of sculpture is entwined with character development and questions about site-specificity. His sculptures pose, vamp, and slouch. They wear feather boas and recline with magazines, suggesting both stage sets and the functional spaces those sets approximate. Burr’s humor is not a cynical response to the solemnity or “neutrality” of earlier modes of artistic production. Rather, his efforts are deployed as barometers for cultural signification and desire: to measure the effects of certain formal choices and to provide a ready platform for our own projections and mores.

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John Miller, Untitled, 1986. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

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Allan McCollum, Collection of One Hundred and Twenty Drawings, 1989/93. Graphite pencil on museum board. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel Gallery, New York.

Allan McCollum began his Drawings project in 1989 by creating custom-designed stencils from a set of forty curves, which form the basic vocabulary of all the drawings. Using the stencils, he has produced hundreds of different graphite drawings by hand, ensuring that no two drawings are the same. Continually straddling the margins of singular/multiple, beautiful/banal, and decipherable/ indecipherable, McCollum’s series questions the place of art in a world of industrial mass production while taking a critical position in relation to both. 

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Dara Birnbaum, PM Magazine, 1982. Single-channel video, color, sound; bromide enlargement with speed-rail suspension system, painted wall. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Restricted gift of Joseph and Jory Shapiro, Mr. and Mrs. E. A. Bergman, and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer (1984.7)

Using video, sound, appropriated footage from television, and an array of editing and image-processing techniques, Birnbaum has been at the forefront of investigations into the content and conventions of television and mass media since the late 1970s. In PM Magazine, she utilizes imagery from the introduction to the nightly prime-time television program of the same name. Adding a uniquely-composed “acid rock” version of the Doors’ well-known song “L.A. Woman,” the work jarringly explores the ideologies expressed through mass media.

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David Wojnarowicz, The Death of American Spirituality, 1987. Mixed media on plywood. Collection of John Carlin and Renée Dossick.

David Wojnarowicz’s life experiences—his early history of abuse, hustling, and drugs; his euphoric queerness; and his and his friends’ fatal struggles with AIDS—furnish the conditions of his artistic production. Identifying with the communities from the decrepit piers and underground East Village sites that he frequented, Wojnarowicz found in the personal and the social weapons to attack the dominant paradigms of a nation in the throes of the culture wars. Like much of his oeuvre, both of the works included here merge imagery from pop culture, history, and dreams to assemble distinctive narratives and historical allegories. The resulting surreal compositions point to and demand accountability from cultural conventions and egregious political actors—like American notions of “progress” and the participants in the Iran-Contra affair—in a chronicle of the wreckage of contemporary American society.

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Louise Lawler, Bulbs, 2005–6. Laminated Fujiflex on museum box. Collection of Leonard and Nancy Amoroso.

Louise Lawler is widely known for photographing various sites related to the distribution of art, such as art galleries, auction houses, private collections, and museums. Works by other artists have provided the subject matter for a number of her pieces, including her large-scale color photograph Bulbs. The strings of lightbulbs laid out on packing blankets are a sculpture by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a friend and colleague of Lawler who died from AIDS-related complications in 1996 and whose work is also featured in Take It or Leave It. Lawler’s unusual perspective—roughly at eye level with the lifeless sculpture—creates a composition that recalls a seascape with an endless horizon.

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Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989. Single-channel video (Betacam SP NTSC), color, sound. 30:00 min. Courtesy of the artist.

In her performance and video works, Andrea Fraser often takes on personae that function both as character studies and as critical investigations of the sites for art, revealing the layers of context and construction (of class, gender, politics, etc.) that ground their very existence. In Museum Highlights, Fraser borrows the form and conventions of a museum tour, playing the role of Jane Castleton, a fictional docent. The tour is composed entirely of quotations from a variety of sources, including brochures from museum archives and art reviews as well as writings by authors as diverse as Immanuel Kant and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Rather than take visitors through an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Castleton points out elements of the institution’s infrastructure and typically overlooked spaces, drawing attention to questions about pedagogy, aesthetic criteria, and systems of judgment at work within museums.

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