A Critique Towards Art History:

Looking at artworks by Louise Lawler and Joëlle Tuerlinckx

By Lisa Heinis, PhD Candidate at VUB and Visiting Student Scholar at UC Berkeley

Artworks can be a great way to look at a–political, social or aesthetic–situation from a different viewpoint. While analyzing a work of art, regardless of what medium was used to create it, they can give us distance and perhaps think about, and discuss, larger issues that the artists made visible.

 In my presentation, I will argue that both the work of American artist Louise Lawler, and Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx can do just that. In both artists’ practice we see a recurring subject of the “arranging” of objects, as a way to give meaning to them. Their work not only raises questions about how we “order” our art institutions, such as museums, but they also present us with a critique towards the gender bias of these institutions, and in what way this way of arranging contributes to the exclusion of everyone who our culture considers as being “other.”