The purpose of this thesis is to examine the artistic production of photo artist Louise Lawler and the evolution of critical response to her work between the 1970s and 1990s. Of main concern are the manner in which early scholarship and exhibition reviews effectively situated Lawler's work within the discourse of institutional critique, a field of critical scholarship and artistic production that examines institutions of art such as museums and galleries. The objective of this thesis is to reexamine Lawler from a feminist art historical perspective using French feminist theory to investigate how her work can arguably be considered to be a feminist intervention into the patriarchal structures of museums, galleries, and connoisseurship. Lawler's dominant practice is photographic in nature, yet she does not consider herself a photographer. Like many artists of her generation Lawler has capitalized upon the indexical nature of the photographic medium, using it as a tool to create images that "document" art objects in situ. She has made her art in all the places in which artworks circulate or are displayed, be it the curated spaces of museums, an auction house or a private house, well-lit gallery show room walls or crowded and dark storage rooms. Throughout her forty-year career Lawler has worked to disrupt the patriarchy of the art world by drawing attention to philosophies of display and exhibition. She has shown us what is not on display within art systems by consistently showing us what is on display. She has refused to comply with systems or organization, crafting textual interventions that disrupt the linguistics of wall labels and titles of artworks. She has fragmented and dislocated the authorship of artists to their works, and she has appropriated curatorial practices to claim both the physical spaces of display and gain control of what objects are deemed valuable enough to be shown there. Lawler's work has consistently interrupted normative practices of art institutions, effectively disrupting the patriarchy inherent within the systems and structures to define art.

This is a study of the early work of the American artist Louise Lawler and her collaborators, including Christopher D’Arcangelo, Sherrie Levine, and Jenny Holzer. It centers on the New York art world between 1978 and 1983—a moment hailed as the end of avant-gardism and the birth of postmodernism—and examines the legacy and transformation of conceptual art and institutional critique by a new generation of artists during this period. Lawler’s practice is analyzed in relation to her Pictures Generation peers, so named for their affiliation with the non-profit space Artists Space (which mounted the influential exhibition "Pictures," curated by Douglas Crimp, in 1977) and the commercial gallery Metro Pictures, founded in 1980. The work of Pictures artists is united by its appropriation of images and texts that were culled from everyday life and modified through photographic strategies such as cropping, captioning, and juxtaposition. These artists, many of them women, developed a critique of representation—in Gayatri Spivak’s words, of "standing-for" and "speaking-for"—located at the crossroads of feminism and postmodernism. Though Lawler’s practice was understood as institutional critique at the moment of its emergence, she has since been historicized as a Pictures artist. This study understands her as a double agent who deliberately operates between and across spheres usually kept separate. In so doing, she refigures the practice of critique as a subtle form of maneuvering that I, following the artist, term finesse. The key contribution of Lawler’s work is a new understanding of power, informed by the politics of identity and difference, which accounts for the crucial importance of subjectivity and positioning in the act of critique.