Art Documentation Quotes

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

I have 17 full-time archivists working for me who put away in books all the diversity of artwork I do, from drawing to etching to monotypes to prints to lithographs.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

The Documents Project has actively collected documentation on both island-based Puerto Rican art as well as Nuyorican art in the United States through partnerships and researchers ceded at the University of Puerto Rico's museum in San Juan and Hunter College's Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City, respectively.

I had to leave some traces. In the beginning, I would give complete instructions to the photographer. In the '70s, people would come to photograph your work and you would just end up with this crazy material that had nothing to do with your work; maybe I'd pick up two or three photographs that were the closest to the idea. This is why when you look at the '70s, you see much less documentation and really bad material. The material will become misleading to what the piece was.

Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

When I first had a video camera to document a performance, it was in Sweden and I remember it was really crucial for me.

Graffiti doesn't exist unless someone got a photo, because it's gone immediately.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.