Thomas Lawson

Thomas Lawson (born 1951, Glasgow, Scotland) is an artist, writer, editor, and from 1991 to 2022 was the Dean of the School of Art & Design at California Institute of the Arts. He emerged as a central figure in ideological debates at the turn of the 1980s about the viability of painting through critical essays, such as "Last Exit: Painting". He has been described as "an embedded correspondent [and] polemical editorialist" who articulated an oppositional, progressive position for representational painting from within an increasingly reactionary art and media environment. Artforum called his approach to the medium "one of the most cogent and controversial" in the 80s.

Lawson has received awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and Rockefeller Foundation. He work was featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition, "The Pictures Generation" (2009), and "A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation" (1989) at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MoCA). He has also created temporary public works in New York City, Glasgow, and Newcastle upon Tyne.

Lawson's essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals such as Artforum, Art in America, Flash Art and October; an anthology of his writing, Mining for Gold, was published in 2004. He has also edited or co-edited the contemporary art journals REALLIFE Magazine, Afterall and East of Borneo. Lawson currently lives and works in Los Angeles and Edinburgh, Scotland.

Early life and career Lawson grew up in Glasgow and developed an early interest in the language of painting. He was active in the art scene there, creating an art club and organizing an exhibition of Scottish painter Pat Douthwaite. While at CUNY, Lawson began exhibiting art at Artists Space (1977, 1979) and the Drawing Center (1978). He also co-founded REALLIFE Magazine in 1978 with his wife, writer Susan Morgan, and contributed essays to Artforum, Art in America and Flash Art. Surveys of Lawson's work have since been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), the Battersea Arts Centre (London), and Goss-Michael Foundation (Dallas). He is currently represented by David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. In 1991, Lawson was appointed Dean of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), a post he held until 2022.

Work and reception Lawson is arguably better known for his critical writing and tenure as Dean at CalArts than for his painting. However, critics in the 2000s, such as Andrew Berardini, began suggesting that his painting was due for a reassessment for its role in broadening the parameters of appropriated imagery and offering a nuanced, critical alternative to conceptual art and neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s.

His career is best understood in its entirety, with his complementary practices of artmaking, critical writing, magazine editing, curating, and educating collectively addressing key ideological debates of the time. Their work was broadly unified by its critique of modernism's avant-garde myths and embrace of postmodern art-making strategies, media imagery, pop-culture references and simple, sometimes crude, technique and presentation. This approach was bolstered by critical writing from Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Hal Foster, and Lawson, who in Artforum, Flash Art and REALLIFE called for art that deconstructed dominant media and cultural representations Crimp (and the others) denounced contemporary painting's "reactionary expressionism" as fatally compromised; they favored photographic work, like that of Richard Prince or Cindy Sherman. Decontextualizing overused painting techniques and snapshots drawn from tabloid stories, he sought to reconstitute and question their lost meaning and to expose the hollowness and insensitivity of conditioned responses to spectacle and tragedy. and "hard-headed and thoughtful [...] with a punk rock and painterly awareness." others, such as Carrie Rickey, found the ambiguity of the work's intention to be troubling. Reviewers generally placed works such as Metropolis: The Museum (1983) or The Temple of the Kultur Critic (1984), among Lawson's most alluring, but differed on their political efficacy. Ronald Jones wrote that Lawson successfully subverted cultural expressions of authority, "prov[ing] them too slight to thrive outside their incubated logic." and then into public space with Civic Virtue/Civic Rights (1988), a temporary work in City Hall Park in New York. It was the first of several public works that examined traditional public sculpture and its relationship to dominant power structures by translating such representations into other contexts. For the five-year commission, A Portrait of New York (1989), he covered a one-third mile length of scaffolding parapet during renovation of the city's Municipal Building with bright blue and orange, casually rendered imagery drawn from local civic statuary, redressing the short shrift given women and minorities in public sculpture by shuffling their images with those of monumentalized historical figures such as Alexander Hamilton, Nathan Hale and Al Smith. In 1990, he created Memory Lingers Here for the First Tyne International Exhibition in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, a 30-billboard installation that enveloped a derelict soap factory. The work used imagery of St. George and the Dragon taken from a neglected, local war memorial in Old Eldon Square to comment on regional identity, memory, and the loss of place and social cohesion. Some of Lawson's other public art-related projects include billboards in New Haven, Connecticut (1988) and Bellgrove Station, Glasgow (1990),

Return to painting (1995– ) Lawson returned to painting in the second half of the 1990s and has continued to engage the question of the medium's viability as an artist, educator, and writer. In his own work, Lawson has extended his strategy of exploiting the contrast between the expectations of medium (painting) and message to explore concerns from geopolitics to self-representation on social media. These later bodies of work are characterized by a greater use of juxtaposition, fragmentation and humor, and incorporate disparate painterly techniques, pictorial conventions and imagery in a sometimes dizzying mix to "visually disabling."

In his 1995 show, "Viennese Paintings," Lawson explored madness by juxtaposing stark, claustrophobic institutional rooms, disquieting images drawn from building facades, fountains and asylums in Vienna, and references to Freud and early modernism on diptychs rendered at topsy-turvy angles in brilliant colors. His LAXART show, "History/Painting" (2007), probed geopolitical, environmental and economic instability through images of non-Western world maps and views of the globe, political leaders (e.g., Dogs of War, 2006) and victims of beheadings from news and art history, painted with discordant colors and expressive techniques suggesting Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde or George Grosz. Artforum’s Travis Diehl described similar works, such as Theoretical Picture or Voluptuous Panic (both 2012), as crossbreeding and suturing "huge chunks of culture" through jarring juxtapositions of painterly techniques, and "a weirdly savaged classicism" of truncated and silhouetted fragments from myths, statuary and contemporary media. Reviewers described Lawson's 2015 show at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery as uncanny work that defied categorization and encouraged viewers "to shed their biases and re-engage with wild beauty." and a relentless, acerbic critic of the dominant authorities of the era; and October as well as in exhibition catalogues for artists including Sarah Charlesworth, Liz Glynn, Gary Hume, Laura Owens and Steven Prina, among many. Several of his essays, including "Last Exit: Painting" and "The Future is Certain," have been anthologized extensively, and he co-edited the anthology, Modern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pop (1988). Mining for Gold (JRP/Ringier, 2004), a collection of his writing, was listed among frieze 's "Best Books 2005" and the writing noted for its role in critical discourses that have "informed successive generations of younger artists." Lawson also wrote a two-act play based on the sedition trial of the Scottish radical Thomas Muir, titled The Pest of Scotland, or, A Tocsin Sounds in Embro (2001). In 2015, he contributed to Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life, an anthology offering lessons, practical advice, ideological perspectives and assignments on contemporary art to students from artists across the globe. REALLIFE featured written and visual material by and about young artists and served as a clearing house for new ideas and examinations of mass media and art, while chronicling New York's developing postmodern alternative art scene; In his writing and interviews, Lawson has stressed the importance of an art school having a "clear understanding of its own, historically driven account of what is important." His teaching emphasized CalArts’ founding intellectual tradition of contesting conventional ideas, questioning the means and ideology of representation, and teaching no medium in advance of ideas, while still rooting practice in the visual. Thus, despite CalArts’ reputation as a place where painting had to justify itself, art writers note that Lawson mentored a generation of painters there including Ingrid Calame, Laura Owens, and Monique Prieto.

Prior to becoming Dean at CalArts, Lawson did not maintain long-term appointments in academia, nor was he is known for a deep pedagogical practice or research. He was a Visiting Faculty member for a semester at CalArts in both 1990 and 1987, and was a part-time Instructor in New York both at the School of Visual Arts between 1981 and 1990 and the New York Studio Program between 1987 and 1989, and was also twice a Visiting Critic at Rhode Island School of Art and Design in academic years 1988–89 and 1983–84. Visual Art Projects, Glasgow (1999), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1989, 1985 1982); residency awards from the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming (2003) and Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center (1997); and funding for REAL LIFE Magazine from the NEA, Visual Artists Forums and NYSCA Visual Arts (1979–91).