Mining for gold

The "Positions" series is dedicated to artists' writings. It aims to question artistic and curatorial practices from the singular position of an artist who writes both on his/her own work as well as that of other artists. More than any artist/writer of his generation, Thomas Lawson has the make up of a true journalist. He is an embedded corresondent, a polemical editorialist, sending his dispatches to a radically independent media that happens to be his own (or that he makes his own). While fully participating in the rhetorical consummation of a break with modernism and its avant-garde myths, Lawson nevertheless manages to uphold a real oppositional modus operandi, a determination to take sides, to make critical distinctions. An account of the rise to prominence of the "Picture Generation" and the profound transformation of the downtown New York art scene, this collection of essays prrovides a comprehensive narrative of some of the 1980s most trenchant ideological quarrels to have surfaced from within the art world.