Jason Hirata Goes Long on Lawler

“Reception makes the work.” That is the opening line of the document Jason Hirata presented with his Dia Artists on Artists lecture on Louise Lawler a couple of months ago. [Sunday afternoon, May 31.] If I remember correctly, it comes from his email correspondence with Lawler; he’d wanted to make sure before he started that the reason there hadn’t been an Artists on Artists lecture on Lawler’s work before was not because she didn’t want there to be. Lawler’s response was, “Reception makes the work.” If I’m vague on some of the details, it’s because the YouTube video for Hirata’s lecture is four and a half hours long, and it took me several days of disjuncted snatches of time to get through it, and it’ll take longer still to process. Besides the length, the most obvious thing about Hirata’s talk is not the Zoom of it—by now that’s a normalized medium. [Though it does have a slight early pandemic aura, the video is actually produced to Dia spec: full speaker view only, comments…