Liza Lou’s Iconic ‘Trailer’ Reemerges for the First Time in a Decade Taking the form of a 1949 mobile trailer, the work unpacks America's dark obsessions

By Brian Boucher

Halloween at the Brooklyn Museum, dear reader, is a riot. The museum is a polling place, and when I visited, early voters streamed through, poll workers letting out a round of applause every time a first-time voter cast their ballot. School groups abounded, and education department staffers were reportedly giving school tours upstairs in costumes based on works in the institution’s collection. 

Also in the mix, just a few feet from where the voters stood on line in the lobby, is Trailer (1998–2000), a resonant artwork by American artist Liza Lou that plumbs Hollywood images of crime and violence, toxic masculinity and communal femininity, fine and decorative art, and the American obsession with guns and hunting—all packed into one 35-foot-long 1949 Spartan Royal Mansion mobile trailer. It’s on public view for the first time in a decade.

Step up into a little space for one person at a time to survey the interior, and you’re transported in the dimly lit black-and-white world, whose interior, save for the quilted fabric black ceiling, is covered with millions of black and white beads, from the linoleum-tiled floor to the top of the (faux?) wood-paneled walls. The compact space is packed with the owner’s possessions. The curtains are all drawn, lending an air of secrecy or even malice.

Whoever it was loved their guns; a shotgun is propped against the wall by the door, while another hangs above the couch. A lamp is propped on a pile of three books: Proud Guns, Shooter’s Bible, and How to Hunt Deer. (The latter two, at least, show up online as real books.) A copy of Guns magazine (“Be a pistol champ”) sits on a coffee table along with a hunting knife, a pack of Marlboros, and a whisky bottle. A pornographic magazine resting on the floor nearby points to much darker territory.

The piece prompted me to think Lou was ahead of the game in thinking about so-called toxic masculinity, but a quick Google revealed that the term was coined during the men’s movement of the 1980s, and thus likely on the artist’s mind as she conceived the piece.