In 1979, Lawler presented "A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture" at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. As the full-length soundtrack of "The Misfits" played, the silver screen remained unremittingly blank. A black card announcing the event stated the (self-explanatory) title of the work, and the venue and date of its screening. The artist has reprised the piece on a handful of occasions, including in 1983 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York (using the 1961 film "The Hustler" and the 1957 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What’s Opera, Doc?") as part of a show organized by Robert Barry at the downtown alternative space Franklin Furnace called “In Other Words: Artists Use of Language” and, in 1987, in the C.W. Post College in a show organized by Bob Nickas called “Perverted in Language.” The piece was also performed as part of West of Rome’s “Women in the City” series curated by Emi Fontana at the Aero Theater in 2008, and in Amsterdam in 2012 at The Movies theater with "Saturday Night Fever" (1977). In 1994, Lawler created "Foreground," and presented it in Tate Gallery in 2009.