In 1978, art dealer and curator Janelle Reiring invited Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Christopher D’Arcangelo, and Adrian Piper to participate in a group exhibition at Artists Space on 105 Hudson Street in New York. D’Arcangelo removed his name from the exhibition, left his catalogue pages blank, and posted statements critiquing the politics of the art world. Sherman presented staged photographic narratives in which she performed fictional identities inspired by 1950s cinema. Piper combined a photograph of African American men with a satirical audio monologue that questioned viewers’ assumptions. Lawler, meanwhile, exhibited a borrowed racehorse painting under theatrical lighting, drawing attention to the conventions of exhibition display.

The same year, the cinematic and performative context of this exhibition extends into a parallel collaboration between Lawler and Reiring that resulted into a remarkable conceptual artist’s book that transforms Henry G. Wales’s account of Mata Hari’s execution, originally written for the International News Service, into a detailed film script. Wales, a British war correspondent, witnessed the execution of Gertrud Margarete Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, on October 15, 1917, after she had been convicted of espionage. Written in the style of a contemporary news report, his dispatch recounts her final hours (from prison to the execution ground) emphasizing her composure and dignity.

"She did not die as actors and moving picture stars would have us believe that people die when they are shot. She did not throw up her hands nor did she plunge straight forward or straight back. Instead she seemed to collapse. Slowly, inertly, she settled to her knees, her head up always, and without the slightest change of expression on her face."

From its opening scenes to the final sound of the gunshot, Wales's narrative is meticulously translated into cinematic language and completed with camera directions. Lawler’s script oscillates between Wales's eyewitness account and Jeanne Moreau's portrayal of Mata Hari in the 1964 film. Halfway through the book, the screenplay is interrupted by the insertion of a seven of spades playing card and a loose transcription of Wales's original account. As Lawler notes in the colophon, "With only slight alterations, this account serves as the voice-over narration during the driving sequence."

For the cover, Lawler staged what appears to be her only experiment in assuming a fictional persona, disguising herself as Mata Hari. Her interest in imageless cinematic works continued in 1979 with a blind screening of The Misfits (directed by John Huston), during which the projector lamp remained off while the marquee announced: A MOVIE WITHOUT A PICTURE. In this spirit, the Mata Hari artist's book offers a comparable cinematic experience: one that is read rather than watched.

That same year, Lawler published two other “untitled” volumes—one red and the other blue—each illustrated entirely with the backs of playing cards, accompanied by descriptions of the images that would appear on their faces. This work belongs to the playful conceptual logic explored by contemporaries such as Marcel Broodthaers. Lawler's early artist's books are now extremely rare. During the 1970s, she distributed them not only through art bookstores and galleries but also in unlikely venues such as cinemas and hairdressers' salons. This partly accounts for the rarity of her early publications today.