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Review We need to talk about Sherrie Levine.
Art History, After Sherrie Levine by Howard Singerman
University of California Press, 2012
Judith Rodenbeck
To dispense with the straightforward biographical information: Sherrie Levine was born in 1947 and grew up outside Saint Louis. A baby
boomer from the American suburban 1950s with its nativist patriotism and ugly racial politicsshe recalls the films of that dark bourgeois
ironist Douglas Sirk as a serious distraction in those years
1
she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1965 and was there (BA, 1969;
MFA, 1973) during the heyday of anti-Vietnam War actions on campus, reading Herbert Marcuse and Franz Fanon (and no doubt Jorge Luis
Borges), steeping herself in French and German New Wave cinema, and encountering project-oriented artistic practice through visiting
California conceptualist Stephen Kaltenbach. Originally trained as a painter and printmaker, her early work was in collage, and some of these
were included by curator-critic Douglas Crimp in a now-famous 1977 exhibition, Pictures. Around 1980, she began rephotographing
photographs by canonical Modernist photographers and in 1981 she had her first (and only) one-person show at Metro Pictures, in which she
exhibited twentytwo images from her photographic series, Untitled, After Walker Evans, presenting beautifully printed photographs of
reproductions of photographs taken by Evans for the FSA. The show was a scandal and success in the New York art scene; Levines
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rephotographic projects were rapidly assimilated by critics as key emblems for the Pictures Generation, a loose-knit group of artists working
both materially and theoretically with reprographic techniques and best identified with Crimps 1977 show and his two essays of the same name,
and with his colleagues at the journal October. As Levine would put it in a 1986 interview, At the time, my support systems were critical rather
than financial. October was the earliest of these systems.
2
Ensuing decades have seen her practice materially broaden to take up the technique of
casting, which she has done in base and precious metals and in glass, as well as painting, printing, and papermaking, and the contemporary genre
of installation. If the techniques remain essentially reprographic, the consistent through-line is the exploration of the economies established by
the retinal (as Marcel Duchamp put it) and its non-retinal supplements. In November of 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art
mounted Mayhem: Sherrie Levine, a major career retrospective presenting over three decades of work.
Sherrie Levine, Avant Garde and Kitsch, 2002. Cast crystal: 7 ! 2 ! 1 " inches and cast bronze: 7 # ! 2 # ! 2 inches. Edition of 12. Sherrie
Levine. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.
Levines first solo show in New York took place in the same year as Pictures. The exhibitionTwo Shoes for Two Dollars presented (and
sold) seventy-five pairs of boys dress shoes. The strategy was Duchampian updated by sales receipts. Levine had found the shoes in a Bay Area
thrift store in the early seventies and had carried them with her to New York.
In 1977, she recalls, the director of the 3 Mercer Street Store had been looking for artists who wanted to show things that werent the kind of
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thing you find in a gallery, but which made reference to the store. [W]e did a show that took place on two weekends. Two shoes sold for
two dollars, and they sold out immediately.
3
The obvious critical route in was via the concept of the fetish, both in the Freudian and in the
Marxian sense, but the loaded content and seriality of these miniature bluchers also suggested the expansion of these two reference points via a
third trope, that of fractured or only obliquely apprehended narrative. Seeing all those shoes spread out on a table, one inevitably wished to
animate them, to invent stories in which they became the synecdochic characters, Crimp would write in his essay for Pictures.
4
The critics
discussion marked out an epistemological shift that he had not yet named but which, by the time the catalog essay was revised for the pages of
October, he had identified as Postmodernism. In this second Pictures essay, Crimp elaborated on the implications of the peculiar
melancholia of which Levines shoes were symptomatic: If it had been characteristic of the formal descriptions of modernist art that they were
topographical, that they mapped the surfaces of artworks in order to determine their structures, then it has now become necessary to think of
description as a stratigraphic activity, one addressed to processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that constitute the strategies
of contemporary work.
5
Postcard announcement for Sherrie Levines Two Shoes for Two Dollars, 3 Mercer Street Gallery, New York, April 1623, 1977. Sherrie
Levine. Courtesy Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan.
Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged, Levine writes, in a 1981 artists statement. We know that a picture is but a space in which
a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.
We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original.
6
Indeed, the standard interpretation of Levines work has subsumed it
under the banner of the copy in its property form, appropriation. As such, the work stands as a near-zero-degree statement of picturing or, more
generally, re-presentation; and thus, like Duchamps readymade, it presents a dead end that is also an intellectual wormhole. In Howard
Singermans new book, Art History, After Sherrie Levine, Levine is not so much a photographer, collagist, fabricator, or constructor, not so much
even an artist in the traditional sense, and perhaps not even an appropriationist, as she is a new kind of art historian, drilling a critical tunnel
through aesthetic Modernism while restaging key contemporary art historical discussions (I think in particular of Rosalind Krauss on Duchamp
and Constantin Brancusi)
7
via complex, allusive material and occasionally linguistic exegeses.
Art History, After Sherrie Levine is both monograph and not. It is the first in-depth survey of Levine, the jacket blurb tells us, yet the after of
the title indicates a temporal and spatial displacementthe book post-dates and stands to the side of the workwhile also following in the
venerable tradition of the artistic copy, the propaedeutic exercise. His title, of course, takes the form devised by Levine herself (generally,
Untitled, after [name of artist]); it also, though probably inadvertently, repeats the title (After Sherrie Levine) of an artwork by Michael
Mandiberg.
8
Inasmuch as this formulation repeats Levines own, too, the implication is that Singermans book presents, la Levine, a
reproduction of reproduction(s) of Levines work. This takes us somewhere, for if this book is in some absolute way not about Sherrie Levine, it
is, I guess also absolutely, about me.
9
Singerman received an MFA in 1978 from the Claremont Graduate School. He worked as an editor at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, from 1985 to 1988 before heading off to doctoral study in the Visual Culture program at the
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University of Rochester, where he earned his PhD in 1996. His groundbreaking 1999 book, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American
University, a study of the professionalization of art and art education in the United States, has become a key text in contemporary discussions of
alternative pedagogical models. These slim facts may seem incidental; yet this quick sketch traces out a trajectory through the studio and the
museum collection to the place of pedagogy (Singerman is a university professor and an historian of the teaching of studio art) understood as
grounded in discursive objects.
Comprising six dense chapters simply yet deceptively titled by medium or strategyPictures, Photographs, Paintings, Endgame, Sculptures, and
CountingSingermans book takes the work of Sherrie Levine as the complex occasion for rethinking the disciplinary concerns and procedural
moves of art history. Or rather, the book proposes Levines oeuvre as something more closely resembling a Badiouean event (though Singerman
does not deploy this concept), that is, as a paradigmatic constellation that becomes legible through the reflective interpretive act of the subject
whom, in some senses, the event has itself called into being. And Singerman has kept the faith since first seeing (and reviewing) Levines
photographs after Walker Evans in a small Los Angeles gallery in 1983; he has been working on this book, he tells us, for nearly two decades.
Taken as meditations on or unfoldings of the implications of Levines oeuvre, the books chapters are organized in a chronology that loosely
follows a sequential exhibition history. Singermans method involves the careful, even surgical rereading of the contemporaneous discourse,
pitting one essay against another, or one school (primarily, critical theory of the October school) against another (whether the smaller artist-run
journals like Real Life and Wedge, glossies such as Flash Art and Art in America, or, less frequently, the studied midcult criticism of the
mainstream art press), or one moment against another, opening out the complex reception histories not just of Levines work and her (self-)
positioning but also of those works laid alongside or ensnared by her project of citation. At the same time, Levines appropriations, which draw
on a range of sources from Gustave Flaubert to Blinky Palermo, afford considerations of touchstone moments in the history of Modernist
abstraction. These moves, the published critical assessments as well as the oeuvre itself, Singerman argues, have still not been fully digested.
Levines work, he writes, poses questions that are still better answered by interpretation, by criticism rather than art history.
10
At issue is the
way in which, post-Pictures, Postmodernism was critically constructed in the breach, most prominently by work done in and around the journal
October, but also in numerous responsive, reactive texts (articles, artists statements, art works) appearing elsewhere in the art world. In a
particularly masterful chapterwhich is structured by analogies with chess Singerman borrows Pierre Bourdieus field of cultural production
to map out that playing field, including what artist Barbara Kruger called its financial choreographies
11
(though he is perhaps a bit too soft on
this aspect), including the corner of it that has developed into the (paraconsistent) academic field of contemporary art history.
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Sherrie Levine, untitled (Presidential Collage 4), 1979. Collage on paper, 24 ! 18 inches. Sherrie Levine. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery,
New York.
Singermans book follows in a line of obsessional art history texts. Art history has its share of these, of course, and my own pantheon would
have to include Alois Riegls Stilfragen, which attempted to trace a continuous history of ornamental motifs autonomous from external referents;
Aby Warburgs Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, the written version of a lecture on the snake dance (the lecture
was delivered in order to demonstrate Warburgs sanity and win him release from a mental hospital); and George Kublers 1962 The Shape of
Time, in which Kubler argues for an independent history of forms in which their elements recur across cultures and over time in response to
different problems.
12
All three of these texts, as it happens, are concerned with style; more pointedly, they are concerned with the distributive
signifying capacities of form over time; and more pointedly still, though emerging from the discipline of art history proper, each of these texts
has been foundational for the more historically inclined branch of visual cultural studies. Art History, After Sherrie Levine, given its binomial
subject of art history and Sherrie Levine, follows in their wake in its exploration of time and form, here the time and form(s) of Modernism
as radically condensed in Levines (perversely) singular appropriative oeuvre. The result is an elliptical text, shaped by recursive loops and
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backtracks, by re-readings and self-reflection.
But the obsessional texts that Singermans book brings to mind more directly form a recent genre within art history, one coeval with Levines
project and with the three decades of Singermans fidelity to it. The most recent of these, T. J. Clarks 2006 The Sight of Death: An Experiment
in Art Writing, presents the artful record of one years daily contemplation of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin, an account whose journal format
the continual reconsiderations, the returns-withquestions, the blind spotsis juxtaposed with Clarks typical painstaking material and
historical parsing of visual detail and contemporaneous critical literature while threaded through with the authors reflection on his own, and his
mothers, mortality.
13
More proximate to Singermans subject matter, Molly Nesbits 2000 brilliant and underappreciated Their Common Sense,
in which the author addresses Duchamp by his first name, virtually reinhabits that artists boyhood schoolroom by way of sorting through the
enmeshing of the commodity form, visual abstraction, mechanical drawing, and skilled labor.
14
Before any of these, of coursenot after Sherrie Levine but beforecomes Roland Barthess lapidary 1980 meditation on photography, La
Chambre Claire, published the following year in English as Camera Lucida, in which the author famously attempted to theorize a subjects
interest in a given photograph via the twined (though not twinned) terms studium and punctum, the former the pedagogical, affirmative tracery of
a kind of general, enthusiastic [cultural] commitment found by the viewer in the photograph and the latter, strikingly, a psychic wound
inflicted on the viewer by some fleeting, deceptively inconsequential detail.
15
These two terms seem wholly apt to Singermans project in Art
History, After Sherrie Levine. For this hugely ambitious text, with its nearly mnemonic detailing of the discourse invoked by the name Sherrie
Levine, itself has an underlying melancholia: this is implicit in the resistance to historicizing. If Singermans masterful retooling of art history in
favor of deep, precisionist yet associative reading models long-term commitment to a difficult and evolving oeuvre, in so doing it cannot help but
also demonstrate the temporal passage of the very critical constellations it maps out. Aptly, the words in Levines 1981 artists statement, quoted
above, are appropriated, of course, from the conclusion of Roland Barthess The Death of the Authorthe essay in which he famously
concludes, we know that to restore writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the
Author.
16
And surely the signatory of that artists statement has met her ideal reader.
Judith Rodenbeck is the author of Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings. She teaches art history at Sarah
Lawrence College.
Footnotes
1. Of his own films Sirk once said, There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably
removed from you. You cant reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections. Sirk on Sirk: Interviews with Jon Halliday (London:
Secker & Warburg, 1971), 130."
2. Sherrie Levine as quoted in Janet Malcolm, A Girl of the Zeitgeist, The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings (New York: Knopf, 1992),
296, as quoted in Howard Singerman, Art History, After Sherrie Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 162."
3. Levine, in conversation with Constance Lewallen, Journal of Contemporary Art (undated), www.jca-online.com/slevine. html. The shoes,
originally purchased in bulk from a thrift shop in Berkeley, were later reproduced in an edition for Parkett 32 (1992), manufactured by an
Italian fabricator."
4. Douglas Crimp, Pictures: An Exhibition of the Work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, Philip Smith
(New York: Artists Space, 1977), 16, as quote in Singerman, 37. This version of Crimps essay is reprinted in X-TRA 8.1 (Fall 2005)."
5. Douglas Crimp, Pictures, October 8 (Spring 1979), 87, as quoted in Singerman, 47."
6. Artists statement by Levine (1981), as quoted in Singerman, 28."
7. See Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981)."
8. From the site, AfterSherrieLevine. com: In 2001 Michael Mandiberg scanned these same photographs, and created
AfterWalkerEvans.com and AfterSherrieLevine.com to facilitate their dissemination as a comment on how we come to know information
in this burgeoning digital age."
9. Singerman, 12."
10. Ibid., 21."
11. Barbara Kruger quoted in Anders Stephanson, Barbara Kruger, Flash Art 136 (October 1987), 55, as quoted in Singerman, 173."
12. See Alos Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. Evelyn Kain (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1992); Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997); and George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1962)."
13. T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale, 2006)."
14. Molly Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000)."
15. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26."
16. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, trans. Richard Howard, Aspen 5 & 6 (1967), http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/
threeEssays.html#barthes."
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