Trailing a reputation for formal and theoretical austerity that’s exacting even by the rigorous standards of her Pictures generation cohort, Sherrie Levine has in fact engaged with a remarkably sensuous array of forms and approaches over the past forty-odd years. She’s been indelibly written into the canon via her audacious deadpan appropriations of historic artworks by photographers such as Walker Evans, Alexandr Rodchenko, and Edward Weston, and painters including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Egon Schiele. But she’s also worked in sculpture—Fountain (Buddha), 1996, for instance, is a gleaming bronze urinal she fashioned after Marcel Duchamp’s that wrestles away her conceptual progenitor’s ur-readymade and directs it, almost eight decades later, into yet another system of circulation. Whatever the medium, Levine’s confrontations with authorship and authenticity—and the manner in which she has further mobilized these ideas to spotlight gender inequities embedded in art-world hierarchies—have influenced subsequent generations in ways that can sometimes feel almost too deeply ingrained to fully discern.
The two intellectual lodestars of Levine’s practice—Walter Benjamin’s argument that artifactual aura is inevitably distorted by reproduction and Roland Barthes’s notion of the moribund author—are similarly baked into contemporary artistic discourse, so often unpacked and repackaged that drilling down into the replications and arrogations that underpin her output can seem at times almost nostalgic. “Wood,” Levine’s tightly focused show at David Zwirner’s Upper East Side location, contained just four works, each of which played out a slightly different version of her central concerns. If the sparing selection confirmed the endurance of the fundamental issues with which she has long engaged, it also called into question the degree to which her habitual gestures can still find traction amid the altered political and ethical terrain of our current moment.
The only work on view not from 2023 was Fitz: 1–12, 1994, a piece comprising a dozen small panels that feature an image of a grouchy dog drawn in the 1920s by animator Dick Huemer for the celebrated Fleischer Studios, originator of Betty Boop. Like Levine’s other recapitulations of early-twentieth-century cartoon imagery—most famously of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and his antagonist Ignatz the Mouse—the Fitz suite consists of superficially identical paintings of the titular character, here in black casein on ten-by-ten-inch squares of cherry wood. Of course, the point is that they’re not precise duplicates at all: Not only does the natural character of each individual surface predictably diverge from its companions in terms of grain and coloration, the renderings themselves are also subtly varied in both line and compositional alignment. (The easiest way to see how these minor deviances present themselves is to swipe through pictures of the panels, one after another, on the Zwirner website, which lends the pup’s grimacing mug an uncanny locomotion reminiscent of a flip-book.)
While Fitz: 1–12 intervenes in an artifact that has a distinct provenance with which Levine’s actions can be understood to be in dialogue, the other three pieces in the show were all unique objects not made by her but rather created (or chosen) by unidentified individuals. Each had quite specific and complex valences: Fox is a piece of polished and decorated burl wood in the form of a Japanese kitsune figurine; Head is a carved stone implement from New Guinea resembling a skull that was used as a ceremonial mortar; and Scholar Figure is an exquisitely complex hunk of wood “crafted” by nature and then collected (by someone, at some point) for philosophical contemplation. All were fascinating to see, both for their own intrinsic material conditions and for what they suggest about Levine’s personal program of attention. And yet because these items were presented as effectively “authorless” ethnographic materials (at least epistemologically, if obviously not ontologically), the artist’s overwriting of even the slender contextual particulars they did possess in favor of brute annexation to her own program felt strangely unpersuasive. Levine has, of course, been doing this sort of thing for years. But as the suppression and distortion of the histories of one sort of maker for the delectation of another—appropriation not as conceptual gambit, but as structurally malign enterprise—are increasingly understood as decisive problematics in contemporary discourse, schemes that instrumentalize vital things in the service of narrowcast art-world concerns start to seem not just a bit wearied, but also vaguely pernicious.
