While a great deal has been written about Sherrie Levine, her exhibitions are not often reviewed. Instead her work is made an example. It is embedded in articles on “allegorical procedure, appropriation, and montage” (Benjamin Buchloh’s subject in an article in Artforum, September 1982). Or, and unfortunately more often, it is used as evidence in articles decrying the “small-scale skepticism” of recent art. Here Levine is presented as a symbol of her generation, resentful of the immediate past and downtrodden by art history, accused by turn of careerist cynicism and self-victimizing melancholy. And in most cases Levine’s work is written of as an idea—that of the presentation of someone else’s pictures as her own. In this view, if her work is finally made, it is only to make good its threat.
Perhaps the reason Levine’s work is not reviewed is because it seems to have no body. She provides no material impregnated by intention or by its own self-conscious materiality; there is no image that is Levine’s for the critic to decipher. But the problem is not that nothing can be said about Levine’s work—much can be, and has been, said about what appears to be so little—but that the work needs language for its even marginal existence, and that it does almost nothing to limit language’s intrusion. It is not only bodiless, but defenseless.
Still, Levine does offer an object and it is greater than the idea it has been reduced to. Levine’s objects implicate the viewer and label his or her viewing a self-conscious and ideological act. In spite of their still interesting and intricate images, I found myself avoiding looking into Levine’s photographs “After Walker Evans”; I was pulling myself up and out of Evans’ images and insisting instead on their frames, mats, and glass—that is, on Levine’s work. The forays I did make into the pictures were, in a sense, embarrassed, camouflaged as the search for evidence of rephotography, for the sense of uniqueness that would protect both Evans and Levine by proving the artist’s hand unavoidable.
Levine’s work exists only in context, only as it places itself in the world and illuminates its position in a series of cultural relationships. As mere copies of Evans’ pictures, her photographs lose meaning, but they compensate for this loss with the meanings that Evans doesn’t allow: the politics of his photographs as images and commodities. More importantly, her work makes evident, through its neediness, its location in the art world; the gallery, the mailer, title cards, press releases, and bibliography are all in a sense part of Levine’s text, her overlay. Paul Valéry wrote that the “prime motive of any work” is “the wish to give rise to discussion.” Levine’s work goes further; it not only instigates discussion, but includes it. Placement, illumination, and discussion, the encircling of the work of art, have traditionally been the functions of independent criticism, but they are the functions Levine assumes.
With the Evans rephotographs this exhibition included a new series of works, commercial color reproductions of Van Gogh portraits mounted on poster board. Levine refers to these as collages, a name that includes her mats and gives her faint marks of alignment the significance and tenuousness of drawing. The collages, their plates literally purloined, work quite differently than the rephotographs, where Levine’s process recreates Evans’ own, even as it transforms his images. The reproductions lie too far from the original paintings to suggest that Levine has stolen Van Gogh’s objects or that she is “passing” with their aura. Yet that is what the plate has already done, it is already a sign for Van Gogh—and it is a doubled one. Despite Expressionism’s claim to the “interior portrait,” to seeing beneath the skin and into the soul of the sitter, it is Van Gogh we insist on seeing in his portraits. His psyche is projected onto and deforms his subjects, a projection and an alienation that the plates magnify. As Levine will do, Van Gogh removes his sitters’ meanings and superimposes his own.
Levine’s Evans images are gallery works; they need the information and audience the gallery provides. It is toward the collector’s home, however, that Levine’s Van Gogh plates seem targeted. Hung amid a collector’s photographs, paintings, and sculpture, her “collages” would be particularly didactic, immediately and noisily out of place. They would question their location and would demand explanation as works of Sherrie Levine. As Buchloh noted, “Only as a commodity can the work fulfill all of its functions.”
—Howard Singerman
