In Buffalo, in art school, Cindy Sherman sat down in a photo booth and gave the camera a look. She came up under Lucille Ball’s face so successfully that her own face subsided. Most people her age were swimming in another direction, preferring the pond of their own nonconformity. Hers was a different, though still contrary position: The negative of your negative is my Lucy. This idea had led her first toward elaborately unpredictable appearances at parties. Her boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, suggested she combine them with her work. Was he proposing an imitation of life? The two of them moved to New York together in the summer of 1977, the summer of the blackout and the string of murders by a man calling himself the Son of Sam.
That same year David Salle, who had come to New York from CalArts in 1975, took a job teaching drawing at the Hartford School of Art. He brought various friends along to help, among them Sherrie Levine. She herself had arrived in New York from Madison, via Berkeley, having had her own experience of work and play. She had made a series of short Super-8 movies. In one of them six cowgirl candles burned down to a puddle, weeping, she noted later, like a country-western song, but in silence. Bruce Nauman, when he saw this, felt the result was boring. She took this as reason enough to destroy the whole series.
Permanent silence seemed not to be fatal. Levine taught a course in Hartford on the work of Douglas Sirk. She and Salle plunged into the aesthetics of melodrama. They fixed on Imitation of Life. Sirk’s film had appeared in 1959, when they were children, at the end of the decade that had seen and loved six seasons of I Love Lucy. The movie showed the danger that lay in wait behind every success and star. Salle took Sirk’s warning back to his studio and wrote a set of statements designed to set out the issues for his own work: “The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.” There was New York.
They had all come to a city fabled for its art. They settled downtown in the new center of activity, SoHo, and took stock. Around them the entire economy had fallen into the grip of a deep and slowly grinding recession. There were no galleries coming to call, no sense that a person wanting to perform great art experiments could expect to make a living from them, much less obtain general recognition. Louise Lawler, who had come to the city earlier from Cornell, could have told them this. These conditions would require inventing the space for their art. They had come to a place without walls.
Spaces were being invented—spaces for living, spaces for eating, spaces for nightlife. Inside and outside were indistinguishable. If their day jobs were necessary and various, bottom-feeding along the commercial art hierarchies or teaching nursery school or cooking in restaurants or sitting fairly dutifully at a reception desk, their free time merged. Collective life led to collective art life. The place-names were generic but memorable: Artists Space, The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, 112 Greene Street, Printed Matter, the Performing Garage. A Louise Lawler place-mat picture once had to be rescued from Food (the early-’70s restaurant-collective now best known as the brainchild of Gordon Matta-Clark) when the police temporarily padlocked it. With the accumulation of friendship, collaboration, and exchange, none of their work was completely individual. Call it instead independent.
What to put where? Sherrie Levine would put seventy-five pairs of small shoes, sized for a child but styled for a man, on sale at the Three Mercer Street Store. That she had found them at a California job-lot sale hardly mattered. Artists could work through any economy, the thrift economy too. The money economy proved more difficult. Levine made a series of silhouettes taken from the penny, the quarter, and the new half-dollar coins, painting the presidents so that they faced each other flatly fluorescent on small sheets of graph paper. Happily parodying D.H. Lawrence, she called them Sons and Lovers. Douglas Crimp included them in the group show he curated at Artists Space in the fall of 1977. He called it “Pictures.” “Pictures” also announced a twenty-six-second film loop by Jack Goldstein called The Jump, in which he had altered some stock footage so that one saw only a human silhouette filled with a light effect repeatedly run, jump, and dive, piking stylishly off the end of an unseen board into perfect darkness that, like a psychedelic reflex, swallowed it whole. Crimp highlighted it in his catalogue essay. In hindsight The Jump looks like a pure description of a professional situation.
Two years later Artforum sent out a questionnaire asking artists to address the change in the general professional situation, or as it diplomatically put it, the change in the audience. Assuming, Vito Acconci said, that the gallery could still be considered the space of operations, one had two options: either to use the gallery like language, as a sign, for all intents and purposes turning it into a book, or to use the gallery as the space where art itself occurred while someone else watched. In the ’70s he had taken the second option, which meant that the gallery then became something else, “a community meeting-place, a place where a community could be formed, where a community could be called to order, called to a particular purpose.” The community was understood to be an art community. “The art public was, in effect, a substitute for ‘community,’ ” he noted, “but, at least, this was a way to work in a public rather than in front of a public.” In 1976 in the pages of Arts Magazine, Salle had already paid Acconci the supreme compliment of calling him the anthropologist of his own universe.
The terrible scale of the world outside this universe, outside the galleries too, the infinity that drove its wedge into every little certainty, struck Salle early. He tried to locate the artist: “Never underestimate either the seriousness of ambivalence or the malaise of the vastness, or the attempt at vastness, of scholarship which is not really invoked to explain anything, but only used to keep going. You take ten people, get each one to tell a joke (usually not funny at all). Someone comes along, tells the joke badly—you laugh your head off. This is why Vito Acconci is an artist.” This was a way to begin, a way to become a figure in the vastness. Take steps, games, awkward jokes, black humor. Turn the received idea into the devil’s plaything. Play the infinity itself backward. These were thoughtful, not adolescent, moves. The scholar of this vastness, however, was someone else, whom Salle had neither met nor read. It is difficult to address art’s inherited relationship to the expanse of the world without citing and turning to this scholar. In English his magnum opus is known as The Voices of Silence.
The Voices of Silence was written by André Malraux during a fifteen-year period that included World War II. Though considered a classic by the ’70s, it was circulating mostly as an echo in the work of later authors. George Kubler’s Shape of Time, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Brian O’Doherty’s series of Artforum articles that would become Inside the White Cube all showed the effects of Malraux’s epic, as did Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, written soon after The Voices of Silence appeared. Barthes had taken Malraux’s law of metamorphosis and from it developed his concept of myth, that peculiar, bourgeois type of speech made by leeching a sign and corrupting its meaning. He had taken his examples from the Americanized mass culture then pouring into France, epitomized in myths like Greta Garbo’s face. The problem under consideration here, how to find forms that can address the vastness, has a history that is and is not an art history, that is and is not American.
Malraux too was concerned with the contemporary predicament; however, he had introduced his law of metamorphosis differently—by recounting the plight of the masterpiece, uprooted from its human time and place and left drained, bleak, alone, in the museum. He wrote of a double displacement being made by the newest act of preservation, what he termed the Museum Without Walls, being organized by default in a mind overstimulated by the expanding archive of the photographic reproduction. He saw a great threat. It came from the formalisms and professionalism of a modern art culture keeping art from its chief and ancient business, the confrontation with the totality of experience and fate. True arts and cultures, Malraux went on to say, put man into a relation with duration and sometimes with eternity, “and make of him something other than the most-favored denizen of a universe founded on absurdity.” “No culture has ever delivered man from death,” he wrote a few pages later, “but the great cultures have sometimes managed to transform his outlook on it, and almost always to justify its existence. . . . What the tragic art of modern times is trying to do away with is the gag of lies with which civilization stifles the voice of destiny.” Art was meant to bear this kind of knowledge, “a limbo of negations,” Malraux concluded. This limbo of negations was the darkness, the danger, that still greeted the young artist.
At some point while revising his final chapters in 1951, Malraux watched a new storm of metamorphosis come. The ghost of Hegel had been haunting him all along, helping him chart the rhythms of metamorphosis in the vastness and see the fluctuations moving necessarily into negativity in order to make any progress, and offstage the specter kept striking its low chords. Remember Hegel? “The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness,” Hegel had intoned. “Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.” How not to hear Hegel in the back of Malraux’s mind, lecturing on the philosophy of history?
Hegel had given Malraux the direction to go looking for the future. The quantum change he was witnessing, Malraux thought, as Hegel had, might be linked to the birth of an American culture, which he described as the home of an extremely efficient publicity descended in fact from one of painting’s traditions and “making for its canned goods a Museum Without Walls of foodstuffs.” However, owing to the cold war, Malraux could not yet predict much. Would the changes in the twentieth century spring from the final triumph of Russian communism or even from the resurrection of Europe? Malraux did not commit himself. But now we see that he was announcing the new priorities Barthes would analyze and that would a decade later in Fluxus and Pop produce the massive breakdown of the hierarchies that had kept commercial art and its forms separate, at least theoretically, from the noble aesthetic pursuits. We have been schooled in the literature chronicling this collapse.1 Let us say only that by the ’70s the irresolution of history itself was apparent in New York. The term “postmodern” was not needed to see this. Generically speaking, no walls. Institutionally speaking, few walls. Any and all media were available. Stories were shattering and rising. The youth cultures multiplying and mutating added momentum and pulse.2 Young artists coming to the city found an unusually open theater of operations that found its physical equivalent every time the lights went down at the movies. They would find their rhetoric of form there.
This choice came heavy with implications. The movies had inherited the old social role of the theater. Like the theater they were central to the mediation of long-term social processes that had for more than five hundred years been pulling populations into cities. Their overwhelming importance was a given. By the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche could lean without comment on the maskers’ trope as he castigated his age, reserving the full weight of his scorn for those who fell under the spell of the banal pressure to take on a given role until it became instinct. Those intent on success, Nietzsche remarked, had had to become skilled players, had cut their coat according to the available cloth and had adapted to every shift of circumstance and wind to such a degree that they had become the coat themselves, if it had not already become them. In the twentieth century things changed slightly. One now became the coat, the same instinctual coat, with the help of a mirror.
It would not take long for the new advertising industry to claim the mirror image and produce new mechanisms for social and commercial identification. Every day Hegel’s “automatic self-mirroring activity of consciousness” found practical application. All kinds of thinkers and artists could readily see a reflection’s central importance. In some cases, as with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a mirror alone set the development of human subjectivity into motion. When in the mid-’50s the sociologist Edgar Morin wrote of the cinema’s great attraction, he tracked the parallel movement of the star’s life in his or her roles and the self-consciousness of the ordinary person: “The ‘I’ is first of all an other, a double, that reveals and pinpoints the shadows, reflections, the mirrors. The double wakens when the body sleeps, it is freed and becomes ‘spirit’ or ghost when the body no longer wakes up. It survives the mortal. The gods will separate themselves from the common dead to become the great immortals. The double lies at the origin of the gods.”3 Modern life, he noted, had forced the double to atrophy and paste itself flat against the body’s skin; it has become our “role,” he said; all duality had been submerged, forced inside. The star had the power to revive the archaic force of the double and let it live elsewhere. Life being more than a hall of coats, or gloves. This was the life being set up for imitation in 1977. It was hardly superficial or conceptually thin. It was a life to uncover and discover. For the time being, walls were secondary.
AFTER ARRIVING IN NEW YORK, CINDY SHERMAN AND ROBERT Longo went one day to David Salle’s loft and there saw, spread around, photos spirited out of the archive of the pulp-magazine publisher where Salle had a day job. There lay cheap pictures of soft-porn starlets posing and exposing. Sherman saw them enacting picture stories, little novellas, and she took the idea back to her own character-based work. It was no longer possible for her to imagine personifying a star, nor did she experiment with her characters on the street. The street was already too full of people in their camouflage, New York being a city where an everyday theater of the self was viewed as both normal and necessary, a Nietzschean protection. Sherman began to make imitation film stills of herself in poses, the first six pictures showing the same blond starlet at different points. “The role-playing was intended to make people become aware of how stupid roles are, a lot of roles,” she said later, “but since it’s not all that serious, perhaps that’s more the moral to it, not to take anything too seriously.” She let her starlet go forth as a baby doll, face ready for the world but otherwise undressed, flopped on a bed, paralyzed by a thought that seemed to be crossing her mind very slowly. The light overhead shone evenly. Her hand mirror was dramatically thrown aside. Was another image coming to mind as a better alternative?
Later Sherman took her shots and her characters one by one. She arrived at them by poring over books about the movie idols of her childhood, unfocusing her memory and trying from that blurred point to embody the increasingly distant reflection. She thought of her face as a blank canvas. Her characters kept a degree of this blankness, of a reflection that seemed incompletely bleached, its roots somehow still showing a darkness that was not a color.
She dressed herself in clothes from thrift shops. This let her pictures cut time two ways: ’50s and ’60s dresses could look old and new because of the contemporary aesthetic of thrift. Thrift culture was being embraced in the ’70s as an antidote, the refusal of commercial fashion and its dictate to imitate; those who wore thrift were living simply, closer to the ground, using the old coat as a badge of alienation. “My ‘stills’ were about the fakeness of role-playing,” Sherman said, “as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy.” She might as well have said, “Under my cloak, the king is a joke,” the line Cervantes used to begin the tale of Don Quixote. These were jokes to lean on and to drink to. Someone somewhere was always laughing her head off. Sherrie Levine’s shoes made similar points.
Neither small shoes nor film stills offered the recipe for freedom, but they did show a woman opening a space for herself in the narrower spectrum of her choice. Might it be possible to pry a person from her shell? Sherman kept her work at one remove from stardom, aspiring to a life rather than imitating it exactly, working loosely with the lesser lights.4 The first results were shown at Artists Space in the fall of 1978 in a group show curated by Janelle Reiring. There she shared a space with Louise Lawler, Christopher D’Arcangelo, and Adrian Piper.
That year Lawler made her own one-time character experiment disguised as Mata Hari for a book cover. For Artists Space, however, she abandoned the figure completely and instead used two lights to break apart the givens of figure, picture, and theater. The scene was extreme. There was a spotlight glaring inside and a pink searchlight shining outside. On the empty wall hung a borrowed painting of a racehorse, for whom all bets were off a long time ago. There was no race. The bright lights took over everything. “You are standing in your own shoes,” Lawler says now. You have walked into a situation that has rearranged your own world and made you well aware of it. In other words, you as an image are gone. The room was flooded, but there was neither an image nor the reflection of an image. Light moved the ground without becoming the ground. On other occasions Lawler let matters go completely dark. In Santa Monica in 1979, she arranged for a midnight screening in a local movie theater. On the marquee it was advertised as A Movie Without a Picture, and it was just that, The Misfits shown with the lights in the projector out, voices rising and falling away, but always voices without silence.
The work in the place with few walls had pushed these artists to concentrate on the definition of the individual figure, its silhouette, its limits, its surface and interior business. This had led them to see the vastness in the figure itself, a vastness for which there would be no single pictorial equivalent, no single sign, only approximations that in their work became even more approximate as the different layers of a figure were explored. The light effects native to mass culture became the artist’s scalpel; the same light effects gave these artists their material: Spotlights, floodlights, fluorescent pigments, overhead, slide, and rear projectors were all put to work. These light effects did not coalesce into a code of shapes and forms or settle into someone’s definition of a medium. They overstepped their old function as modifiers. The picture of the figure was dissolving into a multiplicity, a limbo of quasi negativity from which it would not be rescued, only bathed. It did not seem to be attached to a new meaning.
Light effects were being revealed as effects. The figure was being revealed as another effect, a social character. For their figures, these artists often relied on images they had found, reusing them, refilling them partly, or lifting them lightly into transfers. Some called this allegory. Better to say that the image too was entering into the general culture of thrift. Somewhat paradoxically, this time of thrift led to the picture of an impossibly younger, untraditional, unknowable self. Salle, Sherman, Lawler, and Levine were still making their work for themselves and their small public. This was the position: Myself is ourselves, maybe.
In February 1978, Sherrie Levine reworked her presidents’ heads. Each was filled with a photograph, as if each had had a change of character. Lincoln was made into a postcard announcement, and JFK became an eight-foot-tall slide projection. The image was thrown there by light, hovered there in light, transient as a ray, utterly fragile. It was a mother-and-child photograph that had been lifted from a fashion magazine and framed as a president that hovered there, sociable but antisocial, nothing really coming together, and certainly not as a family. When Crimp published a revised version of the “Pictures” essay in October in 1979, the JFK projection appeared as an illustration, and Cindy Sherman’s film-still project was added. As was an uncredited reference to Barthes’s Mythologies.
There would be an effort in the essays of Crimp and Rosalind Krauss to ground this work on the figure by invoking critical categories derived from the act of making one picture imitate another form or picture—the photographic, the index, the copy, the allegory, the myth—in order to bring the work in line with the new critique of representation that was arriving from Europe.5 In the ’70s both art criticism and art history were experiencing a change that would affect the way they posed the most basic questions of aesthetics. The crisis and expansion that ensued produced yet another set of ramifications intellectually, but for the most part the new New York art criticism was not concerned with the imitation of life, but only with imitation. One can see why. The imitation of life in the work of Sherman, Salle, Levine, and Lawler was difficult, and not because it was theory driven. It had become an imitation overtaken by light, the identifiable light of the movies and the stranger reflected light observable in people on the street. A social light was leaking and flooding out of these pictures. They seemed to request nonpictorial discussion.
The title of Salle’s installation at The Kitchen in November 1979, The Structure Is in Itself not Reassuring, put the matter plainly. It drew from the installations he had been doing since his solo show at Artists Space in 1976, taking shape in 1979 as a group of ink drawings on back-lit rice-paper screens in front of which hung bare lightbulbs. He had revised the statements he’d written over the past two years and published them in Cover in May. The next year he and James Welling published a conversation in which Salle put the problem in the form of an unresolvable contradiction: “An ‘aesthetically motivated’ . . . image is so directly of the world that it bypasses art altogether. . . . The image is held in a nexus of won’ts and can’ts, like something always held away from you, successively distanced, and that in version of intention makes sense if you see the aesthetic as something which is really about loss and longing rather than completion.” So much for words. Salle pulled the images off the screens and set them into dulled arrangements on canvas to make a series of paintings where mostly undressed women were smoking. I Can Even Personify, one claimed, as if the figure were a person. She was painted in rough red outline, thick like a lipstick; around her, like figments of someone else’s imagination, gray charcoal figures floated in and out, like ash. Light here had been stubbed out. The group was shown in the new Gagosian/Nosei-Weber gallery space at the same time as the installation at The Kitchen.
The paintings and those that followed were much criticized for being misogynist, as if they were people, perhaps because they were speaking the formal language by which people recognized other people. Levine finally felt it important to come to Salle’s defense in the summer 1981 Flash Art. Without saying so, she gave everyone the piece of advice (“Maybe I should see things as they really are and not as I want them to be”) that had gone unheeded in Imitation of Life: These figures, she explained, had been given the role of exposing the problem of the other, its untruth, and the untruth inherent in the cultural confusion of women with truth itself. “In this culture which publicly denies our most primary desire and dread,” she concluded, “the most important function of art is to mediate between our private and public selves.” The self, she was intimating, was not an image. Salle had seen the other in the dullness. Was it Morin’s archaic double? As for Levine herself, by the time she wrote this, she had found her own way through the labyrinths of light.
In 1980 Levine had cut Andreas Feininger reproductions out of books and mounted them, untouched, as her own collages. Then she took photographs of the photographs reproduced in books, starting with Edward Weston’s portraits of his son Neil, shown as a nude torso. She wrote a statement explaining herself:
Instead of taking photographs of trees or nudes, I take photographs of photographs. I choose pictures that manifest the desire that nature and culture provide us with a sense of order and meaning. I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of aloofness. I hope that in my photographs of photographs an uneasy peace will be made between my attraction to the ideals these pictures exemplify and my desire to have no ideals or fetters whatsoever. It is my aspiration that my photographs, which contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both worlds.
The Weston estate took exception to this, seeing instead a breach of copyright. Levine was obliged to withdraw the work, but she did not abandon the approach. The next year she made a series from the work Walker Evans did for his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Levine made another statement in 1980 in which she recounted, without citation, Alberto Moravia’s first sight of the primal scene, telling how when “she” witnessed “her” parents in this way, “she” divided herself into two, an imitation self who entered the world and a first self who maintained a great distance, watching. She found a way to take this split and doubled (or tripled) self into the material of the photograph: She took her photographs from books and made the finished print from what is called an internegative, lifting the image into a thinner, lighter, less intensely toned second generation, less a copy than a shift. In this backstage step of transfers through a negative state, the figure emerges like a double leaving another double behind. To put the matter more concretely, her Annie Mae Gudger print has used Evans and Agee’s effort to reset the poverty of the sharecropper, as Agee said, “to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense.” She revived their “independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” But Levine employed the most impersonal, least theatrical techniques of thrift to bring the divinity back. The trace of her own labor was confined to the zone of internegativity, as if there she could exist, a person only of shift, not swallowed by the darkness but not visible either, something like a person without walls.
Cindy Sherman began a new series of pictures in 1980 using the cheap staging technique of rear projection. In 1979 she had gone West to visit her family, newly moved to Phoenix, and while with them had traveled, from time to time making more stills on their vacation locations. She had come with her costumes. The possibilities multiplied. Her father helped sometimes with the shutter release. He helped with “the hitchhiker.” She came home with a wider repertoire. In the studio she looked into ways to extend it further. She was setting scenarios of trap and escape. She pulled into closer shots that still showed her moving in a frosty light, looking over her shoulder warily as she crossed the highway with her bike. The figure was never removed from the push of a life. Through the swell and fade of the rear projection, through the brilliance of a flashbulb forestalling sundown, a character was caught between the movies and the street outdoors. It was a limbo of another kind.
In these different ways the figure of the self being pre- sented by this group of young artists was telescoping into zones that a pictorial figure could never contain. This self was not orbiting around the institutions art was supposed to treat as polestars. It was not drowning in the totalizations of the spectacle, but neither would it declare itself master of the social world. It was inconclusive. But this art was already setting up another idea of the stage on which art was to play, just as it was setting up a scale for itself that went beyond the usual professional questions. They were issues with which to begin a life’s work, which is how Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine and David Salle and Louise Lawler used them.
In 1981 Levine and Lawler collaborated on a work that let them inhabit an older art collaboration begun in 1962 by Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, then each in their twenties and thinking about the large questions themselves. Frampton and Andre had spent evenings typing out a dialogue of challenges to one another, Frampton at one point declaring, “A photograph is no substitute for anything.” Levine and Lawler, on reading this in the book published in 1981 by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, took the sentence into their own, not always serious pattern of internegativity and emerged with an ongoing project of their own, A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything. It spoke worlds for worlds. It also spoke up for the side of life that held anything.
This anything had come up for discussion in 1962. Its terms will be familiar. At one point, Frampton and Andre had pondered the problem of the scale of their universe. They tried to speak about how the distances had changed, and the measurements too. “Unless we have an inch in common, an untaxed inch, I might add,” Andre declared, “our years will contradict, and our miles will wander northward without ever reaching Boston.” But no one would be stepping outside the markets of their day, Frampton wrote at the end. Andre countered, adding, “I would say it is important not to become a weapon in the hands of those we despise.”
Levine and Lawler took this up, using the warmth in the young men’s coats to take up the problem of wall-lessness, of making more space for their work. Their collaboration set up extremely temporary, self-organized exhibition spaces. The only trace of the collaboration would come, gallery style, with an invitation card. Outside New York, the project might appear in a small gallery or a student’s studio. In New York itself, the shows were held just for an evening in the private lofts of friends. For the one in May 1981 Lawler brought seven photograms of long-playing records, one of them the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” The next month there was an evening in Lawler’s loft, where Levine showed her Eliot Porter series. And so it went, as needed, more private than public. In 1982 they did a set of pages using the title for Phil Mariani and Brian Wallis’s new magazine Wedge. A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything. The project marked the end of their wall-lessness, and their innocence.
For as it did so, the spaces of the art market had regrouped, and a new economy for art had emerged. Galleries now were coming to call. Mary Boone had opened, Larry Gagosian would come, in 1980 Helene Winer had left Artists Space to found Metro Pictures with Janelle Reiring. By 1981 wall-lessness was hardly the only option. The modern-art museum would present itself as everyone’s final destination and only point of reference. But was the museum necessarily the frame for art’s future? Where did the art go?
This was the situation that prompted Cindy Sherman to speak of the fakery in role playing. Louise Lawler would organize A Movie Will Be Shown Without a Picture at the Bleecker Street Cinema. She chose to show The Hustler in the dark, along with the cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? On the poster for the event, she quoted Jack Palance’s character from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt saying, “Every time I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook.” It had become a time of checkbooks.
David Salle began using an overhead projector to center his images on the canvas as he painted them, painting them into the light by immersing himself in it. In 1983 he took the picture from behind, letting the name of King Kong come up like a misunderstood rear projection over the backs of two motherly nudes walking up a beach as if they had literally walked out of the living room. The theater of the monster falling like a light over mother pushed the imitation of life over the edge. Salle began to think in the physical terms of theater, beginning here by affixing an end table to the painting, like a stage. That year he would begin to paint to the time of the dance of Karole Armitage.
Sherrie Levine grew more sanguine as she went forward. “When I started doing this work,” she wrote a few years later, “I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they’re both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work’s about for me—that space in the middle where there’s no picture, rather an emptiness, an oblivion.” At the same time, she also turned outward: “I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and the future, between my history and yours.” My self is our self more broadly now, but the interaction being imagined remains personal, full of the trace internegativity of the old days, as if art might still be something that passed between friends. But, as she said this, she was looking backward.
Molly Nesbit is associate professor of art history at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum.
NOTES
1. See, for example, the following texts and their arguments, marked as much by Hegel as by Marx: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Swerve, 1994), first French edition 1967; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), first French edition 1974; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi, with an introduction by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), first French edition 1979.
2. On the role played by mass media forms in the development of modern art, see especially Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modernism and Modernity. The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. Benjamin Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut, and David Solkin (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983): 215–64 (in abbreviated form in Crow’s collected essays, Modern Art in the Common Culture [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996]). The discussion of the relevance of the high/low hierarchy continued to be played out in academic and museum circles during the ’80s. Its historical importance for modern art in the years before 1968 remains undisputed, and after 1968 it continued to have its usefulness in the development of a political aesthetics. But on the street, these questions were moot, and by the time of the “High and Low” exhibition at MoMA in 1990 it was clear that they could only sustain academic life.
3. Edgar Morin, Les Stars (3d ed.; Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 63, translation mine.
4. Eventually she would frame her shots by propping a real mirror near the camera so that she could check the effect of her pose.
5. For a good characterization of the landscape facing the art critic, see Anders Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens” (1987), in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 300. Owens: “[In the mid- to late 70s] there was a new interest in and proliferation of art writing, which deliberately did not set itself the task of coming up to the level of ‘seriousness’ set by Greenberg and Fried. What then came to be seen as the postmodern was that proliferation of discourses on the outside. These were not activities that were trying to theorize postmodernism or the question of postmodernism, but to function as postmodernism. Roughly at the same time, some of us began to articulate this within art practice, as one way of detaching oneself from the art that was being pushed by the galleries, the art that was being written about in the art journals. So there was a strong sense that this articulation removed one from the dominant centers of the art world and art market. Whether it was good old modernist withdrawal is another matter. . . . Initially what was informing the debate anyway was Frankfurt School stuff, and Walter Benjamin. The discourse in the art world was identified with the photographic.” The work on this identification was being led by Rosalind Krauss. See her interview with Paul Taylor, Art & Text 8 (Summer 1982): 31–37, and her essays from the period, collected in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); most relevant is the title essay, which appeared first in October 18 (Fall 1981): 47–66. Equally important to the formation of a criticism around this work: Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88; Crimp, “The Photographic Conditions of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101; Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 and 13 (Spring and Summer 1980); and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum, September 1982, 45–56.
In Buffalo, in art school, Cindy Sherman sat down in a photo booth and gave the camera a look. She came up under Lucille Ball’s face so successfully that her own face subsided. Most people her age were swimming in another direction, preferring the pond of their own nonconformity. Hers was a different, though still contrary position: The negative of your negative is my Lucy. This idea had led her first toward elaborately unpredictable appearances at parties. Her boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, suggested she combine them with her work. Was he proposing an imitation of life? The two of them moved to New York together in the summer of 1977, the summer of the blackout and the string of murders by a man calling himself the Son of Sam.
That same year David Salle, who had come to New York from CalArts in 1975, took a job teaching drawing at the Hartford School of Art. He brought various friends along to help, among them Sherrie Levine. She herself had arrived in New York from Madison, via Berkeley, having had her own experience of work and play. She had made a series of short Super-8 movies. In one of them six cowgirl candles burned down to a puddle, weeping, she noted later, like a country-western song, but in silence. Bruce Nauman, when he saw this, felt the result was boring. She took this as reason enough to destroy the whole series.
Permanent silence seemed not to be fatal. Levine taught a course in Hartford on the work of Douglas Sirk. She and Salle plunged into the aesthetics of melodrama. They fixed on Imitation of Life. Sirk’s film had appeared in 1959, when they were children, at the end of the decade that had seen and loved six seasons of I Love Lucy. The movie showed the danger that lay in wait behind every success and star. Salle took Sirk’s warning back to his studio and wrote a set of statements designed to set out the issues for his own work: “The pictures present an improvised view of life as normal. Life is shown as we think
we see it but in fact never do. The pictures imitate life to find a way out.” There was New York.
They had all come to a city fabled for its art. They settled downtown in the new center of activity, SoHo, and took stock. Around them the entire economy had fallen into the grip of a deep and slowly grinding recession. There were no galleries coming to call, no sense that a person wanting to perform great art experiments could expect to make a living from them, much less obtain general recognition. Louise Lawler, who had come to the city earlier from Cornell, could have told them this. These conditions would require inventing the space for their art. They had come to a place without walls.
Spaces were being invented—spaces for living, spaces for eating, spaces for nightlife. Inside and outside were indistinguishable. If their day jobs were necessary and various, bottom-feeding along the commercial art hierarchies or teaching nursery school or cooking in restaurants or sitting fairly dutifully at a reception desk, their free time merged. Collective life led to collective art life. The place-names were generic but memorable: Artists Space, The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, 112 Greene Street, Printed Matter, the Performing Garage. A Louise Lawler place-mat picture once had to be rescued from Food (the early-’70s restaurant-collective now best known as the brainchild of Gordon Matta-Clark) when the police temporarily padlocked it. With the accumulation of friendship, collaboration, and exchange, none of their work was completely individual. Call it instead independent.
What to put where? Sherrie Levine would put seventy-five pairs of small shoes, sized for a child but styled for a man, on sale at the Three Mercer Street Store. That she had found them at a California job-lot sale hardly mattered. Artists could work through any economy, the thrift economy too. The money economy proved more difficult. Levine made a series of silhouettes taken from the penny, the quarter, and the new half-dollar coins, painting the presidents so that they faced each other flatly fluorescent on small sheets of graph paper. Happily parodying D.H. Lawrence, she called them Sons and Lovers. Douglas Crimp included them in the group show he curated at Artists Space in the fall of 1977. He called it “Pictures.” “Pictures” also announced a twenty-six-second film loop by Jack Goldstein called The Jump, in which he had altered some stock footage so that one saw only a human silhouette filled with a light effect repeatedly run, jump, and dive, piking stylishly off the end of an unseen board into perfect darkness that, like a psychedelic reflex, swallowed it whole. Crimp highlighted it in his catalogue essay. In hindsight The Jump looks like a pure description of a professional situation.
Two years later Artforum sent out a questionnaire asking artists to address the change in the general professional situation, or as it diplomatically put it, the change in the audience. Assuming, Vito Acconci said, that the gallery could still be considered the space of operations, one had two options: either to use the gallery like language, as a sign, for all intents and purposes turning it into a book, or to use the gallery as the space where art itself occurred while someone else watched. In the ’70s he had taken the second option, which meant that the gallery then became something else, “a community meeting-place, a place where a community could be formed, where a community could be called to order, called to a particular purpose.” The community was understood to be an art community. “The art public was, in effect, a substitute for ‘community,’ ” he noted, “but, at least, this was a way to work in a public rather than in front of a public.” In 1976 in the pages of Arts Magazine, Salle had already paid Acconci the supreme compliment of calling him the anthropologist of his own universe.
The terrible scale of the world outside this universe, outside the galleries too, the infinity that drove its wedge into every little certainty, struck Salle early. He tried to locate the artist: “Never underestimate either the seriousness of ambivalence or the malaise of the vastness, or the attempt at vastness, of scholarship which is not really invoked to explain anything, but only used to keep going. You take ten people, get each one to tell a joke (usually not funny at all). Someone comes along, tells the joke badly—you laugh your head off. This is why Vito Acconci is an artist.” This was a way to begin, a way to become a figure in the vastness. Take steps, games, awkward jokes, black humor. Turn the received idea into the devil’s plaything. Play the infinity itself backward. These were thoughtful, not adolescent, moves. The scholar of this vastness, however, was someone else, whom Salle had neither met nor read. It is difficult to address art’s inherited relationship to the expanse of the world without citing and turning to this scholar. In English his magnum opus is known as The Voices of Silence.
The Voices of Silence was written by André Malraux during a fifteen-year period that included World War II. Though considered a classic by the ’70s, it was circulating mostly as an echo in the work of later authors. George Kubler’s Shape of Time, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, and Brian O’Doherty’s series of Artforum articles that would become Inside the White Cube all showed the effects of Malraux’s epic, as did Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, written soon after The Voices of Silence appeared. Barthes had taken Malraux’s law of metamorphosis and from it developed his concept of myth, that peculiar, bourgeois type of speech made by leeching a sign and corrupting its meaning. He had taken his examples from the Americanized mass culture then pouring into France, epitomized in myths like Greta Garbo’s face. The problem under consideration here, how to find forms that can address the vastness, has a history that is and is not an art history, that is and is not American.
Malraux too was concerned with the contemporary predicament; however, he had introduced his law of metamorphosis differently—by recounting the plight of the masterpiece, uprooted from its human time and place and left drained, bleak, alone, in the museum. He wrote of a double displacement being made by the newest act of preservation, what he termed the Museum Without Walls, being organized by default in a mind overstimulated by the expanding archive of the photographic reproduction. He saw a great threat. It came from the formalisms and professionalism of a modern art culture keeping art from its chief and ancient business, the confrontation with the totality of experience and fate. True arts and cultures, Malraux went on to say, put man into a relation with duration and sometimes with eternity, “and make of him something other than the most-favored denizen of a universe founded on absurdity.” “No culture has ever delivered man from death,” he wrote a few pages later, “but the great cultures have sometimes managed to transform his outlook on it, and almost always to justify its existence. . . . What the tragic art of modern times is trying to do away with is the gag of lies with which civilization stifles the voice of destiny.” Art was meant to bear this kind of knowledge, “a limbo of negations,” Malraux concluded. This limbo of negations was the darkness, the danger, that still greeted the young artist.
At some point while revising his final chapters in 1951, Malraux watched a new storm of metamorphosis come. The ghost of Hegel had been haunting him all along, helping him chart the rhythms of metamorphosis in the vastness and see the fluctuations moving necessarily into negativity in order to make any progress, and offstage the specter kept striking its low chords. Remember Hegel? “The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness,” Hegel had intoned. “Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.” How not to hear Hegel in the back of Malraux’s mind, lecturing on the philosophy of history?
Hegel had given Malraux the direction to go looking for the future. The quantum change he was witnessing, Malraux thought, as Hegel had, might be linked to the birth of an American culture, which he described as the home of an extremely efficient publicity descended in fact from one of painting’s traditions and “making for its canned goods a Museum Without Walls of foodstuffs.” However, owing to the cold war, Malraux could not yet predict much. Would the changes in the twentieth century spring from the final triumph of Russian communism or even from the resurrection of Europe? Malraux did not commit himself. But now we see that he was announcing the new priorities Barthes would analyze and that would a decade later in Fluxus and Pop produce the massive breakdown of the hierarchies that had kept commercial art and its forms separate, at least theoretically, from the noble aesthetic pursuits. We have been schooled in the literature chronicling this collapse.1 Let us say only that by the ’70s the irresolution of history itself was apparent in New York. The term “postmodern” was not needed to see this. Generically speaking, no walls. Institutionally speaking, few walls. Any and all media were available. Stories were shattering and rising. The youth cultures multiplying and mutating added momentum and pulse.2 Young artists coming to the city found an unusually open theater of operations that found its physical equivalent every time the lights went down at the movies. They would find their rhetoric of form there.
This choice came heavy with implications. The movies had inherited the old social role of the theater. Like the theater they were central to the mediation of long-term social processes that had for more than five hundred years been pulling populations into cities. Their overwhelming importance was a given. By the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche could lean without comment on the maskers’ trope as he castigated his age, reserving the full weight of his scorn for those who fell under the spell of the banal pressure to take on a given role until it became instinct. Those intent on success, Nietzsche remarked, had had to become skilled players, had cut their coat according to the available cloth and had adapted to every shift of circumstance and wind to such a degree that they had become the coat themselves, if it had not already become them. In the twentieth century things changed slightly. One now became the coat, the same instinctual coat, with the help of a mirror.
It would not take long for the new advertising industry to claim the mirror image and produce new mechanisms for social and commercial identification. Every day Hegel’s “automatic self-mirroring activity of consciousness” found practical application. All kinds of thinkers and artists could readily see a reflection’s central importance. In some cases, as with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a mirror alone set the development of human subjectivity into motion. When in the mid-’50s the sociologist Edgar Morin wrote of the cinema’s great attraction, he tracked the parallel movement of the star’s life in his or her roles and the self-consciousness of the ordinary person: “The ‘I’ is first of all an other, a double, that reveals and pinpoints the shadows, reflections, the mirrors. The double wakens when the body sleeps, it is freed and becomes ‘spirit’ or ghost when the body no longer wakes up. It survives the mortal. The gods will separate themselves from the common dead to become the great immortals. The double lies at the origin of the gods.”3 Modern life, he noted, had forced the double to atrophy and paste itself flat against the body’s skin; it has become our “role,” he said; all duality had been submerged, forced inside. The star had the power to revive the archaic force of the double and let it live elsewhere. Life being more than a hall of coats, or gloves. This was the life being set up for imitation in 1977. It was hardly superficial or conceptually thin. It was a life to uncover and discover. For the time being, walls were secondary.
AFTER ARRIVING IN NEW YORK, CINDY SHERMAN AND ROBERT Longo went one day to David Salle’s loft and there saw, spread around, photos spirited out of the archive of the pulp-magazine publisher where Salle had a day job. There lay cheap pictures of soft-porn starlets posing and exposing. Sherman saw them enacting picture stories, little novellas, and she took the idea back to her own character-based work. It was no longer possible for her to imagine personifying a star, nor did she experiment with her characters on the street. The street was already too full of people in their camouflage, New York being a city where an everyday theater of the self was viewed as both normal and necessary, a Nietzschean protection. Sherman began to make imitation film stills of herself in poses, the first six pictures showing the same blond starlet at different points. “The role-playing was intended to make people become aware of how stupid roles are, a lot of roles,” she said later, “but since it’s not all that serious, perhaps that’s more the moral to it, not to take anything too seriously.” She let her starlet go forth as a baby doll, face ready for the world but otherwise undressed, flopped on a bed, paralyzed by a thought that seemed to be crossing her mind very slowly. The light overhead shone evenly. Her hand mirror was dramatically thrown aside. Was another image coming to mind as a better alternative?
Later Sherman took her shots and her characters one by one. She arrived at them by poring over books about the movie idols of her childhood, unfocusing her memory and trying from that blurred point to embody the increasingly distant reflection. She thought of her face as a blank canvas. Her characters kept a degree of this blankness, of a reflection that seemed incompletely bleached, its roots somehow still showing a darkness that was not a color.
She dressed herself in clothes from thrift shops. This let her pictures cut time two ways: ’50s and ’60s dresses could look old and new because of the contemporary aesthetic of thrift. Thrift culture was being embraced in the ’70s as an antidote, the refusal of commercial fashion and its dictate to imitate; those who wore thrift were living simply, closer to the ground, using the old coat as a badge of alienation. “My ‘stills’ were about the fakeness of role-playing,” Sherman said, “as well as contempt for the domineering ‘male’ audience who would mistakenly read the images as sexy.” She might as well have said, “Under my cloak, the king is a joke,” the line Cervantes used to begin the tale of Don Quixote. These were jokes to lean on and to drink to. Someone somewhere was always laughing her head off. Sherrie Levine’s shoes made similar points.
Neither small shoes nor film stills offered the recipe for freedom, but they did show a woman opening a space for herself in the narrower spectrum of her choice. Might it be possible to pry a person from her shell? Sherman kept her work at one remove from stardom, aspiring to a life rather than imitating it exactly, working loosely with the lesser lights.4 The first results were shown at Artists Space in the fall of 1978 in a group show curated by Janelle Reiring. There she shared a space with Louise Lawler, Christopher D’Arcangelo, and Adrian Piper.
That year Lawler made her own one-time character experiment disguised as Mata Hari for a book cover. For Artists Space, however, she abandoned the figure completely and instead used two lights to break apart the givens of figure, picture, and theater. The scene was extreme. There was a spotlight glaring inside and a pink searchlight shining outside. On the empty wall hung a borrowed painting of a racehorse, for whom all bets were off a long time ago. There was no race. The bright lights took over everything. “You are standing in your own shoes,” Lawler says now. You have walked into a situation that has rearranged your own world and made you well aware of it. In other words, you as an image are gone. The room was flooded, but there was neither an image nor the reflection of an image. Light moved the ground without becoming the ground. On other occasions Lawler let matters go completely dark. In Santa Monica in 1979, she arranged for a midnight screening in a local movie theater. On the marquee it was advertised as A Movie Without a Picture, and it was just that, The Misfits shown with the lights in the projector out, voices rising and falling away, but always voices without silence.
The work in the place with few walls had pushed these artists to concentrate on the definition of the individual figure, its silhouette, its limits, its surface and interior business. This had led them to see the vastness in the figure itself, a vastness for which there would be no single pictorial equivalent, no single sign, only approximations that in their work became even more approximate as the different layers of a figure were explored. The light effects native to mass culture became the artist’s scalpel; the same light effects gave these artists their material: Spotlights, floodlights, fluorescent pigments, overhead, slide, and rear projectors were all put to work. These light effects did not coalesce into a code of shapes and forms or settle into someone’s definition of a medium. They overstepped their old function as modifiers. The picture of the figure was dissolving into a multiplicity, a limbo of quasi negativity from which it would not be rescued, only bathed. It did not seem to be attached to a new meaning.
Light effects were being revealed as effects. The figure was being revealed as another effect, a social character. For their figures, these artists often relied on images they had found, reusing them, refilling them partly, or lifting them lightly into transfers. Some called this allegory. Better to say that the image too was entering into the general culture of thrift. Somewhat paradoxically, this time of thrift led to the picture of an impossibly younger, untraditional, unknowable self. Salle, Sherman, Lawler, and Levine were still making their work for themselves and their small public. This was the position: Myself is ourselves, maybe.
In February 1978, Sherrie Levine reworked her presidents’ heads. Each was filled with a photograph, as if each had had a change of character. Lincoln was made into a postcard announcement, and JFK became an eight-foot-tall slide projection. The image was thrown there by light, hovered there in light, transient as a ray, utterly fragile. It was a mother-and-child photograph that had been lifted from a fashion magazine and framed as a president that hovered there, sociable but antisocial, nothing really coming together, and certainly not as a family. When Crimp published a revised version of the “Pictures” essay in October in 1979, the JFK projection appeared as an illustration, and Cindy Sherman’s film-still project was added. As was an uncredited reference to Barthes’s Mythologies.
There would be an effort in the essays of Crimp and Rosalind Krauss to ground this work on the figure by invoking critical categories derived from the act of making one picture imitate another form or picture—the photographic, the index, the copy, the allegory, the myth—in order to bring the work in line with the new critique of representation that was arriving from Europe.5 In the ’70s both art criticism and art history were experiencing a change that would affect the way they posed the most basic questions of aesthetics. The crisis and expansion that ensued produced yet another set of ramifications intellectually, but for the most part the new New York art criticism was not concerned with the imitation of life, but only with imitation. One can see why. The imitation of life in the work of Sherman, Salle, Levine, and Lawler was difficult, and not because it was theory driven. It had become an imitation overtaken by light, the identifiable light of the movies and the stranger reflected light observable in people on the street. A social light was leaking and flooding out of these pictures. They seemed to request nonpictorial discussion.
The title of Salle’s installation at The Kitchen in November 1979, The Structure Is in Itself not Reassuring, put the matter plainly. It drew from the installations he had been doing since his solo show at Artists Space in 1976, taking shape in 1979 as a group of ink drawings on back-lit rice-paper screens in front of which hung bare lightbulbs. He had revised the statements he’d written over the past two years and published them in Cover in May. The next year he and James Welling published a conversation in which Salle put the problem in the form of an unresolvable contradiction: “An ‘aesthetically motivated’ . . . image is so directly of the world that it bypasses art altogether. . . . The image is held in a nexus of won’ts and can’ts, like something always held away from you, successively distanced, and that in version of intention makes sense if you see the aesthetic as something which is really about loss and longing rather than completion.” So much for words. Salle pulled the images off the screens and set them into dulled arrangements on canvas to make a series of paintings where mostly undressed women were smoking. I Can Even Personify, one claimed, as if the figure were a person. She was painted in rough red outline, thick like a lipstick; around her, like figments of someone else’s imagination, gray charcoal figures floated in and out, like ash. Light here had been stubbed out. The group was shown in the new Gagosian/Nosei-Weber gallery space at the same time as the installation at The Kitchen.
The paintings and those that followed were much criticized for being misogynist, as if they were people, perhaps because they were speaking the formal language by which people recognized other people. Levine finally felt it important to come to Salle’s defense in the summer 1981 Flash Art. Without saying so, she gave everyone the piece of advice (“Maybe I should see things as they really are and not as I want them to be”) that had gone unheeded in Imitation of Life: These figures, she explained, had been given the role of exposing the problem of the other, its untruth, and the untruth inherent in the cultural confusion of women with truth itself. “In this culture which publicly denies our most primary desire and dread,” she concluded, “the most important function of art is to mediate between our private and public selves.” The self, she was intimating, was not an image. Salle had seen the other in the dullness. Was it Morin’s archaic double? As for Levine herself, by the time she wrote this, she had found her own way through the labyrinths of light.
In 1980 Levine had cut Andreas Feininger reproductions out of books and mounted them, untouched, as her own collages. Then she took photographs of the photographs reproduced in books, starting with Edward Weston’s portraits of his son Neil, shown as a nude torso. She wrote a statement explaining herself:
Instead of taking photographs of trees or nudes, I take photographs of photographs. I choose pictures that manifest the desire that nature and culture provide us with a sense of order and meaning. I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of aloofness. I hope that in my photographs of photographs an uneasy peace will be made between my attraction to the ideals these pictures exemplify and my desire to have no ideals or fetters whatsoever. It is my aspiration that my photographs, which contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both worlds.
The Weston estate took exception to this, seeing instead a breach of copyright. Levine was obliged to withdraw the work, but she did not abandon the approach. The next year she made a series from the work Walker Evans did for his book with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Levine made another statement in 1980 in which she recounted, without citation, Alberto Moravia’s first sight of the primal scene, telling how when “she” witnessed “her” parents in this way, “she” divided herself into two, an imitation self who entered the world and a first self who maintained a great distance, watching. She found a way to take this split and doubled (or tripled) self into the material of the photograph: She took her photographs from books and made the finished print from what is called an internegative, lifting the image into a thinner, lighter, less intensely toned second generation, less a copy than a shift. In this backstage step of transfers through a negative state, the figure emerges like a double leaving another double behind. To put the matter more concretely, her Annie Mae Gudger print has used Evans and Agee’s effort to reset the poverty of the sharecropper, as Agee said, “to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording, communication, analysis, and defense.” She revived their “independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” But Levine employed the most impersonal, least theatrical techniques of thrift to bring the divinity back. The trace of her own labor was confined to the zone of internegativity, as if there she could exist, a person only of shift, not swallowed by the darkness but not visible either, something like a person without walls.
Cindy Sherman began a new series of pictures in 1980 using the cheap staging technique of rear projection. In 1979 she had gone West to visit her family, newly moved to Phoenix, and while with them had traveled, from time to time making more stills on their vacation locations. She had come with her costumes. The possibilities multiplied. Her father helped sometimes with the shutter release. He helped with “the hitchhiker.” She came home with a wider repertoire. In the studio she looked into ways to extend it further. She was setting scenarios of trap and escape. She pulled into closer shots that still showed her moving in a frosty light, looking over her shoulder warily as she crossed the highway with her bike. The figure was never removed from the push of a life. Through the swell and fade of the rear projection, through the brilliance of a flashbulb forestalling sundown, a character was caught between the movies and the street outdoors. It was a limbo of another kind.
In these different ways the figure of the self being pre- sented by this group of young artists was telescoping into zones that a pictorial figure could never contain. This self was not orbiting around the institutions art was supposed to treat as polestars. It was not drowning in the totalizations of the spectacle, but neither would it declare itself master of the social world. It was inconclusive. But this art was already setting up another idea of the stage on which art was to play, just as it was setting up a scale for itself that went beyond the usual professional questions. They were issues with which to begin a life’s work, which is how Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine and David Salle and Louise Lawler used them.
In 1981 Levine and Lawler collaborated on a work that let them inhabit an older art collaboration begun in 1962 by Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, then each in their twenties and thinking about the large questions themselves. Frampton and Andre had spent evenings typing out a dialogue of challenges to one another, Frampton at one point declaring, “A photograph is no substitute for anything.” Levine and Lawler, on reading this in the book published in 1981 by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, took the sentence into their own, not always serious pattern of internegativity and emerged with an ongoing project of their own, A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything. It spoke worlds for worlds. It also spoke up for the side of life that held anything.
This anything had come up for discussion in 1962. Its terms will be familiar. At one point, Frampton and Andre had pondered the problem of the scale of their universe. They tried to speak about how the distances had changed, and the measurements too. “Unless we have an inch in common, an untaxed inch, I might add,” Andre declared, “our years will contradict, and our miles will wander northward without ever reaching Boston.” But no one would be stepping outside the markets of their day, Frampton wrote at the end. Andre countered, adding, “I would say it is important not to become a weapon in the hands of those we despise.”
Levine and Lawler took this up, using the warmth in the young men’s coats to take up the problem of wall-lessness, of making more space for their work. Their collaboration set up extremely temporary, self-organized exhibition spaces. The only trace of the collaboration would come, gallery style, with an invitation card. Outside New York, the project might appear in a small gallery or a student’s studio. In New York itself, the shows were held just for an evening in the private lofts of friends. For the one in May 1981 Lawler brought seven photograms of long-playing records, one of them the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go?” The next month there was an evening in Lawler’s loft, where Levine showed her Eliot Porter series. And so it went, as needed, more private than public. In 1982 they did a set of pages using the title for Phil Mariani and Brian Wallis’s new magazine Wedge. A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything. The project marked the end of their wall-lessness, and their innocence.
For as it did so, the spaces of the art market had regrouped, and a new economy for art had emerged. Galleries now were coming to call. Mary Boone had opened, Larry Gagosian would come, in 1980 Helene Winer had left Artists Space to found Metro Pictures with Janelle Reiring. By 1981 wall-lessness was hardly the only option. The modern-art museum would present itself as everyone’s final destination and only point of reference. But was the museum necessarily the frame for art’s future? Where did the art go?
This was the situation that prompted Cindy Sherman to speak of the fakery in role playing. Louise Lawler would organize A Movie Will Be Shown Without a Picture at the Bleecker Street Cinema. She chose to show The Hustler in the dark, along with the cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? On the poster for the event, she quoted Jack Palance’s character from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt saying, “Every time I hear the word culture, I take out my checkbook.” It had become a time of checkbooks.
David Salle began using an overhead projector to center his images on the canvas as he painted them, painting them into the light by immersing himself in it. In 1983 he took the picture from behind, letting the name of King Kong come up like a misunderstood rear projection over the backs of two motherly nudes walking up a beach as if they had literally walked out of the living room. The theater of the monster falling like a light over mother pushed the imitation of life over the edge. Salle began to think in the physical terms of theater, beginning here by affixing an end table to the painting, like a stage. That year he would begin to paint to the time of the dance of Karole Armitage.
Sherrie Levine grew more sanguine as she went forward. “When I started doing this work,” she wrote a few years later, “I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they’re both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work’s about for me—that space in the middle where there’s no picture, rather an emptiness, an oblivion.” At the same time, she also turned outward: “I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and the future, between my history and yours.” My self is our self more broadly now, but the interaction being imagined remains personal, full of the trace internegativity of the old days, as if art might still be something that passed between friends. But, as she said this, she was looking backward.
Molly Nesbit is associate professor of art history at Vassar College and a contributing editor of Artforum.
NOTES
1. See, for example, the following texts and their arguments, marked as much by Hegel as by Marx: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (New York: Swerve, 1994), first French edition 1967; Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), first French edition 1974; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi, with an introduction by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), first French edition 1979.
2. On the role played by mass media forms in the development of modern art, see especially Thomas Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture in the Visual Arts,” in Modernism and Modernity. The Vancouver Conference Papers, ed. Benjamin Buchloh, Serge Guilbaut, and David Solkin (Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983): 215–64 (in abbreviated form in Crow’s collected essays, Modern Art in the Common Culture [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996]). The discussion of the relevance of the high/low hierarchy continued to be played out in academic and museum circles during the ’80s. Its historical importance for modern art in the years before 1968 remains undisputed, and after 1968 it continued to have its usefulness in the development of a political aesthetics. But on the street, these questions were moot, and by the time of the “High and Low” exhibition at MoMA in 1990 it was clear that they could only sustain academic life.
3. Edgar Morin, Les Stars (3d ed.; Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 63, translation mine.
4. Eventually she would frame her shots by propping a real mirror near the camera so that she could check the effect of her pose.
5. For a good characterization of the landscape facing the art critic, see Anders Stephanson, “Interview with Craig Owens” (1987), in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 300. Owens: “[In the mid- to late 70s] there was a new interest in and proliferation of art writing, which deliberately did not set itself the task of coming up to the level of ‘seriousness’ set by Greenberg and Fried. What then came to be seen as the postmodern was that proliferation of discourses on the outside. These were not activities that were trying to theorize postmodernism or the question of postmodernism, but to function as postmodernism. Roughly at the same time, some of us began to articulate this within art practice, as one way of detaching oneself from the art that was being pushed by the galleries, the art that was being written about in the art journals. So there was a strong sense that this articulation removed one from the dominant centers of the art world and art market. Whether it was good old modernist withdrawal is another matter. . . . Initially what was informing the debate anyway was Frankfurt School stuff, and Walter Benjamin. The discourse in the art world was identified with the photographic.” The work on this identification was being led by Rosalind Krauss. See her interview with Paul Taylor, Art & Text 8 (Summer 1982): 31–37, and her essays from the period, collected in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); most relevant is the title essay, which appeared first in October 18 (Fall 1981): 47–66. Equally important to the formation of a criticism around this work: Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88; Crimp, “The Photographic Conditions of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 91–101; Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 and 13 (Spring and Summer 1980); and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum, September 1982, 45–56.
