Sherrie Levine
Hazleton, Pennsylvania (USA), 1947

Sherrie Levine is one of the principle members of a generation of artists who, shunning the new neo-expressionist pictorial tendency dominant in the art of the late seventies and early eighties, began to explore issues such as originality, authenticity and authorship, traits that would eventually be dubbed neo-conceptualism. Her first outstanding piece was Shoe Sale (1977) and that same year, she finished a series of drawings, Sons and Lovers, which seemed to be announcing her later works. In these drawings, the recognizable silhouette of an American president faces an anonymous feminine figure; through repetition and variation, the drawings urge the spectator to create the story by uniting them and thus imbuing the work with meaning. In 1979, Levine produced eight collages with works by Leonard Feininger. This was the first time she appropriated the photographs of another artist. That same year, she re-photographed six of Edward Weston’s male nudes, as well as some of Eliot Porter’s landscapes. Two years later, her one person exhibition at Metro Pictures sparked a debate in the New York art scene due to the novelty of her proposal. She presented her reproductions of the photographic series W.P.A. Depression Series by Walker Evans. With her appropriations, Levine assigns new meaning to the work of great masters of art -always men- and denies the traditional notions of originality and authorship, which have been paradigmatic of the patriarchal concept of avant-garde. At the same time, she questions the idea of property and the fetishising process undergone by every work of art merely due to the fact that it carries a signature. In 1983, she returned to painting and presented water-colour copies of plates reproducing paintings of some of the great masters of the historic avant-gardes such as Miró, Léger and Stuart Davis. With this series, she again tested the concept of originality by creating copies of copies, which were not reproduced through mechanical means, but restored the sensual hand-crafted quality of the brushstroke. Considering that her own work was repressed to a certain extent, she decided to abandon appropriation for a few years and she created a series of paintings that, as she herself explained, “not only had to do with art history, but also with personal history and memory. I wanted to make paintings that were both formal and allegoric”. Pertaining to this era are her series of manufactured wooden boards whose knots were turned into gold, the canvases with geometric bands of colour from 1985, inspired by the minimalist paintings that had embarrassed her as a student, and her later shift toward the representation of board games. Since these pictorial series, she has often returned to the appropriationist strategies of her early works by introducing digital imaging as in Meltdown or carrying them into three dimensions to fill out the figures of the bachelors in Duchamp’s Le grand verre, or to make bronze casts of urinals similar to those in Fountain by the same artist, or to order the construction of six identical billiard tables inspired by Man Ray’s The Fortune. S. R.

Interieurs Parisiens: 1-60 After Atget, 1997

Since her first series in which she re-photographed Edward Weston’s nudes, Eliot Porter’s landscapes and Walker Evans’ rural scenes, Sherrie Levine has frequently returned to this technique. This series of photographs comprises a set of sixty images of the interiors of Parisian houses, without people, taken by Eugene Atget, one of the masters of French photography, over the course of several decades (1856-1927).
Atget created one of the most important existing photographic archives of the French capital. For thirty years, his aim was to document everything picturesque and artistic in Paris and its vicinity, eventually compiling a body of work consisting of ten thousand photographs. The choice of this artist is not gratuitous, for he was one of the first in recognizing that photography had its own language, and that it was an independent and autonomous media, distanced from turn-of-the-century pictorial presuppositions. Atget died without the general public recognition he deserved, although amidst the early avant-garde movements, he was much acclaimed and even considered something of a hero. He photographed some of the works of artists such as Derain, Braque and Utrillo, unintentionally anticipating one of the reproductive strategies of Levine herself, and his work was admired by Man Ray, Bernice Abbot and Ansel Adams. Atget was also deeply involved with another concept also very important to Levine: that of memory. One of Atget’s main concerns was photographing monuments, buildings and situations that were on the verge of vanishing. He was conscious of the historical significance of his work. By choosing these types of works and artists and by adding new meaning to them through her own glance, Levine makes manifest the extent to which the history of contemporary art is a cultural construction dominated by a concept of patriarchal avant-garde from which women were excluded.
Through appropriation, Levine has explored her relationship with the works and the authors she chooses, a relationship that she has occasionally defined as oedipal. For Levine, this method has a magical quality: two superimposed images aspiring to establish an allegoric reading of the work. The spectator is the one who must reconstruct the meaning that these photographs have for her and establish, besides, their own bond with them. Levine has assimilated Roland Barthes’ ideas about the death of authorship and considers that “the birth of the spectator ought to be at the painter’s expense”, or, in this case, at the photographer’s expense.
Photographing photographs, Levine questions concepts of authorship, property, uniqueness and reproduction. By signing these “stolen” images, she is infusing them with authenticity, bestowing them with the aura they would have lost if they had been mere copies, conferring on them the status of unique works worthy of merchandising. Her intention is not to deny these concepts, but to establish their dialectic nature. S. R.

Serie details' Interieurs Parisiens: 1-60 After Atget, 1997