SHERRIE LEVINE OCTOBER Files

George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, Devin Fore, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, David Joselit, Rosalind Krauss, Carrie Lambert- Beatty, Annette Michelson, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson Eva Hesse, edited by Mignon Nixon Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph James Coleman, edited by George Baker Cindy Sherman, edited by Johanna Burton Roy Lichtenstein, edited by Graham Bader Gabriel Orozco, edited by Yve-Alain Bois Gerhard Richter, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Richard Hamilton, edited by Hal Foster with Alex Bacon Dan Graham, edited by Alex Kitnick John Cage, edited by Julia Robinson Claes Oldenburg, edited by Nadja Rottner Louise Lawler, edited by Helen Molesworth with Taylor Walsh Robert Morris, edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson John Knight, edited by André Rottmann Isa Genzken, edited by Lisa Lee Hans Haacke, edited by Rachel Churner Michael Asher, edited by Jennifer King Mary Kelly, edited by Mignon Nixon William Kentridge, edited by Rosalind Krauss Bruce Nauman, edited by Taylor Walsh Sherrie Levine, edited by Howard Singerman SHERRIE LEVINE

edited by Howard Singerman

essays by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Stephen W. Melville, Erich Franz, Howard Singerman, Catherine Ingraham, Sylvia Lavin, Susan Kandel, Michel Assenmaker, Sherrie Levine, David Joselit, and Maria H. Loh

OCTOBER FILES 23

All works of art by Sherrie Levine © the artist unless noted otherwise.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Bembo by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Singerman, Howard, editor. Title: Sherrie Levine / edited by Howard Singerman. Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Series: October files | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017061374| ISBN 9780262038584 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780262535724 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Levine, Sherrie--Criticism and interpretation. | Appropriation (Art)--United States. Classification: LCC N6537.L453 S55 2018 | DDC 700.92--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061374

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents

Series Preface vii

Acknowledgments ix

Douglas Crimp Pictures (1979) 1

Douglas Crimp The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism (1980) 15

Rosalind Krauss excerpt from “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition” (1981) 27

Craig Owens Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks (1982) 35

Craig Owens excerpt from “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” (1983) 39

Stephen W. Melville Not Painting: The New Work of Sherrie Levine (1986) 51

Rosalind Krauss Bachelors (1990) 59

Erich Franz Presence Withdrawn (1992) 67 vi Contents

Howard Singerman Seeing Sherrie Levine (1994) 73

Catherine Ingraham Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld (1996) 107

Sylvia Lavin Habeas Corpus (1996) 117

Susan Kandel Sherrie Levine: Stalker (1997) 125

Michel Assenmaker After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? (1998) 133

Sherrie Levine pathos: Trois Contes (2002) 153

Sherrie Levine Some Statements (1979–2010) 163

Howard Singerman Sherrie Levine: On Painting (2004) 173

David Joselit Last Laugh (2012) 203

Maria H. Loh Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork (2012) 211

Index of Names 221 Series Preface © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar period that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature, which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather, it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its own right, on its own terms, and with its own implications. To this end, we feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elaborate different methods of criticism in order to eluci- date different aspects of the art in question. The essays are often in dia- logue with one another as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art is to political context and historical change. These “files,” then, are intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tenden- cies of our time.

The Editors of OCTOBER

Acknowledgments Acknowledgments Acknowledgments © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

The mission of the October Files series is to recognize artists whose work has “altered our understanding of art in significant ways” and has “prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained.” Each text in each volume in the series, then, is in some sense a proposal—a claim for the value and the ongoing challenge of a specific artistic practice. The argument that is demonstrated in the essays in this volume is that Sherrie Levine’s work, which was instrumental in the construction of a critical postmodernism as it was laid out in essays “first published in October” (to quote again from the series preface), continues to sustain our critical and interpretive attention. The first three essays included here were initially published in Octo- ber, and all are now well known. They have appeared in whole or in part in other anthologies. Each of these opening essays engages Levine’s work in a critical repudiation of modernism in the visual arts, particularly as it was promulgated by the art historian Michael Fried. Douglas Crimp’s Pictures exhibition (at Artist’s Space in 1977) and his essay “Pic- tures,” published in October 8 (Spring 1979)—the book’s first essay—link Levine to a larger group of then-emerging artists who seemed engaged in a similar critical practice. His title has come to name that “movement,” such as it was, and that moment in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s more broadly. Crimp’s essay “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” published in October 15 (Winter 1980), returns to some of the artists he addressed in the earlier essay—to Levine, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, x Acknowledgments

Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman—and to the questions of presence and reproduction he raised in the earlier essay in relation to performance. Here his answers turn on photography as theorized with and after Walter Benjamin. Rosalind Krauss’s essay “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition,” which cites the two Crimp essays and his discussion of Levine’s photographs after Edward Weston, is presented here in an excerpt. It first appeared in October 18 (Autumn 1981). Craig Owens’s “Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks,” a review of Levine’s 1982 exhibition of six offset prints of works by Franz Marc, was first published in Art in America 70 (Summer 1982), page 148, and appears here courtesy of Art Media Holdings, LLC, and with the permission of the estate. It also appears in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, a collection of Owens’s writings edited by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock, with an introduction by Simon Watney, published by University of California Press, 1992. Owens’s 1983 essay “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Post- modernism” compellingly resituates a particular set of artists engaged in what Crimp labeled the photographic activity of postmodernism— Levine, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Sherman—in relation to a poststructural critique of representation that is strongly informed by the writings and politics of French feminism. The essay has in many ways determined the trajectory of much subsequent writing on Levine’s work. Owens, a senior editor at Art in America and an associate editor at October from 1979 through 1980, first published “The Discourse of Others” in Hal Foster’s edited volume The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodernism (Bay Press, 1983). It is presented here in excerpt and is published in its entirety in Beyond Recognition. Stephen W. Melville’s “Not Painting: The New Work of Sherrie Levine” was published in Arts Magazine 60, no. 6 (February 1986). It is included here with permission of the author. In 1986, in an interview with Janet Malcolm, Levine noted that October had provided her earliest support system, one “critical rather than financial.” But Levine and the other artists who were part of Octo- ber’s discourse of postmodernism are to a great extent absent from the magazine after the publication of “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition” in 1981. When Levine returns to its pages nearly a decade later, in Rosalind Krauss’s “Bachelors” in October 52 (Spring 1990), she is accompanied by historical actors rather than contemporaries. Prior to its publication in October, Krauss’s “Bachelors” appeared in a catalogue published in September 1989 by Mary Boone Gallery in conjunction with Levine’s exhibition of her suite of cast glass works after Marcel Duchamp. Krauss’s essay reads Levine’s Bachelors, her first sculpture and her then most recent work, in relation to her earlier practice using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capital- ism and Schizophrenia (1972). The gallery monograph is a particular (and, for some, suspect) genre. It necessarily assumes the centrality and singularity of the artist and her work. Its implicit task is to tie the new work to the artist’s career, and more, to her oeuvre—a curious word in relation to Levine’s practice and to the discourse that had once surrounded it in October. The “Levine effect” that Krauss posits in “Bachelors”— according to which “names form a series among themselves, a world in which the name claims nothing, ‘means’ nothing, even though it continues to produce”—both returns to the critique of authorship of those initial essays and still does much the same organizational work that oeuvre does. Erich Franz’s contribution, “Presence Withdrawn,” was first published in German and English in Parkett 32 (1992); the English translation by David Britt is reprinted with permission of the author and Parkett Publishers, Zurich and New York. My essay “Seeing Sherrie Levine” was published in October 67 (Winter 1994). A number of essays included here first appeared in gallery publica- tions, and focus, as the genre suggests, on individual bodies or series of works and on the artist—on the question of her practice now and its relation to her practice then. As with every essay in this book, these essays are indebted to October’s initial theorization of Levine’s work— sometimes as a platform on which to build and at others as a position or summation to write away from. As a group, the essays share the joined project of specifying Levine’s work and foregrounding their authors’ specific experience of it—what is it like to look at this work, to think with it, to say what the works are like (chimeras, taxidermy, fandom, pratfalls, Poussin), and to situate them affectively. Catherine Ingraham’s “Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld” and Sylvia Lavin’s “Habeas Corpus” were both written for the book Sherrie Levine:

Acknowledgments xi xii Acknowledgments

Sculpture, edited by David Frankel and published in 1996 by Galerie Jablonka in Cologne and Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles. The essays are included here with permission of the authors. Susan Kandel’s “Sherrie Levine: Stalker” was first published in art/ text 59 (November 1997–January 1998). The essay was republished in the 1998 catalogue Sherrie Levine, which accompanied the artist’s exhibition at the Städtisches Museum Schloss Morsbroich in Leverkusen, Ger- many. It is included here with the permission of the author. Michel Assenmaker’s essay is also drawn from the Museum Mors- broich catalogue, where it was first published in French as “D’après Sherrie Levine, la répétition?” Assenmaker notes the terms of its writing: “A friend does me the honor of commissioning a text.” It has been translated for this publication under the title “After Sherrie Levine, Repetition?” by Jocelyn Spaar and myself and appears with the permission of the author and the translators. I am pleased to be able to include writings by Sherrie Levine. In addition to “Some Statements” (1979–2010), a compilation of artist’s statements drawn from a variety of contexts (press releases, exhibition brochures and catalogues, and magazines beginning in 1979), is her Getty Research Institute seminar “pathos: Trois Contes,” which was published in October 101 (Summer 2002). I thank Sherrie Levine for her permission and generosity and for her patient support of this volume. I also want to extend my thanks to those in her studio and to Adam Lehner at October. My essay “Sherrie Levine: On Painting” appeared in RES: Anthro- pology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn 2004), a special issue entitled “Polemi- cal Objects” and edited by Philip Armstrong, Stephen Melville, and Erika Naginski. RES is published by the President and Fellows of Har- vard College and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The two most recent texts included in this volume are from an exhibition catalogue titled Sherrie Levine: Mayhem and edited by Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman. The book accompanied the artist’s 2012 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. David Joselit’s “Last Laugh” and Maria H. Loh’s “Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork” are reprinted with the permission of the authors and the Whitney Museum, New York. Pictures Douglas Crimp Pictures Douglas Crimp © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Pictures was the title of an exhibition of the work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith, which I organized for Artists Space in the fall of 1977.1 In choosing the word pictures for this show, I hoped to convey not only the work’s most salient characteristic— recognizable images—but also and importantly the ambiguities it sustains. As is typical of what has come to be called postmodernism, this new work is not con- fined to any particular medium; instead, it makes use of photography, film, performance, as well as traditional modes of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Picture, used colloquially, is also nonspecific: a picture book might be a book of drawings or photographs, and in common speech a painting, drawing, or print is often called, simply, a picture. Equally important for my purposes, picture, in its verb form, can refer to a mental process as well as the production of an aesthetic object. The following essay takes its point of departure from the catalogue text for Pictures; but it focuses on different issues and addresses an aesthetic phenomenon implicitly extending to many more artists than the original exhibition included. Indeed, although the examples discussed and illustrated here are very few, neces- sitated by the newness and relative obscurity of this work, I think it is safe to say that what I am outlining is a predominant sensibility among the current genera- tion of younger artists, or at least of that group of artists who remain committed to radical innovation.

Art and illusion, illusion and art Are you really here or is it only art? Am I really here or is it only art? —Laurie Anderson 2 Douglas Crimp

In his famous attack against Minimal sculpture, written in 1967, the critic Michael Fried predicted the demise of art as we then knew it, that is, the art of modernist abstract painting and sculpture. “Art degenerates,” he warned us, “as it approaches the condition of theatre,” theater being, according to Fried’s argument, “what lies between the arts.”2 And indeed, over the past decade we have witnessed a radical break with that modernist tradition, effected precisely by a preoccupation with the “theatrical.” The work that has laid most serious claim to our attention throughout the seventies has been situated between, or outside the individual arts, with the result that the integrity of the various mediums— those categories the exploration of whose essences and limits constituted the very project of modernism—has dispersed into meaninglessness.3 Moreover, if we are to agree with Fried that “the concept of art itself … [is] meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts,” then we must assume that art, too, as an ontological category, has been put in question. What remain are just so many aesthetic activities, but judging from their current vitality we need no longer regret or wish to reclaim, as Fried did then, the shattered integrity of modernist painting and sculpture. What then are these new aesthetic activities? Simply to enumerate a list of mediums to which “painters” and “sculptors” have increasingly turned—film, photography, video, performance—will not locate them precisely, since it is not merely a question of shifting from the conventions of one medium to those of another. The ease with which many artists managed, some ten years ago, to change mediums—from sculpture, say, to film (Serra, Morris, et al.) or from dance to film (Rainer)— or were willing to “corrupt” one medium with another—to present a work of sculpture, for example, in the form of a photograph (Smithson, Long)—or abjured any physical manifestation of the work (Barry, Weiner) makes it clear that the actual characteristics of the medium, per se, cannot any longer tell us much about an artist’s activity. But what disturbed Fried about minimalism, what constituted, for him, its theatricality, was not only its “perverse” location between painting and sculpture,4 but also its “preoccupation with time—more precisely, with the duration of experience.” It was temporality that Fried considered “paradigmatically theatrical,” and therefore a threat to modernist abstraction. And in this, too, Fried’s fears were well founded. For if temporality was implicit in the way minimal sculpture was experienced, then it would be made thoroughly explicit—in fact the only possible manner of experience—for much of the art that followed. The mode that was thus to become exemplary during the seventies was performance—and not only that narrowly defined activity called performance art, but all those works that were constituted in a situation and for a duration by the artist or the spectator or both together. It can be said quite literally of the art of the seventies that “you had to be there.” For example, certain of the video installations of Peter Campus, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman, and more recently the sound installations of Laurie Anderson not only required the presence of the spectator to become activated, but were fundamentally concerned with that registra- tion of presence as a means toward establishing meaning.5 What Fried demanded of art was what he called “presentness,” a transcendent condition (he referred to it as a state of “grace”) in which “at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest”; what he feared would replace that condition as a result of the sensibility he saw at work minimalism—what has replaced it—is presence, the sine qua non of theater.

The presence before him was a presence. —Henry James

An art whose strategies are thus grounded in the literal temporality and presence of theater has been the crucial formulating experience for a group of artists currently beginning to exhibit in New York. The extent to which this experience fully pervades their work is not, however, immediately apparent, for its theatrical dimensions have been transformed and, quite unexpectedly, reinvested in the pictorial image. If many of these artists can be said to have been apprenticed in the field of performance as it issued from minimalism, they have nevertheless begun to reverse its priorities, making of the literal situation and duration of the performed event a tableau whose presence and temporality are utterly psychologized; performance becomes just one of a number of ways of “staging” a picture. Thus the performances of Jack Goldstein do not, as had usually been the case, involve the artist’s performing the work, but rather the presentation of an event in such a manner and at such a distance that it is apprehended as representation—representation not, however, conceived as the re-presentation of that which is prior,

Pictures 3 4 Douglas Crimp but as the unavoidable condition of intelligibility of even that which is present. Two years ago Goldstein presented Two Fencers (1977) at the Salle Patino in Geneva. Distanced some fifty feet from the audience, bathed in the dim red glow of a spotlight, accompanied by the sound of recorded music taken from Hollywood swashbuckler soundtracks, two men in fencing gear enacted their athletic routine.6 They appeared as if déjà vu, remote, spectral, yet just as certainly, present. Like the contor- tionist and gymnast of Goldstein’s earlier performances, they were there, performing in the space of the spectators, but they nevertheless looked virtual, dematerialized, like the vivid but nebulous images of holograms. After one fencer had appeared to defeat the other, the spotlight went down, but the performance continued; left in darkness to listen to a replay of the background music, the audience would attempt to remem- ber that image of fencing that had already appeared as if in memory. In this doubling by means of the mnemonic experience, the paradoxical mechanism by which memory functions is made apparent: the image is forgotten, replaced. (Roget’s Thesaurus gives a child’s definition of memory as “the thing I forget with.”) Goldstein’s “actors” do not perform prescribed roles; they simply do what they would ordinarily do, professionally, just as the Hollywood- trained German shepherd growls and barks on cue in Goldstein’s film A German Shepherd [Shane] (1975), and a ballerina descends from pointe in A Ballet Shoe (1975), and a lion framed in a golden logo tosses his head and roars in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1975). These films show either simple, split-second gestures that are repeated with little or no difference, or slightly more extended actions that appear to exhaust themselves. Here, for example, is the scenario for A Ballet Shoe: the foot of a dancer in toe shoe is shown on pointe; a pair of hands comes in from either side of the film frame and unties the ribbon of the shoe; the dancer moves off pointe; the entire film lasts twenty-two seconds. The sense that its gesture is a complete one is therefore mitigated by its fragmented images (generating multiple psychological and tropological resonances) and its truncated duration; the whole is but a fragment. The impression of a completed action (one fencer defeats the other) combines with a structure of repetition (the match is one of constant attack and parry) so that no action is really brought to closure; the performance or film stops, but it cannot be said to end. In this respect the recent film entitled The Jump (1978) is exemplary. Shown as a loop, it is a potentially endless repetition of repetitions. A diver leaps, somersaults, plunges, and disintegrates. This happens very quickly, and then it happens again, and still a third time. The camera follows the courses of the three divers, framing them in tight close-up, so that their trajectories are not graphically discernable. Rather, each diver bursts like fireworks into the center of the frame and within a split second disappears. The Jump was made by rotoscoping stock Super 8 footage of high dives and shooting the animation through a special-effects lens that dispersed the image into jewellike facets.7 The resultant image, sometimes recognizable as diver, sometimes amorphous, is a shimmering, red silhouette seen against a black field. Time is extremely compressed (the running time is twenty-six seconds) and yet extremely distended (shown as a loop, it plays endlessly). But the film’s temporality as experienced does not reside in its actual duration, nor of course in anything like the synthetic time of narrative. Its temporal mode is the psychological one of anticipation. We wait for each dive, knowing more or less when it will appear, yet each time it startles us, and each time it disappears before we can really take satisfaction in it, so we wait for its next appearance; again we are startled and again it eludes us. In each of Goldstein’s films, performances, photographs, and phonograph records, a psychologized temporality is instituted: foreboding, premonition, suspicion, anxiety.8 The psychological resonance of this work is not that of the subject matter of his pictures, however, but of the way those pictures are presented, staged; that is, it is a function of their structure. Goldstein’s manner of staging the image is perfectly exemplified by the technique used for The Jump, the technique of rotoscopy, a process that is both a trace(ing) and an effacement of the filmed image, a drawing that is simultaneously an erasure. And that is what any staging of the image must always be. The temporality of these pictures is not, then, a function of the nature of the medium as in itself temporal, but of the manner in which the picture is presented; it can obtain in a still picture as well as a moving one. Here is a picture: It shows a young woman with close-cropped hair, wearing a suit and hat whose style is that of the 1950s. She looks the part of what was called, in that decade, a career girl, an impression that is perhaps cued, perhaps merely confirmed by the fact that she is surrounded by the office towers of the big city. But those skyscrapers play another role in this picture. They envelop and isolate the woman,

Pictures 5 6 Douglas Crimp reinforcing with their dark-shadowed, looming facades her obvious anxiety, as her eyes dart over her shoulder … at something perhaps lurking outside the frame of the picture. Is she, we wonder, being pursued? But what is it, in fact, that makes this a picture of presentiment, of that which is impending? Is it the suspicious glance? Or can we locate the solicitation to read the picture as if it were fiction in a certain spatial dislocation—the jarring juxtaposition of close-up face with distant buildings—suggesting the cinematic artifice of rear-screen projection? Or is it the details of costume and makeup that might signal disguise? It is perhaps all of these, and yet more. The picture in question is nothing other than a still photograph of/ by the artist Cindy Sherman, one of a recent series in which she dresses in various costumes and poses in a variety of locations that convey highly suggestive though thoroughly ambiguous ambiences. We do not know what is happening in these pictures, but we know for sure that something is happening, and that something is a fictional narrative. We would never take these photographs for being anything but staged. The still photograph is generally thought to announce itself as a direct transcription of the real precisely in its being a spatiotemporal fragment; or, on the contrary, it may attempt to transcend both space and time by contravening that very fragmentary quality.9 Sherman’s photographs do neither of these. Like ordinary snapshots, they appear to be fragments; unlike those snapshots, their fragmentation is not that of the natural continuum, but of a syntagmatic sequence, that is, of a conventional, segmented temporality. They are like quotations from the sequence of frames that constitutes the narrative flow of film. Their sense of narrative is one of its simultaneous presence and absence, a narrative ambience stated but not fulfilled. In short, these are photographs whose condition is that of the film still, that fragment “whose existence never exceeds the fragment.”10 The psychological shock that is registered in this very special kind of picture can best be understood when it appears in relation to normal film time as the syntagmatic disjunction of a freeze frame. The sudden abjuration of narrative time solicits a reading that must remain inside the picture but cannot escape the temporal mode of which it is a fragment. It is within this confusion of temporalities that Robert Longo’s work is situated. The central image of his three-part tableau performance, Sound Distance of a Good Man (1978), presented last year at Franklin Furnace, was a film, showing, with no motion at all (save for the flickering effect of light that is a constant feature of cinema) the upper torso of a man, body arched and head thrown back as if in convulsion. That posture, registering a quick, jerky motion, is contrasted, in this motionless picture, with the frozen immobility of the statue of a lion. As the film unwound it continued to show only this still image; the entire film con- sisted of nothing but a freeze frame. But if the film’s image does not traverse any temporal distance other than that literal time of the performed events that framed it on either side, its composition followed a rather complex scenario. Longo’s movie camera was trained on a photograph, or more precisely a photo-montage whose separate elements were excerpted from a series of photographs, duplicate versions of the same shot. That shot showed a man dressed and posed in imitation of a sculpted aluminum relief that Longo had exhibited earlier that year. The relief was, in turn, quoted from a newspaper reproduction of a fragment of a film still taken from The American Soldier (1970), a film by Fassbinder. The “scenario” of this film, the scenario just described, the spiral of fragmentation, excerptation, quotation that moves from film still to still film is, of course, absent from the film that the spectators of Sound Dis- tance of a Good Man watched. But what, if not that absent scenario, can account for the particular presence of that moving still image? Such an elaborate manipulation of the image does not really transform it; it fetishizes it. The picture is an object of desire, the desire for the signification that is known to be absent. The expression of that desire to make the picture yield a reality that it pretends to contain is the subject of the work of Troy Brauntuch. But, it must be emphasized, his is no private obsession. It is an obsession that is in the very nature of our relationship to pictures. Brauntuch therefore uses pictures whose subject matter is, from a humanist point of view, the most loaded, most charged with meaning, but which are revealed in his work to be utterly opaque. [T]here is a picture [that] appeared as an illustration to the memoirs of Albert Speer with the caption “Hitler asleep in his Mercedes, 1934.”11 Brauntuch has reproduced it as the central image of a recent three-part photographic print. The degree to which the image is fetishized by its presentation absolutely prevents its re-presentation; itself photographic, Brauntuch’s work cannot in turn be photographically reproduced. Its exacting treatment of the most minute details and qualities of scale,

Pictures 7 8 Douglas Crimp color, framing, relationships of part to part would be completely lost outside the presence of the work as object. The [aforementioned] photograph, for example, is enlarged to a width of eighteen inches, thereby making its half-tone screen visible, and printed on the left-hand side of a seven-foot long blood-red field. To the right of this picture is a further enlarged excerpt of it showing the building in the distance seen just above the windshield of the Mercedes. The panel on which these two images appear is flanked by two other panels positioned vertically. … The two vertical panels are blown up photographs, as well, although they are too abstracted to read as such. They are, in fact, reproductions of a fragment of a photograph of the Nuremberg rally lights shining in parallel streaks against the vast expanse of darkness. They are, of course, no more recognizable than the right-hand figure in the above photograph is recognizable as Hitler, nor do they divulge anything of the history they are meant to illustrate. Reproduced in one book after another about the Holocaust, already excerpted, enlarged, cropped, the images Brauntuch uses are so opaque and fragmentary as to be utterly mute regarding their supposed subject. And indeed the most opaque of all are the drawings by Hitler himself.12 What could be less revealing of the pathology of their creator than his perfectly conventional drawings? Every operation to which Brauntuch subjects these pictures represents the duration of a fascinated, perplexed gaze, whose desire is that they disclose their secrets; but the result is only to make the pictures all the more picturelike, to fix forever in an elegant object our distance from the history that produced these images. That distance is all that these pictures signify. Although the manipulations to which Sherrie Levine subjects her pictures are far less obsessive than Brauntuch’s, her subject is the same: the distance that separates us from what those pictures simultaneously proffer and withhold and the desire that is thereby set in motion. Drawn to pictures whose status is that of cultural myth, Levine discloses that status and its psychological resonances through the imposition of very simple strategies. In a recent tripartite series, for example, Levine cropped three photographs of a mother and child according to the emblematic silhouettes of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Ken- nedy. The currency of the myths with which Levine deals is exemplified by those profiles, taken as they are from the faces of coins; the photographs are cut out of a fashion magazine. The confrontation of the two images is structured in such a way that they must be read through each other: the profile of Kennedy delineates the picture of mother and child, which in turn fills in the Kennedy emblem. These pictures have no autonomous power of signification (pictures do not signify what they picture); they are provided with signification by the manner in which they are presented (on the faces of coins, in the pages of fashion magazines). Levine steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts their mythologies. Shown as a slide projection last February at the Kitchen, the mother-and-child/Kennedy picture was magnified to a height of eight

Sherrie Levine, Presidential Profile, 1979. Slide projection, dimensions variable. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

Pictures 9 10 Douglas Crimp feet and diffused through a stream of light. This presentation of the image gave it a commanding, theatrical presence. But what was the medium of that presence and thus of the work? Light? A 35mm slide? A cut-out picture from a magazine? Or is the medium of this work perhaps its reproduction here in this journal? And if it is impossible to locate the physical medium of the work, can we then locate the original artwork?13 At the beginning of this essay, I said that it was due precisely to this kind of abandonment of the artistic medium as such that we had witnessed a break with modernism, or more precisely with what was espoused as modernism by Michael Fried. Fried’s is, however, a very particular and partisan conception of modernism, one that does not, for example, allow for the inclusion of cinema (“cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art”) or for the preeminently theatrical painting of Surrealism. The work I have attempted to introduce here is related to a modernism conceived differently, whose roots are in the Symbolist aesthetic announced by Mallarmé,14 which includes works whose dimension is literally or metaphorically temporal, and which does not seek the transcendence of the material condition of the signs through which meaning is generated. Nevertheless, it remains useful to consider recent work as having effected a break with modernism and therefore as postmodernist. But if postmodernism is to have theoretical value, it cannot be used merely as another chronological term; rather it must disclose the particular nature of a breach with modernism.15 It is in this sense that the radically new approach to mediums is important. If it had been characteristic of the formal descriptions of modernist art that they were topographical, that they mapped the surfaces of artworks in order to determine their structures, then it has now become necessary to think of description as a stratigraphic activity. Those processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that constitute the strategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture. A theoretical understanding of postmodernism will also betray all those attempts to prolong the life of outmoded forms. Here, in brief, is an example, chosen because of its superficial resemblance to the pictures discussed here: The Whitney Museum recently mounted an exhibition entitled New Image Painting, a show of work whose diversity of quality, intention, and meaning was hidden by its being forced into conjunction for what was, in most cases, its least important characteristic: recognizable images. What was, in fact, most essential about all of the work was its attempt to preserve the integrity of painting. So, for example, included were Susan Rothenberg’s paintings in which rather abstracted images of horses appear. For the way they function in her painted surfaces, however, those horses might just as well be grids. “The interest in the horse,” she explains, “is because it divides right.”16 The most successful painting in the exhibition was one by Robert Moskowitz called The Swimmer [1977], in which the blue expanse from which the figure of a stroking swimmer emerges is forced into an unresolvable double reading as both painted field and water. And the painting thus shares in that kind of irony toward the medium that we recognize precisely as modernist. New Image Painting is typical of recent museum exhibitions in its complicity with that art which strains to preserve the modernist aesthetic categories which museums themselves have institutionalized: it is not, after all, by chance that the era of modernism coincides with the era of the museum. So if we now have to look for aesthetic activities in so- called alternative spaces, outside the museum, that is because those activities, those pictures, pose questions that are postmodernist.

Notes

1. Pictures (New York: Committee for the Visual Arts, 1977). The exhibition subse- quently traveled to the Allen Art Museum, Oberlin; the Los Angeles Institute of Con- temporary Art; and the University of Colorado Museum, Boulder. I wish to thank Helene Winer, director of Artists Space, on three counts: for inviting me to organize the Artists Space exhibition, thereby giving me the opportunity of seeing a wide variety of current work in studios; for steering me in the general direction of the work I have come to find so engaging; and, most particularly, for her commitment to showing the work of a group of young artists of major significance which would otherwise have remained publicly invisible. 2. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 21, reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 116–147. All subsequent quotations from Fried are from this article; the italics throughout are his. 3. This is not to say that there is not a great deal of art being produced today that can be categorized according to the integrity of its medium, only that that production has become thoroughly academic; take, for example, the glut of so-called pattern painting, a modernist-derived style that has not only been sanctioned with a style name, but has

Pictures 11 12 Douglas Crimp

generated a critical commentary, and constituted an entire category of selection for the most recent Whitney Museum biennial exhibition. 4. Fried was referring to Donald Judd’s claim that “the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture,” made in his article “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1964): 74–82. 5. Rosalind Krauss has discussed this issue in many of her recent essays, notably in “Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1 (Spring 1976), and “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” parts 1 and 2, October 3 (Spring 1977) and 4 (Fall 1977). 6. Goldstein’s phonograph records, intended both as independent works and, in some cases, as soundtracks for performances, are made by splicing together fragments, sometimes no longer than a few seconds, of sound from existing recordings, paralleling his use of stock footage to make films. 7. Rotoscopy is a technique of tracing over live-action footage to make an animation. 8. Each of the artists discussed here might be said to work with the conventions of a particular genre; if that is the case, Goldstein’s would be those of the disaster film. In the movie Earthquake, for example, the entire first third of the film is nothing but a narration about an impending earthquake; yet when it comes, we are taken completely by surprise. 9. See, for example, Hollis Frampton, “Impromptus on Edward Weston: Everything in Its Place,” October 5 (Summer 1978), especially pages 59–62. 10. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 67. The appearance of the film still as an object of particular fascination in recent artistic practice is so frequent as to call for a theoretical explanation. Both Sherman’s and Robert Longo’s works actually resemble this odd artifact, as does that of John Mendelsohn, James Birrell, among others. Moreover, many of its characteristics as discussed by Barthes are relevant to the concerns of all the works discussed here. In this context, it is also interesting to note that the performances of Philip Smith were called by him “extruded cinema” and had such revealing titles as Still Stories, Partial Biography, and Relinquish Control. They con- sisted of multiple projections of 35mm slides in a sequence and functioned as deconstruc- tions of cinematic narrative. 11. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970), ill. following page 166. It was of course Walter Benjamin, a victim of the very history this memoir would recount, who asked, “Is it not the task of the photographer—descendent of the augurs and the haruspices—to uncover guilt and name the guilty in his pictures?” But then he added, “‘The illiterate of the future,’ it has been said, ‘will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.’ But must we not also count as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?” “A Short History of Photogra- phy,” Screen 13, no. 1 (Spring 1972): 24. 12. Brauntuch has used these drawings, which have been extensively published, in several of his works. Perhaps even more surprising than the banality of Hitler’s drawings is that of the art produced inside the concentration camps; see Spiritual Resistance: Art from Concentration Camps, 1940–45 (New York: Jewish Museum, 1978). 13. Levine initially intended that the three parts of the work take three different forms for the purposes of this exhibition: the Kennedy silhouette as a slide projection in the gallery, the Lincoln as a postcard announcement, and the Washington as a poster, thus emphasizing the work’s ambiguous relationship to its medium. Only the first two parts were executed, however. 14. For a discussion of this aesthetic in relation to a pictorial medium, see my essay “Positive/ Negative: A Note on Degas’s Photographs,” October 5 (Summer 1978): 89–100. 15. There is a danger in the notion of postmodernism which we begin to see articulated, that which sees postmodernism as pluralism, and which wishes to deny the possibility that art can any longer achieve a radicalism or avant-gardism. Such an argument speaks of the “failure of modernism” in an attempt to institute a new humanism. 16. In Richard Marshall, New Image Painting (New York: Whitney Museum of Ameri- can Art, 1978), 56.

Pictures 13

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism* Douglas Crimp The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism Douglas Crimp © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

It is [this] fetishistic, fundamentally anti-technical notion of Art with which theorists of photography have tussled for almost a century, without, of course, achieving the slightest result. For they sought nothing beyond acquiring credentials for the photographer from the judgment-seat which he had already overturned. —Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography”

That photography had overturned the judgment-seat of art is a fact which the discourse of modernism found it necessary to repress, and so it seems that we may accurately say of postmodernism that it constitutes precisely the return of the repressed. Postmodernism can only be understood as a specific breach with modernism, with those institutions which are the preconditions for and which shape the discourse of modernism. These institutions can be named at the outset: first, the museum; then, art history; and finally, in a more complex sense, because modernism depends both upon its presence and upon its absence, photography. Postmodernism is about art’s dispersal, its plurality, by which I certainly do not mean pluralism. Pluralism is, as we know, that fantasy that art is free, free of other discourses, institutions, free, above all, of history. And this fantasy of freedom can be maintained because every work of art is held to be absolutely unique and original. Against this pluralism of originals, I want to speak of the plurality of copies. Nearly two years ago in an essay called “Pictures,” in which I first found it useful to employ the term postmodernism, I attempted to sketch 16 Douglas Crimp in a background to the work of a group of younger artists who were just beginning to exhibit in New York.1 I traced the genesis of their concerns to what had pejoratively been labeled the theatricality of minimal sculpture and the extensions of that theatrical position into the art of the seventies. I wrote at that time that the aesthetic mode that was exemplary during the seventies was performance, all those works that were constituted in a specific situation and for a specific duration; works for which it could be said literally that you had to be there; works, that is, which assumed the presence of a spectator in front of the work as the work took place, thereby privileging the spectator instead of the artist. In my attempt to continue the logic of the development I was outlining, I came eventually to a stumbling block. What I wanted to explain was how to get from this condition of presence—the being there necessi- tated by performance—to that kind of presence that is possible only through the absence that we know to be the condition of representation. For what I was writing about was work which had taken on, after nearly a century of its repression, the question of representation. I effected that transition with a kind of fudge, an epigraph quotation suspended between two sections of the text. The quotation, taken from one of the ghost tales of Henry James, was a false tautology, which played on the double, indeed antithetical, meaning of the word presence: “The presence before him was a presence.” What I just said was a fudge was perhaps not really that, but rather the hint of something really crucial about the work I was describing, which I would like now to elaborate. In order to do so, I want to add a third definition to the word presence. To that notion of presence which is about being there, being in front of, and that notion of presence that Henry James uses in his ghost stories, the presence which is a ghost and therefore really an absence, the presence which is not there, I want to add the notion of presence as a kind of increment to being there, a ghostly aspect of presence that is its excess, its supplement. This notion of presence is what we mean when we say, for example, that Laurie Anderson is a performer with presence. We mean by such a statement not simply that she is there, in front of us, but that she is more than there, that in addition to being there, she has presence. And if we think of Laurie Anderson in this way, it may seem a bit odd, because Laurie Ander- son’s particular presence is effected through the use of reproductive technologies which really make her quite absent, or only there as the kind of presence that Henry James meant when he said, “The presence before him was a presence.” This is precisely the kind of presence that I attributed to the performances of Jack Goldstein, such as Two Fencers (1977), and to which I would now add the performances of Robert Longo, such as Surrender (1979). These performances were little else than presences, performed tableaux that were there in the spectator’s space but which appeared ethereal, absent. They had that odd quality of holograms, very vivid and detailed and present and at the same time ghostly, absent. Goldstein and Longo are artists whose work, together with that of a great number of their contemporaries, approaches the question of representation through photographic modes, particularly all those aspects of photography that have to do with reproduction, with copies, and copies of copies. The extraordinary presence of their work is effected through absence, through its unbridgeable distance from the original, from even the possibility of an original. Such presence is what I attribute to the kind of photographic activity I call postmodernist. This quality of presence would seem to be just the opposite of what Walter Benjamin had in mind when he introduced into the language of criticism the notion of the aura. For the aura has to do with the presence of the original, with authenticity, with the unique existence of the work of art in the place in which it happens to be. It is that aspect of the work that can be put to the test of chemical analysis or of connoisseurship, that aspect which the discipline of art history, at least in its guise as Kunstwissenschaft, is able to prove or disprove, and that aspect, therefore, which either admits the work of art into, or banishes it from, the museum. For the museum has no truck with fakes or copies or reproductions. The presence of the artist in the work must be detectable; that is how the museum knows it has something authentic. But it is this very authenticity, Benjamin tells us, that is inevitably depreciated through mechanical reproduction, diminished through the proliferation of copies. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” is the way Benjamin put it.2 But, of course, the aura is not a mechanistic concept as employed by Benjamin, but rather a historical one. It is not something a handmade work has that a mechanically made work does not have. In Benjamin’s view, certain photographs had an aura, while even a painting by

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism 17 18 Douglas Crimp

Rembrandt loses its aura in the age of mechanical reproduction. The withering away of the aura, the dissociation of the work from the fabric of tradition, is an inevitable outcome of mechanical reproduction. This is something we have all experienced. We know, for example, the impossibility of experiencing the aura of such a picture as the Mona Lisa as we stand before it at the Louvre. Its aura has been utterly depleted by the thousands of times we’ve seen its reproduction, and no degree of concentration will restore its uniqueness for us. It would seem, though, that if the withering away of the aura is an inevitable fact of our time, then equally inevitable are all those projects to recuperate it, to pretend that the original and the unique are still possible and desirable. And this is nowhere more apparent than in the field of photography itself, the very culprit of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin granted a presence or aura to only a very limited number of photographs. These were photographs of the so-called primitive phase, the period prior to photography’s commercialization after the 1850s. He said, for example, that the people in these early photographs “had an aura about them, a medium which mingled with their manner of looking and gave them a plenitude and security.”3 This aura seemed to Benjamin to be a product of two things: the long exposure time during which the subjects grew, as it were, into the images; and the unique, unmediated relationship between the photographer who was “a technician of the latest school,” and his sitter, who was “a member of a class on the ascendant, replete with an aura which penetrated to the very folds of his bourgeois overcoat or bow-tie.”4 The aura in these photographs, then, is not to be found in the presence of the photographer in the photograph in the way that the aura of a painting is determined by the presence of the painter’s unmistakable hand in his picture. Rather it is the presence of the subject, of what is photographed, “the tiny spark of chance, of the here and now, with which reality has, as it were, seared the character of the picture.”5 For Benjamin, then, the connoisseurship of photography is an activity diametrically opposed to the connoisseurship of painting: it means looking not for the hand of the artist but for the uncontrolled and uncontrollable intrusion of reality, the absolutely unique and even magical quality not of the artist but of his subject. And that is perhaps why it seemed to him so misguided that photographers began, after the commercialization of the medium, to simulate the lost aura through the application of techniques imitative of those of painting. His example was the gum bichromate process used in pictorial photography. Although it may at first seem that Benjamin lamented the loss of the aura, the contrary is in fact true. Reproduction’s “social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable,” wrote Benjamin, “without its destructive, cathartic aspect, its liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.”6 That was for him the greatness of Atget: “He initiated the liberation of the object from the aura, which is the most incontestable achievement of the recent school of photography.”7 “The remarkable thing about [Atget’s] pictures … is their emptiness.”8 This emptying operation, the depletion of the aura, the contestation of the uniqueness of the work of art, has been accelerated and intensified in the art of the past two decades. From the multiplication of silk- screened photographic images in the works of Rauschenberg and Warhol to the industrially manufactured, repetitively structured works of the minimal sculptors, everything in radical artistic practice seemed to conspire in that liquidation of traditional cultural values that Benjamin spoke of. And because the museum is that institution which was founded upon just those values, whose job it is to sustain those values, it has faced a crisis of considerable proportions. One symptom of that crisis is the way in which our museums, one after another, around 1970, abdicated their responsibility toward contemporary artistic practice and turned with nostalgia to the art that had previously been relegated to their storerooms. Revisionist art history soon began to be vindicated by “rev- elations” of the achievements of academic artists and minor figures of all kinds. By the mid-1970s another, more serious symptom of the museum’s crisis appeared, the one I have already mentioned: the various attempts to recuperate the auratic. These attempts are manifest in two, contradictory phenomena: the resurgence of expressionist painting and the triumph of photography-as-art. The museum has embraced both of these phenomena with equal enthusiasm, not to say voraciousness. Little, I think, needs to be said about the return to a painting of personal expression. We see it everywhere we turn. The marketplace is glutted with it. It comes in all guises—pattern painting, new-image painting, neoconstructivism, neoexpressionism; it is pluralist to be sure. But within its individualism, this painting is utterly conformist on one point: its hatred of photography. Writing a manifesto-like text for the

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism 19 20 Douglas Crimp catalogue of her American Painting: The Eighties—that oracular exhibition staged in the fall of 1979 to demonstrate the miraculous resurrection of painting—Barbara Rose told us:

The serious painters of the eighties are an extremely heterogeneous group—some abstract, some representational. But they are united on a sufficient number of critical issues that it is possible to isolate them as a group. They are, in the first place, dedicated to the preservation of painting as a transcendental high art, and an art of universal as opposed to local or topical significance. Their aesthetic, which synthesizes tactile with optical qualities, defines itself in conscious opposition to photography and all forms of mechanical reproduction which seek to deprive the art work of its unique “aura.” It is, in fact, the enhancement of this aura, through a variety of means, that painting now self-consciously intends—either by emphasizing the artist’s hand, or by creating highly individual visionary images that cannot be confused either with reality itself or with one another.9

That this kind of painting should so clearly see mechanical reproduction as the enemy is symptomatic of the profound threat to inherited ideas (the only ideas known to this painting) posed by the photographic activity of postmodernism. But in this case it is also symptomatic of a more limited and internecine threat: the one posed to painting when photography itself suddenly acquires an aura. Now it’s not only a question of ideology; now it’s a real competition for the acquisition budget and wall space of the museum. But how is it that photography has suddenly had conferred upon it an aura? How has the plenitude of copies been reduced to the scarcity of originals? And how do we know the authentic from its reproduction?10 Enter the connoisseur. But not the connoisseur of photography, of whom the type is Walter Benjamin, or, closer to us, Roland Barthes. Neither Benjamin’s “spark of chance” nor Barthes’s “third meaning” would guarantee photography’s place in the museum. The connoisseur needed for this job is the old-fashioned art historian with his chemical analyses and, more importantly, his stylistic analyses. To authenticate photography requires all the machinery of art history and museology, with a few additions, and more than a few sleights of hand. To begin, there is, of course, the incontestable rarity of age, the vintage print. Cer- tain techniques, paper types, and chemicals have passed out of use and thus the age of a print can easily be established. But this kind of certifi- able rarity is not what interests me, nor its parallel in contemporary photographic practice, the limited edition. What interests me is the sub- jectivization of photography, the ways in which the connoisseurship of the photograph’s “spark of chance” is converted into a connoisseurship of the photograph’s style. For now, it seems, we can detect the photographer’s hand after all, except of course that it is his eye, his unique vision. (Although it can also be his hand; one need only listen to the partisans of photographic subjectivity describe the mystical ritual performed by the photographer in his darkroom.) I realize of course that in raising the question of subjectivity I am reviving the central debate in photography’s aesthetic history, that between the straight and the manipulated print, or the many variations on that theme. But I do so here in order to point out that the recuperation of the aura for photography would in fact subsume under the banner of subjectivity all of photography, the photography whose source is the human mind and the photography whose source is the world around us, the most thoroughly manipulated photographic fictions and the most faithful transcriptions of the real, the directorial and the documentary, the mirrors and the windows, Camera Work in its infancy, Life in its heyday. But these are only the terms of style and mode of the agreed-upon spectrum of photography-as-art. The restoration of the aura, the consequent collecting and exhibiting, does not stop there. It is extended to the carte-de-visite, the fashion plate, the advertising shot, the anonymous snap or Polaroid. At the origin of every one there is an Artist and therefore each can find its place on the spectrum of subjectivity. For it has long been a commonplace of art history that realism and expressionism are only matters of degree, matters, that is, of style. The photographic activity of postmodernism operates, as we might expect, in complicity with these modes of photography-as-art, but it does so only in order to subvert and exceed them. And it does so precisely in relation to the aura, not, however, to recuperate it, but to displace it, to show that it too is now only an aspect of the copy, not the original. A group of young artists working with photography have addressed photography’s claims to originality, showing those claims for the fiction they are, showing photography to be always a re-presentation,

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism 21 22 Douglas Crimp always-already-seen. Their images are purloined, confiscated, appropriated, stolen. In their work, the original cannot be located, is always deferred; even the self which might have generated an original is shown to be itself a copy. In a characteristic gesture, Sherrie Levine begins a statement about her work with an anecdote that is very familiar:

Not only do we recognize this as a description of something we already know—the primal scene—but our recognition might extend even further to the Moravia novel from which it has been lifted. For Levine’s autobiographical statement is only a string of quotations pil- fered from others; and if we might think this a strange way of writing about one’s own working methods, then perhaps we should turn to the work it describes. At a recent exhibition, Levine showed six photographs of a nude youth. They were simply rephotographed from the famous series by Edward Weston of his young son Neil, available to Levine as a poster published by the Witkin Gallery. According to the copyright law, the images belong to Weston, or now to the Weston estate. I think, to be fair, however, we might just as well give them to Praxiteles, for if it is the image that can be owned, then surely these belong to classical sculpture, which would put them in the public domain. Levine has said that, when she showed her photographs to a friend, he remarked that they only made him want to see the originals. “Of course,” she replied, “and the originals make you want to see that little boy, but when you see the boy, the art is gone.” For the desire that is initiated by that representation does not come to closure around that little boy, is not at all satisfied by him. The desire of representation exists only insofar as it never be Sherrie Levine, After Edward Weston 5, 1980. Black-and-white photograph, 10 × 8 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. fulfilled, insofar as the original always be deferred. It is only in the absence of the original that representation may take place. And representation takes place because it is always already there in the world as representation. It was, of course, Weston himself who said that “the photograph must be visualized in full before the exposure is made.” Levine has taken the master at his word and in so doing has shown him what he really meant. The a priori Weston had in mind was not really in his mind at all; it was in the world, and Weston only copied it. This fact is perhaps even more crucial in those series by Levine where that a priori image is not so obviously confiscated from high

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism 23 24 Douglas Crimp

Sherrie Levine, After Andreas Feininger 3, 1979. Collage on paper, 24 × 18 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. culture—by which I intend both Weston and Praxiteles—but from the world itself, where nature poses as the antithesis of representation. Thus the images which Levine has cut out of books of photographs by Andreas Feininger and Eliot Porter show scenes of nature that are utterly familiar. They suggest that Roland Barthes’s description of the tense of photography as the “having been there” be interpreted in a new way. The presence that such photographs have for us is the presence of déjà vu, nature as already having been seen, nature as representation. If Levine’s photographs occupy a place on that spectrum of photography-as-art, it would be at the farthest reaches of straight photography, not only because the photographs she appropriates operate within that mode but because she does not manipulate her photographs in any way; she merely, and literally, takes photographs. At the opposite end of that spectrum is the photography which is self-consciously composed, manipulated, fictionalized, the so-called directorial mode, in which we find such auteurs of photography as Duane Michaels and Les Krims. The strategy of this mode is to use the apparent veracity of photography against itself, creating one’s fictions through the appearance of a seamless reality into which has been woven a narrative dimension. Cindy Sherman’s photographs function within this mode, but only in order to expose an unwanted dimension of that fiction, for the fiction Sherman discloses is the fiction of the self. Her photographs show that the supposed autonomous and unitary self out of which those other “directors” would create their fictions is itself nothing other than a dis- continuous series of representations, copies, fakes. Sherman’s photographs are all self-portraits in which she appears in disguise enacting a drama whose particulars are withheld. This ambiguity of narrative parallels the ambiguity of the self that is both actor in the narrative and creator of it. For though Sherman is literally self-created in these works, she is created in the image of already-known feminine ste- reotypes; her self is therefore understood as contingent upon the possibilities provided by the culture in which Sherman participates, not by some inner impulse. As such, her photographs reverse the terms of art and autobiography. They use art not to reveal the artist’s true self, but to show the self as an imaginary construct. There is no real Cindy Sherman in these photographs; there are only the guises she assumes. And she does not create these guises; she simply chooses them in the way that any of us do. The pose of authorship is dispensed with not only through the mechanical means of making the image, but through the effacement of any continuous, essential persona or even recognizable visage in the scenes depicted. That aspect of our culture which is most thoroughly manipulative of the roles we play is, of course, mass advertising, whose photographic strategy is to disguise the directorial mode as a form of documentary. Richard Prince steals the most frank and banal of these images, which register, in the context of photography-as-art, as a kind of shock. But ultimately their rather brutal familiarity gives way to strangeness, as an unintended and unwanted dimension of fiction reinvades them. By

The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism 25 26 Douglas Crimp isolating, enlarging, and juxtaposing fragments of commercial images, Prince points to their invasion by these ghosts of fiction. Focusing directly on the commodity fetish, using the master tool of commodity fetishism of our time, Prince’s rephotographed photographs take on a Hitchcockian dimension: the commodity becomes a clue. It has, we might say, acquired an aura, only now it is a function not of presence but of absence, severed from an origin, from an originator, from authenticity. In our time, the aura has become only a presence, which is to say, a ghost.

Notes

* This paper was first presented at the colloquium “Performance and Multidisciplinarity: Postmodernism” sponsored by Parachute in Montreal, October 9–11, 1980. 1. Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88 [reprinted in this volume]. 2. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 221. 3. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” trans. Stanley Mitchell, Screen 13, no. l (Spring 1972): 18. 4. Ibid., 19. 5. Ibid., 7. 6. Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 221. 7. Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” 20. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. Barbara Rose, American Painting: The Eighties (Buffalo: Thoren-Sidney Press, 1979), n.p. 10. The urgency of these questions first became clear to me as I read the editorial pre- pared by Annette Michelson for October 5, A Special Issue on Photography (Summer 1978): 3–5. 11. Sherrie Levine, unpublished statement, 1980. The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition (excerpt) Rosalind Krauss The Originality of the Avant-Garde (excerpt) Rosalind Krauss © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

… For those for whom art begins in a kind of originary purity, the grid was emblematic of the sheer disinterestedness of the work of art, its absolute purposelessness, from which it derived the promise of its autonomy. We hear this sense of the originary essence of art when Schwitters insists, “Art is a primordial concept, exalted as the godhead, inexplicable as life, indefinable and without purpose.” And the grid facilitated this sense of being born into the newly evacuated space of an aesthetic purity and freedom. While for those for whom the origins of art are not to be found in the idea of pure disinterest so much as in an empirically grounded unity, the grid’s power lies in its capacity to figure forth the material ground of the pictorial object, simultaneously inscribing and depicting it, so that the image of the pictorial surface can be seen to be born out of the organization of pictorial matter. For these artists, the grid-scored surface is the image of an absolute beginning. Perhaps it is because of this sense of a beginning, a fresh start, a ground zero, that artist after artist has taken up the grid as the medium within which to work, always taking it up as though he were just dis- covering it, as though the origin he had found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction, this graph-paper ground, were his origin, and his finding it an act of originality. Waves of abstract artists “discover” the grid; part of its structure one could say is that in its revelatory character it is always a new, a unique discovery. 28 Rosalind Krauss

And just as the grid is a stereotype that is constantly being paradoxically rediscovered, it is, as a further paradox, a prison in which the caged artist feels at liberty. For what is striking about the grid is that while it is most effective as a badge of freedom, it is extremely restrictive in the actual exercise of freedom. Without doubt the most formulaic construction that could possibly be mapped on a plane surface, the grid is also highly inflexible. Thus just as no one could claim to have invented it, so once one is involved in deploying it, the grid is extremely difficult to use in the service of invention. And thus when we examine the careers of those artists who have been most committed to the grid, we could say that from the time they submit themselves to this structure their work virtually ceases to develop and becomes involved, instead, in repetition. Exemplary artists in this respect are Mondrian, Albers, Reinhardt, and Agnes Martin. But in saying that the grid condemns these artists not to originality but to repetition, I am not suggesting a negative description of their work. I am trying instead to focus on a pair of terms—originality and repetition—and to look at their coupling unprejudicially; for within the instance we are examining, these two terms seem bound together in a kind of aesthetic economy, interdependent and mutually sustaining, although the one—originality—is the valorized term and the other— repetition or copy or reduplication—is discredited. We have already seen that the avant-garde artist above all claims originality as his right—his birthright, so to speak. With his own self as the origin of his work, that production will have the same uniqueness as he; the condition of his own singularity will guarantee the originality of what he makes. Having given himself this warrant, he goes on, in the example we are looking at, to enact his originality in the creation of grids. Yet as we have seen, not only is he—artist x, y, or z—not the inventor of the grid, but no one can claim this patent: the copyright expired sometime in antiquity and for many centuries this figure has been in the public domain. Structurally, logically, axiomatically, the grid can only be repeated. And, with an act of repetition or replication as the “original” occasion of its usage within the experience of a given artist, the extended life of the grid in the unfolding progression of his work will be one of still more repetition, as the artist engages in repeated acts of self-imitation. That so many generations of twentieth-century artists should have maneuvered themselves into this particular position of paradox—where they are condemned to repeating, as if by compulsion, the logically fraudulent original—is truly compelling. But it is no more compelling than that other, complementary fiction: the illusion not of the originality of the artist, but of the originary status of the pictorial surface. This origin is what the genius of the grid is supposed to manifest to us as viewers: an indisputable zero-ground beyond which there is no further model, or referent, or text. Except that this experience of originariness, felt by generations of artists, critics, and viewers is itself false, a fiction. The canvas surface and the grid that scores it do not fuse into that absolute unity necessary to the notion of an origin. For the grid follows the canvas surface, doubles it. It is a representation of the surface, mapped, it is true, onto the same surface it represents, but even so, the grid remains a figure, picturing various aspects of the “originary” object: through its mesh it creates an image of the woven infrastructure of the canvas; through its network of coordinates it organizes a metaphor for the plane geometry of the field; through its repetition it configures the spread of lateral continuity. The grid thus does not reveal the surface, laying it bare at last; rather it veils it through a repetition. As I have said, this repetition performed by the grid must follow, or come after, the actual, empirical surface of a given painting. The representational text of the grid however also precedes the surface, comes before it, preventing even that literal surface from being anything like an origin. For behind it, logically prior to it, are all those visual texts through which the bounded plane was collectively organized as a pictorial field. The grid summarizes all these texts: the gridded overlays on cartoons, for example, used for the mechanical transfer from drawing to fresco; or the perspective lattice meant to contain the perceptual transfer from three dimensions to two; or the matrix on which to chart harmonic relationships, like proportion; or the millions of acts of enframing by which the picture was reaffirmed as a regular quadrilateral. All these are the texts which the “original” ground plane of a Mondrian, for example, repeats—and, by repeating, represents. Thus the very ground that the grid is thought to reveal is already riven from within by a process of repetition and representation; it is always already divided and multiple. What I have been calling the fiction of the originary status of the picture surface is what art criticism proudly names the opacity of the

The Originality of the Avant-Garde (excerpt) 29 30 Rosalind Krauss modernist picture plane, only in so terming it, the critic does not think of this opacity as fictitious. Within the discursive space of modernist art, the putative opacity of the pictorial field must be maintained as a fundamental concept. For it is the bedrock on which a whole structure of related terms can be built. All those terms—singularity, authenticity, uniqueness, originality, original—depend on the originary moment of which this surface is both the empirical and the semiological instance. If modernism’s domain of pleasure is the space of auto-referentiality, this pleasure dome is erected on the semiological possibility of the pictorial sign as nonrepresentational and nontransparent, so that the signified becomes the redundant condition of a reified signifier. But from our perspective, the one from which we see that the signifier cannot be reified; that its objecthood, its quiddity, is only a fiction; that every signifier is itself the transparent signified of an already-given decision to carve it out as the vehicle of a sign—from this perspective there is no opacity, but only a transparency that opens onto a dizzying fall into a bottomless system of reduplication. This is the perspective from which the grid that signifies the pictorial surface, by representing it, only succeeds in locating the signifier of another, prior system of grids, which have beyond them, yet another, even earlier system. This is the perspective in which the modernist grid is … logically multiple: a system of reproductions without an original. This is the perspective from which the real condition of one of the major vehicles of modernist aesthetic practice is seen to derive not from the valorized term of that couple which I invoked earlier—the doublet, originality/repetition—but from the discredited half of the pair, the one that opposes the multiple to the singular, the reproducible to the unique, the fraudulent to the authentic, the copy to the original. But this is the negative half of the set of terms that the critical practice of modernism seeks to repress, has repressed. From this perspective we can see that modernism and the avant- garde are functions of what we could call the discourse of originality, and that that discourse serves much wider interests—and is thus fueled by more diverse institutions—than the restricted circle of professional art-making. The theme of originality, encompassing as it does the notions of authenticity, originals, and origins, is the shared discursive practice of the museum, the historian, and the maker of art. And throughout the nineteenth century all of these institutions were concerted, together, to find the mark, the warrant, the certification of the original.1 … • What would it look like not to repress the concept of the copy? What would it look like to produce a work that acted out the discourse of reproductions without originals, that discourse which could only operate in Mondrian’s work as the inevitable subversion of his purpose, the residue of representationality that he could not sufficiently purge from the domain of his painting? The answer to this, or at least one answer, is that it would look like a certain kind of play with the notions of photographic reproduction that begins in the silkscreen canvases of Robert Rauschenberg and has recently flowered in the work of a group of younger artists whose production has been identified by the critical term pictures.2 I will focus on the example of Sherrie Levine, because it seems most radically to question the concept of origin and with it the notion of originality. Levine’s medium is the pirated print, as in the series of photographs she made by taking images by Edward Weston of his young son Neil and simply rephotographing them, in violation of Weston’s copyright. But as has been pointed out about Weston’s “originals,” these are already taken from models provided by others; they are given in that long series of Greek kouroi by which the nude male torso has long ago been processed and multiplied within our culture.3 Levine’s act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print, opens the print from behind to the series of models from which it, in turn, has stolen, of which it is itself the reproduction. The discourse of the copy, within which Levine’s act must be located has, of course, been developed by a variety of writers, among them Roland Barthes. I am thinking of his characterization, in S/Z, of the realist as certainly not a copyist from nature, but rather a “pasticher,” or someone who makes copies of copies. As Barthes says:

To depict is to … refer not from a language to a referent, but from one code to another. Thus realism consists not in copying the real but in copying a (depicted) copy. … Through secondary mimesis [realism] copies what is already a copy.4

The Originality of the Avant-Garde (excerpt) 31 32 Rosalind Krauss

Sherrie Levine, After Eliot Porter 7, 1980. Color photograph, 20 × 16 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

In another series by Levine in which the lush, colored landscapes of Eliot Porter are reproduced, we again move through the “original” print, back to the origin in nature and … through another trap door at the back wall of “nature” into the purely textual construction of the sublime and its history of degeneration into ever more lurid copies. Now, insofar as Levine’s work explicitly deconstructs the modernist notion of origin, her effort cannot be seen as an extension of modernism. It is, like the discourse of the copy, postmodernist. Which means that it cannot be seen as avant-garde either. Because of the critical attack it launches on the tradition that precedes it, we might want to see the move made in Levine’s work as yet another step in the forward march of the avant-garde. But this would be mistaken. In deconstructing the sister notions of origin and originality, postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and the conceptual domain of the avant-garde, looking back at it from across a gulf that in turn establishes a historical divide. The historical period that the avant- garde shared with modernism is over. That seems an obvious fact. What makes it more than a journalistic one is a conception of the discourse that has brought it to a close. This is a complex of cultural practices, among them a demythologizing criticism and a truly postmodernist art, both of them acting now to void the basic propositions of modernism, to liquidate them by exposing their fictitious condition. It is thus from a strange new perspective that we look back on the modernist origin and watch it splintering into endless replication.

Notes

1. On the discourse of origins and originals, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 328–335: “But this thin surface of the original, which accompanies our entire existence … is not the immediacy of a birth; it is populated entirely by those complex mediations formed and laid down as a sediment in their own history by labor, life and language so that … what man is reviving without knowing it, is all the intermediaries of a time that governs him almost to infinity.” 2. The relevant texts are by Douglas Crimp; see his exhibition catalogue Pictures (New York: Artists Space, 1977), and “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88. [“Pictures” is reprinted in this volume.] 3. See Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 98–99 [reprinted in this volume]. 4. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 55.

The Originality of the Avant-Garde (excerpt) 33

Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks Craig Owens Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks Craig Owens © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Sherrie Levine is perhaps best known for a series of works, exhibited last spring [1982] at Metro Pictures, in which she rephotographed Walker Evans’s FSA photographs.1 In representing these canonical images of the rural poor—the expropriated—Levine was calling attention to the original act of appropriation whereby Evans first took these photographs, as if to illustrate Walter Benjamin’s observation, in “The Author as Producer,” on the economic function of photography: “[Photography] has succeeded in making even abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment,” i.e., a commodity. This series, and others like it—Levine has executed similar projects after Edward Weston, Andreas Feininger, and Eliot Porter—is responsi- ble for her reputation primarily as an appropriator of images. Yet this characterization of Levine’s activity—upon which have been based both claims for its importance as well as its dismissal as simply another Duchampian critique of the creative impulse—is insufficient, neglecting as it does both the variety of her esthetic strategies and the persistence of her thematic concerns. For Levine has also staged a Shoe Sale at the Mercer Street Store (’77); exhibited stereotypical images, culled from the mass media, of maternity (The Kitchen, ’78) and women artists (Real Life magazine); invited us to the studio of the late painter Dimitri Merinoff (’81); and written a brief but important text on David Salle (Flash Art, Summer ’81). Most recently, she mounted a one-night exhibition of “Six 36 Craig Owens

Sherrie Levine, After Franz Marc, 1982. Set of six off-set lithographs, 19 × 29½ inches; 16 × 19¾ inches; 17¾ × 21½ inches; 23½ × 31¼ inches; 21¼ × 27¾ inches; 25 × 25 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley M. Freehling, 1984.1558a–f. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY. © Sherrie Levine.

Pictures after Franz Marc,” high-quality reproductions of Marc’s expressionist canvases, which Levine purchased, framed behind glass, and exhibited for two hours one Sunday evening in May—an exhibition as a performance, with the artist herself in the role of independent curator. In all her work Levine has assumed the functions of the dealer, the curator, the critic—everything but the creative artist. She has done this not merely to speak of the diminished possibilities for originality in an image-saturated culture, but more importantly in an attempt to counter- act the division of artistic labor in a society that restricts the artist to the manufacture of luxury goods destined for the real agents of artworld appropriation—the dealer, the collector, the museum. Sentimental images of animals—horses, deer, sheep, a sleeping cat— in their “natural” habitats, the “Six Pictures” are also consistent with the thematic issues addressed in all of Levine’s previous work. Her purloined images have invariably been emblematic, allegorical; Levine does not represent women, the poor, or landscapes, but Woman, Poverty, Nature. She is not, however, primarily interested in these subjects per se, but in images of them. This is the primary motive behind her strategy of appropriation: she does not photograph women or landscapes, but pictures of them, for we can approach such subjects, Levine believes, only through their cultural representation. What is more, these are subjects that exist outside of a dominant cultural order, which casts them as the “Other.” All of Levine’s images have been images of this Other; she consistently focuses on the mechanisms whereby our own animal instincts, our bestiality, are externalized, projected onto another—the opposite sex (she cites Paul Schrader’s film Cat People), another social class, or nature in general. Externalized in an alien and alienating image, our drives come to appear to us as universal and natural forces which must be controlled or repressed, either directly or symbolically, through both ritualized and nonritualized forms of representation. It is not surprising, then, that the expressionist impulse in art, based as it is on precisely this externalization of instinct, its projection onto the Other, should now come under Levine’s scrutiny. Apropos of the “Six Pictures after Franz Marc,” Levine cites feminist critic Susan Griffin: “Another strain of Romanticism—which we can see expressed in the conflicted and apocalyptic vision of Franz Marc—sought to know the power of nature and of eros, [but] experienced a hatred and fear of these forces. Rather than acknowledge eros as a part of its own being, this cast of mind divided itself from nature and then experienced a fear of the power of nature as nature returned to its consciousness in the body of women, of the ‘Jew,’ or ‘darkness’” (Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature). Levine’s current work thus has a topical thrust—the “Six Pictures” are currently on view in the Young Americans exhibition at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; at Documenta she is exhibiting a similar series after Egon Schiele. In such contexts, Levine’s images must be read as commentaries on the recent resurgence of the expressionist impulse. Yet the importance of Levine’s critique of expressionism is that it is located within a much broader investigation of cultural representations of alterity, and the psychological, social, and economic functions which such representations serve.

Note

1. See Carter Ratcliff, “Art and Resentment,” Art in America 70 (Summer 1982): 9–13. Page 11 shows Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans.

Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks 37

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) Craig Owens The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) Craig Owens © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Postmodern knowledge [le savoir postmoderne] is not simply an instru- ment of power. It refines our sensitivity to differences and increases our toler- ance of incommensurability. —J. F. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne • A la recherche du récit perdu

“No single theoretical discourse …”—this feminist position is also a postmodern condition. In fact, Lyotard diagnoses the postmodern condition as one in which the grands récits of modernity—the dialectic of Spirit, the emancipation of the worker, the accumulation of wealth, the classless society—have all lost credibility. Lyotard defines a discourse as modern when it appeals to one or another of these grands récits for its legitimacy; the advent of postmodernity, then, signals a crisis in narrative’s legitimizing function, its ability to compel consensus. Narrative, he argues, is out of its element(s)—“the great dangers, the great jour- neys, the great goal.” Instead, “it is dispersed into clouds of linguistic particles—narrative ones, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, etc.—each with its own pragmatic valence. Today, each of us lives in the vicinity of many of these. We do not necessarily form stable linguistic communities, and the properties of those we do form are not necessarily communicable.”1 40 Craig Owens

Lyotard does not, however, mourn modernity’s passing, even though his own activity as a philosopher is at stake. “For most people,” he writes, “nostalgia for the lost narrative [le récit perdu] is a thing of the past.”2 “Most people” does not include Fredric Jameson, although he diagnoses the postmodern condition in similar terms (as a loss of narrative’s social function) and distinguishes between modernist and postmodernist works according to their different relations to the “‘truth- content’ of art, its claim to possess some truth or epistemological value.” His description of a crisis in modernist literature stands metonymically for the crisis in modernity itself:

At its most vital, the experience of modernism was not one of a single historical movement or process, but of a “shock of discovery,” a commitment and an adherence to its individual forms through a series of “religious conversions.” One did not simply read D. H. Lawrence or Rilke, see Jean Renoir or Hitchcock, or listen to Stravinsky as distinct manifestations of what we now term modernism. Rather one read all the works of a particular writer, learned a style and a phenomenological world, to which one converted. … This meant, however, that the experience of one form of modernism was incompatible with another, so that one entered one world only at the price of abandoning another. … The crisis of modernism came, then, when it suddenly became clear that “D. H. Lawrence” was not an absolute after all, not the final achieved figuration of the truth of the world, but only one art-language among others, only one shelf of works in a whole dizzying library.3

Although a reader of Foucault might locate this realization at the origin of modernism (Flaubert, Manet) rather than at its conclusion,4 Jameson’s account of the crisis of modernity strikes me as both persuasive and problematic—problematic because persuasive. Like Lyotard, he plunges us into a radical Nietzschean perspectivism: each oeuvre represents not simply a different view of the same world, but corresponds to an entirely different world. Unlike Lyotard, however, he does so only in order to extricate us from it. For Jameson, the loss of narrative is equiva- lent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically; hence, his diagnosis of postmodernism as “schizophrenic,” meaning that it is characterized by a collapsed sense of temporality.5 Thus, in The Political Unconscious he urges the resurrection not simply of narrative—as a “socially symbolic act”—but specifically of what he identifies as the Marxist “master narrative”—the story of mankind’s “collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity.”6 Master narrative—how else to translate Lyotard’s grand récit? And in this translation we glimpse the terms of another analysis of modernity’s demise, one that speaks not of the incompatibility of the various modern narratives, but instead of their fundamental solidarity. For what made the grands récits of modernity master narratives if not the fact that they were all narratives of mastery, of man seeking his telos in the conquest of nature? What function did these narratives play other than to legitimize Western man’s self-appointed mission of transforming the entire planet in his own image? And what form did this mission take if not that of man’s placing of his stamp on everything that exists—that is, the transformation of the world into a representation, with man as its subject? In this respect, however, the phrase master narrative seems tautologous, since all narrative, by virtue of “its power to master the dispiriting effects of the corrosive force of the temporal process,”7 may be narrative of mastery.8 What is at stake, then, is not only the status of narrative, but of representation itself. For the modern age was not only the age of the master narrative, it was also the age of representation—at least this is what Martin Heidegger proposed in a 1938 lecture delivered in Freiburg im Breisgau, but not published until 1952 as “The Age of the World Pic- ture” [Die Zeit die Weltbildes].9 According to Heidegger, the transition to modernity was not accomplished by the replacement of a medieval by a modern world picture, “but rather the fact that the world becomes a picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.” For modern man, everything that exists does so only in and through representation. To claim this is also to claim that the world exists only in and through a subject who believes that he is producing the world in producing its representation:

The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word “picture” [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man’s producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) 41 42 Craig Owens

Thus, with the “interweaving of these two events”—the transformation of the world into a picture and man into a subject—“there begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capa- bility given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery of that which is as a whole.” For what is representation if not a “laying hold and grasping” (appropriation), a “making-stand-over- against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters)”?10 Thus, when in a recent interview Jameson calls for “the reconquest of certain forms of representation” (which he equates with narrative: “‘Narrative,’” he argues, “is, I think, generally what people have in mind when they rehearse the usual post-structuralist ‘critique of representation’”),11 he is in fact calling for the rehabilitation of the entire social project of modernity itself. Since the Marxist master narrative is only one version among many of the modern narrative of mastery (for what is the “collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity” if not mankind’s progressive exploitation of the Earth?), Jameson’s desire to resurrect (this) narrative is a modern desire, a desire for modernity. It is one symptom of our postmodern condition, which is experienced everywhere today as a tremendous loss of mastery and thereby gives rise to therapeutic programs, from both the Left and the Right, for recuperating that loss. Although Lyotard warns— correctly, I believe—against explaining transformations in modern/ postmodern culture primarily as effects of social transformations (the hypothetical advent of a postindustrial society, for example),12 it is clear that what has been lost is not primarily a cultural mastery, but an economic, technical, and political one. For what if not the emergence of Third World nations, the “revolt of nature,” and the women’s movement—that is, the voices of the conquered—has challenged the West’s desire for ever-greater domination and control? Symptoms of our recent loss of mastery are everywhere apparent in cultural activity today—nowhere more so than in the visual arts. The modernist project of joining forces with science and technology for the transformation of the environment after rational principles of function and utility (Productivism, the Bauhaus) has long since been abandoned; what we witness in its place is a desperate, often hysterical attempt to recover some sense of mastery via the resurrection of heroic large-scale easel painting and monumental cast-bronze sculpture—mediums themselves identified with the cultural hegemony of Western Europe. Yet contemporary artists are able at best to simulate mastery, to manipulate its signs; since in the modern period mastery was invariably associated with human labor, aesthetic production has degenerated today into a massive deployment of the signs of artistic labor—violent, “impassioned” brush- work, for example. Such simulacra of mastery testify, however, only to its loss; in fact, contemporary artists seem engaged in a collective act of disavowal—and disavowal always pertains to a loss … of virility, masculinity, potency.13 This contingent of artists is accompanied by another which refuses the simulation of mastery in favor of melancholic contemplation of its loss. One such artist speaks of “the impossibility of passion in a culture that has institutionalized self-expression”; another, of “the aesthetic as something which is really about longing and loss rather than completion.” A painter unearths the discarded genre of landscape painting only to borrow for his own canvases, through an implicit equation between their ravaged surfaces and the barren fields he depicts, something of the exhaustion of the earth itself (which is thereby glamorized); another dra- matizes his anxieties through the most conventional figure men have conceived for the threat of castration—Woman … aloof, remote, unap- proachable. Whether they disavow or advertise their own powerlessness, pose as heroes or as victims, these artists have, needless to say, been warmly received by a society unwilling to admit that it has been driven from its position of centrality; theirs is an “official” art which, like the culture that produced it, has yet to come to terms with its own impoverishment. […]

The Visible and the Invisible

[…] Modern aesthetics claimed that vision was superior to the other senses because of its detachment from its objects: “Vision,” Hegel tells us in his Lectures on Aesthetics, “finds itself in a purely theoretical relationship with objects, through the intermediary of light, that immaterial matter which truly leaves objects their freedom, lighting and illuminating them without consuming them.”14 Postmodernist artists do not deny this detachment, but neither do they celebrate it. Rather, they investigate the particular interests it serves. For vision is hardly disinterested; nor is it indifferent, as Luce Irigaray has observed: “Investment in the look is not privileged in women as in men. More than the other

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) 43 44 Craig Owens senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. … The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.”15 That is, it is transformed into an image. That the priority our culture grants to vision is a sensory impoverishment is hardly a new perception; the feminist critique, however, links the privileging of vision with sexual privilege. Freud identified the transition from a matriarchal to a patriarchal society with the simultaneous devaluation of an olfactory sexuality and promotion of a more mediated, sublimated visual sexuality.16 What is more, in the Freudian scenario it is by looking that the child discovers sexual difference, the presence or absence of the phallus according to which the child’s sexual identity will be assumed. As Jane Gallop reminds us in her recent book Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction, “Freud articulated the ‘discovery of castration’ around a sight: sight of a phallic presence in the boy, sight of a phallic absence in the girl, ultimately sight of a phallic absence in the mother. Sexual difference takes its decisive significance from a sighting.”17 Is it not because the phallus is the most visible sign of sexual difference that it has become the “privileged signifier”? However, it is not only the discovery of difference, but also its denial that hinges upon vision (although the reduction of difference to a common measure—woman judged according to the man’s standard and found lacking—is already a denial). As Freud proposed in his 1926 paper on “Fetishism,” the male child often takes the last visual impression prior to the “traumatic” sighting as a substitute for the mother’s “missing” penis:

Thus the foot or the shoe owes its attraction as a fetish, or part of it, to the circumstance that the inquisitive boy used to peer up at the woman’s legs towards her genitals. Velvet and fur reproduce—as has long been suspected—the sight of the pubic hair which ought to have revealed the longed-for penis; the underlinen so often adopted as a fetish reproduces the scene of undressing, the last moment in which the woman could still be regarded as phallic.18

What can be said about the visual arts in a patriarchal order that privileges vision over the other senses? Can we not expect them to be a domain of masculine privilege—as their histories indeed prove them to be—a means, perhaps, of mastering through representation the “threat” posed by the female? In recent years there has emerged a visual arts practice informed by feminist theory and addressed, more or less explicitly, to the issue of representation and sexuality—both masculine and feminine. Male artists have tended to investigate the social construction of masculinity (Mike Glier, Eric Bogosian, the early work of Richard Prince); women have begun the long-overdue process of deconstructing femininity. Few have produced new, “positive” images of a revised femininity; to do so would simply supply and thereby prolong the life of the existing representational apparatus. Some refuse to represent women at all, believing that no representation of the female body in our culture can be free from phallic prejudice. Most of these artists, however, work with the existing repertory of cultural imagery—not because they either lack originality or criticize it—but because their subject, feminine sexuality, is always constituted in and as representation, a representation of difference. It must be emphasized that these artists are not primarily interested in what representations say about women; rather, they investigate what representation does to women (for example, the way it invariably positions them as objects of the male gaze). For, as Lacan wrote, “Images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman. … It is representation, the representation of feminine sexuality whether repressed or not, which conditions how it comes into play.”19 Critical discussions of this work have, however, assiduously avoided—skirted—the issue of gender. Because of its generally deconstructive ambition, this practice is sometimes assimilated to the modernist tradition of demystification. (Thus, the critique of representation in this work is collapsed into ideological critique.) In an essay devoted (again) to allegorical procedures in contemporary art, Benjamin Buchloh discusses the work of six women artists—Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Martha Rosler— claiming them for the model of “secondary mythification” elaborated in Roland Barthes’s 1957 Mythologies. Buchloh does not acknowledge the fact that Barthes later repudiated this methodology—a repudiation that must be seen as part of his increasing refusal of mastery from The Pleasure of the Text on.20 Nor does Buchloh grant any particular significance to the fact that all these artists are women; instead, he provides them with a distinctly male genealogy in the Dada tradition of collage and montage.

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) 45 46 Craig Owens

Thus, all six artists are said to manipulate the languages of popular culture—television, advertising, photography—in such a way that “their ideological functions and effects become transparent”; or again, in their work, “the minute and seemingly inextricable interaction of behavior and ideology” supposedly becomes an “observable pattern.”21 But what does it mean to claim that these artists render the invisible visible, especially in a culture in which visibility is always on the side of the male, invisibility on the side of the female? And what is the critic really saying when he states that these artists reveal, expose, “unveil” (this last word is used throughout Buchloh’s text) hidden ideological agendas in mass-cultural imagery? Consider, for the moment, Buchloh’s discussion of the work of Dara Birnbaum, a video artist who re-edits footage taped directly from broadcast television. Of Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), based on the popular television series of the same name, Buchloh writes that it “unveils the puberty fantasy of Wonder Woman.” Yet, like all of Birnbaum’s work, this tape is dealing not simply with mass-cultural imagery, but with mass-cultural images of women. Are not the activities of unveiling, stripping, laying bare in relation to a female body unmistakably male prerogatives?22 Moreover, the women Birnbaum re-presents are usually athletes and performers absorbed in the display of their own physical perfection. They are without defect, without lack, and therefore with neither history nor desire. (Wonder Woman is the perfect embodiment of the phallic mother.) What we recognize in her work is the Freudian trope of the narcissistic woman, or the Lacanian “theme” of femininity as contained spectacle, which exists only as a representation of masculine desire.23 The deconstructive impulse that animates this work has also suggested affinities with poststructuralist textual strategies, and much of the critical writing about these artists—including my own—has tended simply to translate their work into French. Certainly, Foucault’s discussion of the West’s strategies of marginalization and exclusion, Derrida’s charges of “phallocentrism,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” would all seem to be congenial to a feminist perspective. (As Irigaray has observed, is not the “body without organs” the historical condition of woman?)24 Still, the affinities between poststructuralist theories and postmodernist practice can blind a critic to the fact that, when women are concerned, similar techniques have very different Sherrie Levine, After Edward Weston 4, 1980. Black-and-white photograph, 10 × 8 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. meanings. Thus, when Sherrie Levine appropriates—literally takes— Walker Evans’s photographs of the rural poor or, perhaps more perti- nently, Edward Weston’s photographs of his son Neil posed as a classical Greek torso, is she simply dramatizing the diminished possibilities for creativity in an image-saturated culture, as is often repeated? Or is her refusal of authorship not in fact a refusal of the role of creator as “father” of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law?25 (This reading of Levine’s strategies is supported by the fact that the images she appropriates are invariably images of the Other: women, nature, children, the poor, the insane. …)26 Levine’s disrespect for paternal

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) 47 48 Craig Owens authority suggests that her activity is less one of appropriation—a laying hold and grasping—and more one of expropriation: she expropriates the appropriators. […] There is irony in the fact that all these practices, as well as the theoretical work that sustains them, have emerged in a historical situation supposedly characterized by its complete indifference. In the visual arts we have witnessed the gradual dissolution of once fundamental distinctions—original/copy, authentic/inauthentic, function/ornament. Each term now seems to contain its opposite, and this indeterminacy brings with it an impossibility of choice or, rather, the absolute equiva- lence and hence interchangeability of choices. Or so it is said.27 The existence of feminism, with its insistence on difference, forces us to reconsider. For in our country good-bye may look just like hello, but only from a masculine position. Women have learned—perhaps they have always known—how to recognize the difference.

Notes

1. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 8. 2. Ibid., 68. 3. Fredric Jameson, “‘In the Destructive Element Immerse’: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution,” October 17 (Summer 1981): 113. 4. See, for example, “Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 87–109. See also Douglas Crimp, “On the Museum’s Ruins,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 43–56. 5. See Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in Foster, The Anti- Aesthetic, 119–134. 6. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 19. 7. Hayden White, “Getting Out of History,” diacritics 12, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 3. 8. Thus, the antithesis to narrative may well be allegory, which Angus Fletcher identifies as the “epitome of counter-narrative.” Condemned by modern aesthetics because it speaks of the inevitable reclamation of the works of man by nature, allegory is also the epitome of the antimodern, for it views history as an irreversible process of dissolution and decay. The melancholic, contemplative gaze of the allegorist need not, however, be a sign of defeat; it may represent the superior wisdom of one who has relinquished all claims to mastery. 9. Translated by William Lovitt and published in The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 115–154. I have, of course, oversimplified Hei- degger’s complex and, I believe, extremely important argument. 10. Ibid., 149, 50. Heidegger’s definition of the modern age—as the age of representation for the purpose of mastery—coincides with Theodor Adorno and Max Hork- heimer’s treatment of modernity in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (written in exile in 1944, but without real impact until its republication in 1969). “What men want to learn from nature,” Adorno and Horkheimer write, “is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.” And the primary means of realizing this desire is (what Heidegger, at least, would recognize as) representation—the suppression of “the multitu- dinous affinities between existents” in favor of “the single relation between the subject who bestows meaning and the meaningless object.” What seems even more significant, in the context of this essay, is that Adorno and Horkheimer repeatedly identify this operation as “patriarchal.” 11. Fredric Jameson, “Interview,” diacritics 12, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 87. 12. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, 63. Here, Lyotard argues that the grands récits of modernity contain the seeds of their own delegitimation. 13. For more on this group of painters, see my “Honor, Power and the Love of Women,” Art in America 71, no. 1 (January 1983): 7–13. 14. Quoted in Stephen Heath, “Difference,” Screen 19, no. 4 (Winter 1978–1979): 84. 15. Interview with Luce Irigaray in Les femmes, la pornographie, l’erotisme, ed. Marie-Fran- çoise Hans and Gilles Lapouge (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 50. 16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 46–47. 17. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Daughter’s Seduction (Ithaca, NY: Cor- nell University Press, 1982), 27. 18. Sigmund Freud, “On Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 217. 19. Jacques Lacan, “Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality,” in Femi- nine Sexuality, ed. J. Mitchell and J. Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 90. 20. On Barthes’s refusal of mastery, see Paul Smith, “We Always Fail—Barthes’ Last Writings,” SubStance, 36 (1982): 34–39. Smith is one of the few male critics to have directly engaged the feminist critique of patriarchy without attempting to rewrite it. 21. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 43–56. 22. Lacan’s suggestion that “the phallus can play its role only when veiled” suggests a different inflection of the term “unveil”—one that is not, however, Buchloh’s. 23. On Birnbaum’s work, see my “Phantasmagoria of the Media,” Art in America 70, no. 5 (May 1982): 98–100. 24. See Alice A. Jardine, “Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva,” enclitic 4, no. 2 (Fall 1980): 5–15. 25. “The author is reputed the father and owner of his work: literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the ‘droit d’auteur’ or ‘copyright,’ in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution). As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father.” Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 160–161.

The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (excerpt) 49 50 Craig Owens

26. Levine’s first appropriations were images of maternity (women in their natural role) from ladies’ magazines. She then took landscape photographs by Eliot Porter and Andreas Feininger, then Weston’s portraits of Neil, then Walker Evans’s FSA photographs. Her recent work is concerned with Expressionist painting, but the involvement with images of alterity remains: she has exhibited reproductions of Franz Marc’s pastoral depictions of animals, and Egon Schiele’s self-portraits (madness). On the thematic consistency of Levine’s “work,” see my review, “Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks,” Art in America 70, no. 6 (Summer 1982), 148 [reprinted in this volume]. 27. For a statement of this position in relation to contemporary artistic production, see Mario Perniola, “Time and Time Again,” Artforum 21, no. 8 (April 1983): 54–55. Per- niola is indebted to Baudrillard; but are we not back with Ricoeur in 1962—that is, at precisely the point at which we started? Not Painting: The New Work of Sherrie Levine Stephen W. Melville Not Painting Stephen W. Melville © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Is there anything to say about Sherrie Levine’s knot paintings at Basker- ville + Watson that is not obvious? They seem Duchampian objects, assisted readymades wrapped in a pun, and we are now living rather late a history of such gestures. What can such an action do now that has not already been done? These questions edge on to the turf long occupied by Levine, that of repetition. This has frequently enough been taken to mark a problematic of exhaustion: all our gestures are worn out by or appropriated in our media and our history; authority, originality, capital-A Art, are all no longer possible for us. But Levine’s work has been ever more explicitly oriented not to exhaustion but to desire and its historical situation. If the early appropriations of photographs seemed unproblematically described and titled as, e.g., After Edward Weston, the series of Schiele pictures, the masturbatory content of which is rendered essential by titles like Self-Portrait after Egon Schiele, made the question of artistic desire central, shifting the ground of Levine’s work irretrievably away from any univocal critique and into the difficult double-binds of a modernism so late as to involute itself into its own post-. Her production now operates explicitly within the knot of this double-bind, and her paintings- that-are-not become powerful explicators of this place. We may see in the bare wood of these things an allusion to the Arte Povera impulse to find a margin in which art can still work (Levine has offered this connection in conversation); the gold paint on that wood may put us in mind of icons, recalling us to the critique of the status of 52 Stephen W. Melville art that is now a precondition of any work’s gaining an audience; and the shallow glass-fronted boxes these works are may recall Joseph Cor- nell, while their emptiness might lead us to note that wood is the material of frames as gilt is the stuff of ornament. Both of these are what Kant calls “parerga,” accompaniments of works, “erga,” rather than works themselves. We may feel invited to place these things, along with their accompanying striped generic abstractions, beside Allan McCollum’s generic paintings and frame-heavy simulacra, but Levine means these objects to count nonetheless as works and not simply as allusions to works. These things that are not paintings frame themselves framing themselves with only an absence, a not, at their center—which is to say that there is a center, and it is marked and remarked, traced and represented, not wholly absent, a painting after all, knot painting. The Dadaist gesture thus eventuates in a work. The can-opener is used against itself, opening a way into art—or, more precisely, showing that once one avows the knot of one’s desire it will have neither outside nor any simple inside, framing a world. Kant’s parerga become ever more internal to the work they would simply delimit, so that in the history that follows from Kant’s text we find Duchamp displaying for us the internal logic of the frame even as Martin Heidegger is unpacking and insisting upon its ontological import, a different shape of the support. If we can no longer be very comfortable with the sometimes mystifying rhetoric of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” we cannot for all that step free of his claims for the radical framing and framedness of works.1 Heidegger and Duchamp are tangled together in Levine’s Gold Knots—laced in the logic Jacques Derrida calls parergonal. In this entanglement flashes the complex, partial fractal of our world, neither fully literal nor simply rhetorical, neither without art nor apart from society.2 There is no such thing as not painting except outside of that Scene of Instruction that has lodged in one the desire to paint (or has lodged one in the desire to paint, as if desire were not simply personal but something more like a place in the world). It may be that inhabiting, or being inhabited by, this desire means that one can own that desire only as a desire to overcome the very painting which is its source and root, but also its block or denial; and one’s desire might then be driven to reform itself as a desire not to paint and finally to acknowledge itself as a desire to not-paint. The term “Scene of Instruction” is Harold Bloom’s,3 Sherrie Levine, Small Gold Knot 1, 1985. Metallic paint on plywood, 20 × 16 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. and his explorations of the intertwining of influence and desire, defense and appropriation seem particularly apt to the work of this most patient explorer of that moment at which the artist is captured or forged by the desire of art. But if Levine’s work unfolds within a deep awareness of the centrality of influence, it does not wholly embrace Bloom’s schemas of Oedipal agonism and violence. Rather, it demands that we take an interest in an older vocabulary of artistic formation: copy, imitation, forgery, are essential to the experience of her work, as is a sense for the distinctions that hold these terms together and apart. The Stripes shown with the Gold Knots deploy themselves uncannily between imitation and

Not Painting 53 54 Stephen W. Melville

Sherrie Levine, Small Gold Knot 3, 1985. Metallic paint on plywood, 20 × 16 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. forgery, refusing what is nonetheless their originality, displaying their vulnerability to influence, the fact of their (perhaps mere) following. They would stand on no ground more powerful or autonomous than that (they refuse genius). The automatisms of desire examined here cut far deeper than the strategies of geometry and chance that give rise to the two series. These strategies seemed themselves at one time in our recent history adequate safeguards against ingrained automatisms of taste, but for Levine there is no way out of the school of desire—no way that matters in any case. We are enrolled there before we know it. Levine has mentioned Blinky Palermo in connection with these works. The most obvious link is between the plywood of the Gold Knots and that of his Happier Than the Morning Sun or his untitled trap- ezoid, but one can also say that the stripe paintings, however much they may bring Marden to mind when taken individually, are built as a series on principles similar to those of Palermo’s late work (Himmelsrichtungen, e.g.). Those more familiar with Palermo will probably find more to say, but I want simply to stress the way in which Levine’s relation to Palermo in this work is not caught by any notion of “appropriation.” It must be posed in terms of influence or imitation; and, given the fragmentary nature of Palermo’s oeuvre, it is tempting to appeal Bloom’s notions of “clinamen” and “tessera,” limitation and completion, to gloss the particularity of this moment. But it is also of interest to note the continuity between Palermo’s concern with permeability and Levine’s; this would suggest that Levine wants to find a way to think about influence—that is, a way to be influenced—that does not turn on defense and aversion but on a certain openness, a willingness to admit belatedness. On Bloom’s account such openness condemns one to weak or minor art; I think it is difficult now to say whether Levine’s bet is that this is not so or that a certain minority is just what matters now. Either way, we are asked what we make of strength now—how we make that out. Like her parergonal frames, Levine’s imitations take us back to Kant and the transition, not fully achieved in his text, from an aesthetics of the school to one of genius.4 Kant’s text may stage the primal scene of a certain modernist formalism, a scene whose ambiguities we have acted out over and over again but rarely placed under close analysis. Sherrie Levine’s enchantment with modernism can return us to Kant’s text— not to illustrate, because its complexities lie beyond illustration—but in order that we might read it, might reinstruct ourselves or reinscribe ourselves within it, perhaps altering our destination. This we can call her deconstruction of the modernist frame; it is not quite what we would mean if we were to speak of a demystification of the frame with all that would promise of deliverance from it. The genitive in the desire of art is ambiguous, at once generative and disabling. Duchamp’s work can seem torn by these ambiguities, unfolding with equal radicality toward the idealism of the Large Glass and the materiality of the readymades, toward the extraordinary closure and literalism of Étant donné … and the transcendent tropicality of The Bride. … To see Levine’s Knot paintings in this wake—to read them as

Not Painting 55 56 Stephen W. Melville if entitled “after Duchamp” or “Not Painting after Duchamp”—is to see them as they struggle with and against that legacy, reinventing art out of what we have (perhaps too easily) taken as its undoing; inevitably in that act they reinvent Duchamp as well, making a new issue of the unity of that oeuvre, knotting Levine’s desire indissolubly with Duchamp’s (call this art history). This work is not what one would call “site-specific” but I find it difficult to keep from reading its showing at Baskerville + Watson—on lower Broadway, between the ironies and confidences of SoHo and the more exuberant cynicisms and brashnesses of the East Village—as emblematic of the situation in which she undertakes this exploration of the difficulty of making art now—“after modernism,” in a phrase whose exact inflection seems caught in permanent oscillation. I am reminded of her remarks to the Village Voice—remarks that are only on their surface not about the announced topic of the politics of art:

… artists worry about the power of the past and its representations. … Finding a new way to express this old concern is a task fraught with contradiction. We are accused of irony when the concern is expressed and nostalgia when it is denied. … I feel my pieces are most successful when they function as membranes permeable from both sides so that there is an easy flow between an imaginary past and an imaginary future, between my history and yours.

Membranes. Not paintings. Would-paintings. Knot paintings. Works that step outside of negation within its knots—passant en dehors de négation dans ses noeuds. Passing into French, the work becomes feminist, working within and against the phallus, le noeud, as it works in and against what it is not, declining mastery and eliding or evading Bloom’s Oedipalism. In the scene of instruction an audience is engendered, formed, and transformed; in and across these membranes the criteria of strength are placed in question and perhaps revised. Art goes on, gets done, does not end: repetition beyond exhaustion.

Notes

1. For example: “The strife that is brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is figure, shape, Gestalt. Createdness of the work means: truth’s being fixed in place in the figure. Figure is the structure in whose shape the rift composes and submits itself. This composed rift is the fitting or joining of the shining of truth. What is here called figure, Gestalt, is always to be thought in terms of the particular placing (Stellen) and framing or framework (Ge-stell) as which the work occurs when it sets itself up and sets itself forth” (Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter [New York: Harper and Row, 1971], 64). Or again: “The conflict is not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carries the opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of their common ground. It is a basic design, an outline sketch, that draws the basic features of the rise of the lighting of beings. This rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings the opposition of measure and boundary into their common outline. … The rift-design is the drawing together into a unity, of sketch and basic design, breach and outline.” Part of the difficulty of taking this kind of thing to apply to work like Levine’s lies in its transparent participation in the rhetoric of sublimity; but this should also be part of its interest, since Kant’s analysis of the sublime is source of much of what is most powerfully disruptive of the formalism enunciated in his analytic of taste (thus, for example, Hei- degger’s description of the “rift-design” as at once outline and breach captures much of the structure and logic Derrida reads in the parergon). 2. Heidegger’s aesthetic concerns take on a social and implicitly political dimension through his diagnosis of the essence of technology as framing (Ge-stell) in such essays as “The Age of the World Picture,” “The Question Concerning Technology,” and “The Turning.” I suspect that the most powerful approach to the politicality of contemporary art will come through the articulation of this material with more recent French work. 3. Harold Boom, A Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 4. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publish- ing Co., 1951).

Not Painting 57

Bachelors* Rosalind Krauss Bachelors Rosalind Krauss © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

The unpleasant thing, and one that nags at my modesty, is that at root every name in history is I. —Deleuze and Guattari, quoting Nietzsche

“I always wanted,” she said, “to find a way to make sculpture. … What I wanted was to be able to make a sculpture.” And what had he said, a quarter of a century ago now? “I wanted to make a railroad car,” he wrote from Voltri, in 1962. “Given enough time I could have made a train.” David Smith, however, was already a sculptor; the “way” he wanted to find was not on the order of how to make the object, but how to make its phallic import absolutely unmistakable, even to himself. So these two desires—to make a sculpture, to make a train—are different desires, we might say; they are the effects of different orders of fantasy. But why, you could ask, would Sherrie Levine need to “find a way” to make a sculpture? Isn’t the strategy of the readymade (her adoptive strategy, after all) itself, in fact, already, a way of making sculpture? The series of things it produces—the snow shovel, the bottle rack, the urinal, the comb—are already part of the order of the freestanding object; even his calendar (Pharmacy) and the advertisement he “corrected” (Apollinaire Enameled) enter the world of the readymade as objects rather than images. And so her grids, painted on lead, are likewise displaced from the 60 Rosalind Krauss domain of the image. Through the strategy of the readymade they are reinvented as chessboards, as checkerboards, as objects. If she called her early, pirated photographs “collages,” it is because the image, scissored out of the pages of an art book, acquires along with its status as a readymade, the reified condition of the object. But the difference between the (readymade) object and the sculpture may be this: that the sculpture makes it absolutely unmistakable, even to us, that the world of things to which it belongs is that of the “part-object.” It has not come from off the shelf, of supermarket, or department store, or bookshop. There is no question but that it has migrated off the body: so many detachable organs, so many areas of intensity, the effects of so many proper names. The series: Rodin, Mail- lol, Duchamp, Brancusi, and closer to us, Morris, Andre, Hesse. So many names to which to attach the effect of a desire for the part-object: breast, penis, eye, hand, anus. The Rodin effect we could call it, the Brancusi effect, the Duchamp effect. It was in 1952 that Michel Carrouges isolated the Duchamp effect. He called it “the bachelor machine,” and he linked it to another series of names: Franz Kafka’s mechanism for torture through tattooing, in The Penal Colony; Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s irresistible automaton, in The Eve of the Future; Raymond Roussel’s machines for textual production, in Impressions of Africa.1 The model of the machine was clearest, most complete, however, in Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Everything was there: the plan for perpetual motion which the “Litanies” chanted as “vicious circle”; the complexity of the intercon- nections (glider, malic molds, sieves, chocolate grinder, scissors …); the sterility of the cycle, its autoeroticism, its narcissism; the utter self- enclosure of the system, in which desire is at one and the same time producer, consumer, and reproducer (recorder or copier), which is to say, the bachelor apparatus, the oculist witnesses, the top inscription of the bride. In 1972 the bachelor machine was there, waiting, for Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to hook it up to the body without organs, to plug it into the logic of the desiring-machines, to reinvent the Duchamp effect within the world of schizo-capitalism.2 The total interconnectedness of the machines and the absolute deterritorialization of the world onto which they cling: an undifferentiated socius, the body without organs, the subject without a center, the world without Oedipus. Marcel Duchamp, Neuf Moules Mâlic, 1914–1915. Glass, lead, oil paint, varnished steel, 26 × 40 inches. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris AM1997–95. Photo: Philippe Migeat. © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resources. © Association Marcel Duchamp / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2017.

The bachelor machine of Anti-Oedipus constructs the relationship between the desiring-machines and the body without organs, between the bachelor’s world of production and the bride’s domain of inscription. The desiring-machines produce by intercepting the continuous flows of milk, urine, semen, shit; they interrupt one flow in order to produce another, which the next machine will interrupt to produce a flow for the next, and so on. Each machine is a part-object: the breast- machine, the mouth-machine, the stomach-machine, the intestine- machine, the anus-machine. As opposed to this the body without organs produces nothing; it re-produces. It is the domain of simulation, of series crossing one another, of the possible occupation of every place in the series by a subject forever decentered. “I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father. I venture to say that I am also Lesseps. … I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new idea—that of a decent criminal. I am also Chambige—also a decent criminal. … The unpleasant thing, and one that nags at my modesty, is that at root every name in history is I.”3 The body without organs is the place of inscription; it is textual,

Bachelors 61 62 Rosalind Krauss semiological. But its logic is not that of the signifier, that of representation. Rather it is the logic of flows of information in which the content of the first flow (its product) is the expressive medium of the second (its producer). Deleuze and Guattari quote McLuhan here: “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.”4 The same logic is at work, then, within the world of production— the desiring-machines—and that of consumption and reproduction— the body without organs. That is the achievement of the bachelor machine; it holds up the mirror in which the blossoming of the bride reflects onto the cemetery of the uniforms and liveries, in which the inscription is the same as the production, a place where the erotic energy of the “shots” is locked forever in a “mirrorical return.” The bachelor machine produces this folding of the one over the other as a moment of pure intensity. In 1989 the bachelor machine was there, waiting, to provide Sher- rie Levine with “a way” to make sculpture. The Duchamp effect she needed was not that of the readymade, which describes the relations among commodities, and between commodities and their consumers, but that of the bachelor-machine, which invokes the connections between part-objects. And the malic molds, otherwise called the cemetery of uniforms and liveries, would provide these part-objects “readymade.” The “way to make a sculpture” would be to exhume them, to liberate them from the plane of The Large Glass, to cast them in three dimensions. By freeing them from their connection in the series: sieves- malic molds-capillary tubes-glider-chocolate grinder …, they would be liberated ever more securely into the other series: Rodin-Maillol- Brancusi-Duchamp-Hesse …, the series that includes David Smith most clearly when he dreams of wanting to make a train. And nothing needs to be added to these bachelors. They are just as Duchamp left them, readymade. Not as he made them, for on the field of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even they are in the two dimensions of sheets of lead; but as he projected them, within the notes he so patiently stored in The Green Box. For he envisioned them as molds after all, and therefore to be cast. Each cast producing a bachelor, Sherrie Levine, The Bachelors (Gendarme), 1989. Cast glass, approximately 12 × 5 × 5 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. or as he would also put it, a malic form. And the contents of the molds he described as well, when he imagined the illuminating gas inside the molds as solidifying into frosty spangles—“a thousand spangles of frosty gas.” To cast the bachelors in glass, and then to frost the glass, is therefore to add nothing, to create nothing. It is to accept Duchamp’s bachelors, his malic forms, readymade. It is to do nothing more than to occupy that historical position that can be called the Duchamp effect. The only thing here that is added to the Duchamp effect is what is subtracted, namely, the effect of cutting away the bachelors from the rest

Bachelors 63 64 Rosalind Krauss

Sherrie Levine, The Bachelors (Gardien de la Paix), 1989. Cast glass, approximately 12 × 5 × 5 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. of the apparatus, from the glider, the sieves, the grinder, the scissors, the splashes …, and finally of separating each bachelor from his fellows. The isolation is what is added. It is, we could say, an added subtraction. So that the question is how to characterize this excision that the artist’s own desiring-machine produces within the connected flow of Duchamp’s apparatus, of Duchamp’s glass. One answer is that the added subtraction equals “lack.” Desire, according to this, desires what is absent. It wants to have the missing thing. And that thing that is missing will, by giving lack its name, also give desire its meaning. In this reading the sculpture occupies the level of a fantasy. It stays within the world of representation as the model of something desired. Its lack is castrative; its meaning is redemptive, meaning redeemed. It is sculpture as the desire for meaning. But another answer is that the added subtraction allows the bachelor, now cast in glass, actually to be produced, and thus to be added to the domain of reality. The bachelor does not mark the place of lack but rather the site of production. And within this production it forms a series, for it is produced in multiple. It creates a flow of little glass repli- cas, the continuum of the series which the machine now slices apart, making one little thing after the other. And, actualized within this production, it enters the whole array of other, similar, series: 1. The art-historical series: lying recumbent, like the gleaming bronze eggs of Brancusi, it attaches itself to them, as so many infantile moments of contentment, so many breasts, mouths, bellies. 2. The aesthetic series: sheltering within its little, glass vitrine, it is like the fragments of antiquity displayed in a museum—so many torsos, legs, arms, shoulders. Which means its glass case becomes a museum- machine, interrupting the flow of the antique Kunstindustrie— the fifth-, fourth-, third-century circulation of multiples within the classical decorative-arts production—isolating and creating the neoclassical fragment, the aestheticized form of modernist sculpture as a desire for the part-object. 3. The formal series: a series within a series, it is the glass container inside the glass container of its case, reproducing itself in ever smaller miniaturizations, glass as the form of transparency, as form en abîme. 4. The commodity series: “The question of shop windows,” Duchamp had written, “The exigency of the shop window / The shop window proof of the existence of the outside world. …” Desiring produc tion and economic production are not metaphors for one another, Anti-Oedipus insists; their relation is not that of representation. Their connection is real. It is the very isolation of Levine’s Bachelor that allows us to plot the array of its possible connections, to see it not only as the little phallic part-object, the desiring-machine, but also as the slippery, undifferentiated surface of the closed form, Anti-Oedipus’s body without organs, the

Bachelors 65 66 Rosalind Krauss locus of desire as an endless play of substitutions. And it is onto this deterritorialized body that the Levine effect can be plotted, produced. The little Joey of Bruno Bettelheim’s Empty Fortress announces his own occupation within the labyrinth of the bachelor machine. “Con- necticut, Connect-I-cut,” he cries. All of his life functions, Joey claims, will only work if he is plugged into machines that will, with their motors whirring and their lights blinking, allow him to breathe, to eat, to defe- cate. “Connect-I-cut” is Joey’s rare instance of the first person, of “I.” Mostly he is a third person, a function of the machine. He is an effect of the machines, rather than a subject. The Joey effect. To release desire into a world without a subject, a world in which proper names form a series among themselves, a world in which the name claims nothing, “means” nothing, even though it continues to produce: this is a description of the Levine effect.

Notes

* This essay was written for the Sherrie Levine exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in September, 1989. 1. Michel Carrouges, Les machines célibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954). 2. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, letter to Jakob Burckhardt, January 5, 1889, as cited in Anti- Oedipus, 86. 4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 23, as cited in Anti-Oedipus, 241. Presence Withdrawn Erich Franz Presence Withdrawn Erich Franz © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Many works of art attract our gaze because they deny themselves to it. What we look at refers to a reality that eludes representation. If ever transposed into an image, this reality would be neutralized, flattened; it would lose itself. In Jan Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter, the equal value assigned to the description of all surfaces, as defined by the light that falls on them, hints to us that there is another reality beyond the visible. The reading of the letter is a different, inward form of seeing, a movement within the young woman, which we can imagine but never know. The emphatically planar construction of Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat makes us aware of a cruel reality that the picture itself cannot embrace: a reality that can be imagined—and represented—only through the difference between it and pictorial fixity. The dotted, “Divisionist” painting of Georges Seurat makes us aware of urban life, and of its contingent lighting, precisely because the painting upholds so methodical a detachment from all that would be lost in a more direct depiction. The strength of conviction conveyed by some of the great Ameri- can artists of the past few decades rests on the deduction-free reality of the painting, its total visibility. Frank Stella’s “What you see is what you see” bears witness to a faith in form and in communicative clarity that is the polar opposite of the experience we get from the art of Sherrie Levine. In her work, the visible leads on to an awareness of something that would be lost if it were ever clearly shown. Meaning is generated, not by adding to the visible, but by withdrawing it. Something remains 68 Erich Franz behind, which we experience as an absence conveyed by seeing, a sensory quality. Our knowledge and memory do not step in to fill the void left by this experience of the unseeable: on the contrary, our inner images serve only to reinforce the awareness of withdrawal. When we look at Levine’s photographs of reproductions of photographs, we can of course persist in taking an interest in the depiction of American farm life (Walker Evans), or in the surreal, formative energies of a detail of a plant (Karl Blossfeldt); but it is characteristic of Levine’s work that it thwarts us in any such interest. The slight blurring and coarsening, the withdrawal of the sensuous presence of the motif, nullifies any effort on our part to look into the image and distinguish its forms. The effort is stopped short and dissipated before it can progress even as far as the still-detectable pictorial form would suggest. The photograph becomes a mental image, distanced by the mental block that the blurred reproduction sets up. The “second” photograph, the one we are looking at, takes as its motif the reproduction of the first; but we cannot perceive this motif directly, only as “a picture on top of a picture” (as Levine puts it), overlaid by the other according to position. This resistance to our intrusive effort to distinguish forms gives rise to a completely different sensory experience: the perception of a neutral surface of unvarying value. On ceasing to penetrate into the objective content of the photograph, we start to perceive it as a taut, gray, tonal veil, across which the eye glides without resistance. The museum-like framing and serial arrangement of these works still further emphasizes the homogeneity of the gray surface inside each wide, white mat. The tendency to iron out visual distinctions, which we cheerfully accept as one of the drawbacks of reproduction, becomes a disturbingly ambivalent quality when applied to an original. Levine cultivates this visual homogeneity as a sensory quality in its own right; its affinity to reproduction means that it cannot itself be reproduced. Her watercolors after reproductions of Kandinsky, Matisse, or Lissitzky float like an even, intangible film on the strong texture of the thick, handmade paper. Every form that exists in the source is duplicated, but nothing of its original impetus, its gestural expression, or its structural energy. The watercolor captures the light gray background of the reproduction with the same nondirectional meticulousness as the values of pre-existent forms and planes. With watercolor and brush, Sherrie Levine has even traced the drawn lines of Egon Schiele or Blinky Palermo and neutralized their motion. Such evenness and homogeneity could hardly be more remote from the formal energies of her source images, and makes us aware of two things at once: the absence of all that, and the totally different sensory quality of the thin film of paint. In the creation of this effect of a neutral, homogeneous expanse, a major part is played by the support: paper, as the bearer of the transparent watercolor; mahogany, across which the tempera-like casein paint extends in meticulous, nondirectional evenness, leaving the wood visible at the edges and its grain showing through the paint; lead, with its dull, metallic materiality against which the painted checkerboard or chevron divisions are all the more distinctly present as a sensitive and evenly

Sherrie Levine, After Wassily Kandinsky, 1983. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 14 × 11 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

Presence Withdrawn 69 70 Erich Franz

Sherrie Levine, After Egon Schiele 1, 1985. Graphite on paper, 14 × 11 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. spread skin of color; plywood, with its boldly marked grain and its knots with which the thinly applied metallic paint marks a delicate—but also a particularly lifeless—contrast. There is always an evident care and caution in the way in which the surface is coated with paint. Once more, as in the photographs of photographic reproductions, the evenness of the application blocks the intrusive, penetrative gaze. Its “all-over” quality creates a surface as impenetrable as it is inert and inexpressive; none of our efforts to make distinctions, to empathize, and to comprehend can take hold. The experience of a “surface” implies the existence of something behind it—and this is not only because these images are “after” other images. The sources are not always individual works of art; sometimes they are generalized patterns of Modernist art, such as the Surrealist use of chance by Max Ernst and Hans Arp (Gold Knots), or the color combinations chosen by Palermo and Brice Marden (Broad Stripe), or the formal repetitions of Minimal art (Small Checks, Lead Checks). As with reproductions, we do not need to be familiar with the sources of Levine’s originals to tell that their forms come from somewhere else; but we are also aware that in sensory terms they display an entirely personal approach that negates the implications of their alien origins, transposing derived material into a homogeneous, undifferentiated, material presence. In most cases, our knowledge does not extend to the source image itself, but only to a cultural pattern of some kind: an artist’s style, a group of works, a period (Constructivism). Neutralized by the homogeneity of Levine’s works, these recollected patterns take on an abstracted, used quality. Levine’s works cannot possibly be confused with their source images: only with the reproductive clichés that we carry in our minds. Stylistic labels have often obstructed, falsified, even blocked an appropriate response to a work of art (as with Seurat and “Neo- Impressionism,” Kandinsky and “Expressionism,” Jasper Johns and “Pop Art”). But it is hard to imagine any label less appropriate than that of “Appropriation” for Sherrie Levine. This work is not the appropriation of anything: it is the imposition of remoteness, detachment, inaccessibility. It is, in fact, an homage to the cited works inasmuch as the impene- trability of their re-production seems to protect them from acquiring an omnipresence that can be looked at anywhere. Levine’s works are originals (even though they are not always made by her: as with many other artists, the neutrality of the production process is part of the original, sensory quality of the work). The inherent ambivalence of the process by which these originals are perceived, with its glimmerings of alternative cultural patterns, may well run counter to a traditional definition of originality in terms of novelty of invention; but then, that concept, multiplied ad infinitum, is now more a commercially motivated fiction than anything else. The sensory experience of a uniform surface, in Levine’s work, reduces all our mental baggage of cultural clichés, all our craving for projections, explorations, and distinctions, to the opaque materiality of the visible. It is not these works but reproductions, and the art trade, that set out to “appropriate” works of art. The act of positioning a four- color reproduction in the layout of a magazine is an “appropriation.” Levine performs a similar, albeit visible and sustained, ironing-out of her source images; but she makes this into an original experience. In her work, what is there to be looked at does not seem to bring its source along with it. Its homogeneity makes us aware of the loss of that source, and this in turn directs our attention toward those qualities of artistic experience that elude the eye: memory, the inaccessibility of the

Presence Withdrawn 71 72 Erich Franz original, its presence before the inward eye, the intimacy of personal experience, the awareness of the past and of vanished contexts. There is a difference between dumbness and silence. Sherrie Levine’s works remain silent on that which one cannot look at (and which cannot be supplemented by words, by meaning, or by knowledge). In her sculptures, Levine has carried still further this emphasis on the materiality of what can be looked at. A picture, after all, is a pointer to something else, to the source of the visible. Her sculptures are more hermetic: there is no side from which they are meant to be seen; they are closed and self-contained. Their lower parts are so shaped as to suggest an effort to avoid contact with their surroundings. And yet all this physical isolation goes together with almost baroque forms: The Bachelors (After Marcel Duchamp), 1989; Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), 1991; La Fortune (After Man Ray), 1990. By their sheer arbitrariness, these forms suggest that they have an origin somewhere else, whether known to us or not. Where the origin is known, the way back becomes still more shadowy and elusive. In the source objects themselves (Duchamp, Man Ray), origin and motivation were mysterious and almost mythical. As sources for sculpture their forms are elusive: as in Duchamp’s lost readymade, with its two-dimensional existence in pictures. The source objects reconstructed in Levine’s sculptures no longer exist; or else we can no longer tell whether they ever existed or not. Her sculptures are not surface alone but physical presence; and yet they point once more to what cannot be looked at. The lifeless elegance of their objecthood displays the absence of something that they, with their intensely perceived, immediate presence, seem to drive still further away from us: out of this space, out of this time.

(Translation: David Britt) Seeing Sherrie Levine* Howard Singerman Seeing Sherrie Levine Howard Singerman © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

“A fetish is a story masquerading as an object.”1

I am trying to see Sherrie Levine’s photographs “After Walker Evans” again, to see what they look like now, some thirteen years after their initial appearance. The work has been taken up for analysis time and again since its debut, and within the community that knows them, Levine’s rephotographs have become legendary—which is to say, we know them now as a story. Yet my attempt to see them again stems from the sense that they always were a story, and that they were never seen—although seen might not be quite the right verb—otherwise. The images were Evans’s, they were well known to begin with, and the works “After Walker Evans” were from the outset the tale of Levine’s appropriation of his FSA images of the 1930s. From the beginning, then, they have existed not as the images present on the wall, but as an absence in those images, as the evidence of a strategy, the result of a procedure, a process in the art world. Their criticality stemmed from their challenge to authorship, and to the idea of the unique and original work of art. But it followed as well from their challenge to what could be seen, to the visual as the final meaning of the work of art and the final arbiter of its quality. My attempt is to resee the photographs “After Walker Evans,” for I had the chance to see them once before, in a gallery in Los Angeles in 1983. The images came to me well known; between their introduction at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981 and their arrival in California, 74 Howard Singerman they had been included in a number of influential essays on such now familiarly postmodern topics as allegory and appropriation. But they had seldom been written of as though they were individual works of art. “Perhaps the reason Levine’s work is not reviewed,” I wrote at the time, “is because it is seen to have no body, and reviewers are, after all, asked to discuss specific works.”2 Against what I perceived as the reduction of the work to its strategy, I wanted to insist that there was something to look at, an object, and more than that, an image that must be taken into account. What I recorded, however, was my own difficulty in looking and in accounting for it. My looking was circumspect and interrupted; moreover, it seems clear in retrospect that what I saw was precisely a body, a specific and gendered one.

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 the frames, the mat, and the glass; that is, on the Levines. The forays I did make into the pictures were, in a sense, embarrassed, camouflaged as the search for rephotography, for a uniqueness that would protect both Evans and Levine by proving the original inimitable and the artist’s hand unavoidable.3

Why did I turn from the image? Why couldn’t I look at it comfort- ably, closely? I looked away not because there was nothing to see, but because I didn’t want to see what was there. At this distance, ten years later, my denial of what I had seen—and even that what I had seen was something—reenacts the orthodox Freudian narrative of fetishism. I could not look because something I had expected to see wasn’t there; something was missing and, to continue Freud’s story, I looked elsewhere, down to what I had seen before, what I had seen through, and what had framed the image for me. There, in the frame, I found (or founded) the plentitude that would fill in for the wholeness of the work. As in Freud’s story, the lack I saw was only relative, a comparison based on what I imagined would be there. What I had expected to see in Levine’s “After Walker Evans” was what I though her title had promised: the photograph’s absence, its historical supersession or its critical irrelevance. That is, I had imagined—and here my story strays from Freud’s—I would see a lack at the center of her work. But what Levine’s frames marked out, what they staged even as they canceled it, was not the absence of Walker Evans, but the presence of his image. The image was in excess, more than I expected and too much to see. At the same time it was too little: it could not be the image that would fill the desire it had created, the desire to see it in full and with its own name. Levine’s frame, and the story I could tell of her framing, became a substitute object, and my turn to it was an attempt to stop the oscillating doubleness of the image. But the compromise that I constructed on the encircling and suspending frame was a particularly ambiguous one, a fetish modeled after Freud’s suspensory belt, which, he pointed out, “could mean that a woman is castrated, or that she is not castrated, and … even allows of a supposition that a man may be castrated.”4 According to this reading, my fetish of the frame was not as resolute as I had imagined, for it stands not only for the difference I had produced, but also for one that I could not tell. Its effects needed to be reinforced, its story told and retold. • “The halting and rudimentary art of reading.”5

What I had seen was “neither nothing nor simply something … a kind of negative perception,” as Samuel Weber describes the male child’s “discovery” of the absence of the maternal phallus; it was a “perception, whose object or referent—perceptum—is ultimately nothing but a difference, although no simple one, since it does not refer to anything, least of all to itself, but instead refers itself indefinitely.”6 Like the sight of the mother’s body, and after it, Levine’s rephotographs initiate and retrace “a crisis of phenomenality,” a sight or scene that “can no longer be simply perceived, but rather read and interpreted.”7 Even now, it is the not- enough-difference of “After Walker Evans” that continues to generate the essay before you, which, particularly in its insistence on seeing, should be read as an attempt to make the work stop: “The defense against this crisis of perception and phenomenality … expresses itself in the compulsive curiosity” whose task it is “to penetrate, discover, and ultimately to conserve the integrity of perception.”8 Perhaps from the outset, this paper is impossible. Called on to see, “to conserve the integrity of perception,” its presence here is a monument to and a supplement for what cannot be seen and what is not there.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 75 76 Howard Singerman

In Weber’s version, the scenario of castration produces not only the fetishist but the reader, a figure who has appeared with some frequency as the personification of postmodernism. The most familiar and influential story of the reader’s origins for Levine’s work and for that of her peers in the early 1980s was Roland Barthes’s pronouncement that “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”9 Levine appropriated this line and other bits and pieces of Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” uncredited and modified to fit her occupation, to weave together an artist’s statement in 1981, repeating after him that the “birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.”10 Along with Barthes, Borges and Duchamp were clearly crucial to the birth of the viewer that Levine announced, and that appeared by the late 1970s to have announced the visual postmodern. Writing in the late 1950s, Duchamp insisted on a relation among artist, work, and viewer that took reading, and the reader’s share in the production of meaning, as its model. “The creative act,” he wrote, “is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifica- tions and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”11 Between the artist and the work, “a link is missing,” and it is the spectator who fills “this gap which represents the inability of the artist to express fully his intentions.”12 Duchamp’s language of gaps and fillings might connect Barthes’s story to Weber’s, and it might serve, as well, as a caution as we envision the viewer who is born with the death of the artist. Barthes’s reader is but a “place,” a textual “destination”; it is “without history, biography, psychology,” and yet it has a gender: “he is simply that someone.”13 As an act of reading, an exercise of Borges’s technique of “deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution,”14 we might pay closer attention to gender as we read Walker Evans’s scenes of Hale County, Alabama. What difference would it make to read Evans’s images of Hale County as the works of Sherrie Levine, and to take Levine at her word when she insists that “because I am a woman, those images became a woman’s work.”15 To raise the question of gender here, first of all in—or as—the difference between Walker Evans and Sherrie Levine, is not to disinter the author as a source of meaning for the work; it is not to do away with the good work Levine has performed in her critique of authorship. Rather, it is to insist that sexual difference—along with the further differences that its supposedly transparent inscription or its seeming absence are made to signify—is constructed in the act of reading; it is part of the reader’s share. In the coming pages, I will argue that the difference that taking Evans’s images for a woman’s work makes is contin- uously staged in the standard narratives of the history of photography, in the difference constructed in essays and catalogs between Evans’s photographs and those of Dorothea Lange or Helen Levitt. The meaning of sexual difference is a social meaning, and the ideologies of gender and its divisions are part of what is called into play as the spectator, in Duch- amp’s words, “brings the work in contact with the external world.” • “[They] didn’t make me feel I wanted to have one, they made me feel I wanted to be one.”16

Before going further, however, I want to return to my claim that Levine’s first critics did not see her work as images, and to double it with Levine’s own, now infamous complaint, “I was getting tired of no one looking at the work, looking inside the frame. … I wanted to make it clear that what I’ve always made is pictures—to be looked at. That what’s inside the frame is important to me.”17 In Benjamin Buchloh’s “Allegorical Procedures,” for example, Levine’s work is all frame and always strung along a temporal axis: it is a procedure whose task it is to illuminate through its emptiness the art world itself as frame.

Levine’s work functions exclusively within [“the framework of institutionalized art distribution”]. Only as a commodity can the work fulfill all its functions. … Its ultimate triumph is to repeat and anticipate in a single gesture the abstraction and alienation from historical context to which the work is subjected in the process of commodification and acculturation.18

In Buchloh’s presentation, any image valued as art—that is, valued by the institutions of art distribution—can be marked as a commodity by the emptying out of repetition. The writers who did recognize Levine’s images noted them only as types, representatives of categories “chosen,” in Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s words, “for their ideological density.”19

Seeing Sherrie Levine 77 78 Howard Singerman

Within the frame as without it, what mattered was what was being abstracted and alienated: the value of her images, like that of her frames, was their sameness. What was of interest to Douglas Crimp in Levine’s choice of Edward Weston’s photographs of his son’s nude torso was how generic, how fungible those pictures appeared: “According to the copyright law, the images belong to Weston, or now to the Weston estate. I think, to be fair, however, we might just as well give them to Praxiteles, for if it is the image that can be owned, then surely these belong to classical sculpture.”20 Rosalind Krauss, writing of a “discourse of the copy” and the repression of its repetitions beneath the would-be solid and originary grounds of modernism, followed Crimp’s discussion. From within “the discourse of reproductions without originals” that Krauss insistently calls “our perspective,” Weston’s close-cropped images of his son’s nude torso “are given in that long series of Greek kouroi by which the male nude torso has long ago been processed and multiplied within our culture.”21 From this “strange new perspective,” Weston’s vision is no longer whole and singular, no longer formative; rather his image is drawn from and returns to a series of images that would include and allow not only his own image of his son but also Levine’s “After Edward Weston.” Under Levine’s reading—or, in order to mark a certain kind of inversion, after Sherrie Levine—Weston’s image becomes as needy as her own. Rather than marking an origin or occupying a first and seminal position, it too is open to influence and needs to be filled. As Krauss puts it, “Levine’s act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print, opens the print from behind to a series of models,” to those kouroi.22 “From behind” is, as Kaja Silver- man has recently suggested, a quite troubling, if suggestive direction to be taken from, particularly for the male artist or author: “If castration is the insignia of sexual receptivity, then to attribute castration to the father is in a sense to ‘go behind’ him, i.e., to position him as a potential penile receptacle.”23 Levine’s Weston is the castrated father, opened up from behind. Craig Owens makes much the same point: “Levine’s disrespect for paternal authority suggests that her activity is less one of appropriation—a laying hold and grasping—and more one of expropriation.”24 This cutting away of paternal property is, for Owens, performed by Levine’s own refusal to appropriate its prerogatives: “Is her refusal of authorship [for herself] not in fact a refusal of the role of creator as ‘father’ of his work, of the paternal rights assigned to the author by law?”25 No longer pinned to the name of the father at either site, both images become copies, both are found wanting: desire becomes a continuous circuit. As Crimp writes, “the desire of representation exists only insofar as it never be fulfilled, insofar as the original always be deferred.”26 Levine’s objects are, as many have noted, “about desire”; they are objects of desire, or perhaps a record of such objects. We imagine her to have said something like, “I wish I had done that” or “I wish that were mine.” But to become hers, her objects have had to become empty; they have had to become, more correctly, desiring objects. They are incomplete and cannot be made whole whatever they fill themselves with, however much theory they generate. In Lacan’s famous formula- tion, what we desire is the desire of the other. To desire something, even something like a photograph by Edward Weston, is to want that something’s acknowledgment of its own incompleteness, its own wanting for something: a lover, say, or an artist or an owner. As the Weston that Levine’s copy wants to be fades beneath her covering, as it becomes a sign for itself in order to defend itself against the very copy it needs even to be recalled, Levine’s image becomes a work, momentarily full and complete—just what the Weston needs. Yet the pair is mismatched, the completion is once again too little and too much. The engine that runs the Lacanian subject and that insists that every matched set will be incomplete is that when we get what we want—the wanting object— we find it wanting. But it is precisely Levine’s matching, her completing of the object with its own image, that makes her work so hard to look at. It is not only that, as Crimp says, “the desire that is initiated by that representation does not come to closure [even] around the [actual] little boy, is not satisfied at all by him.”27 It is also that the Weston can no longer be before the Levine, or outside the task of not being a Sherrie Levine. Of course, Levine’s Weston is the copy. It is taken, as Levine admits in each of her titles, after another image. Indeed, her photographs might even be identifiable as copies; the signs of her intervention that I searched for in front of her “After Walker Evans” might be available to a more practiced eye. Knowing which came first, one might see Levine’s images as “slightly washed-out pictures of Walker Evans’s pictures.”28 Erich Franz has suggested that their slightly legible difference gains its significance in the series “before” and “after.”

Seeing Sherrie Levine 79 80 Howard Singerman

The photograph becomes a mental image, distanced by the mental block that the blurred reproduction sets up. The “second” photograph, the one we are looking at, takes as its motif the reproduction of the first; but we cannot perceive this motif directly, only as “a picture on top of a picture” (as Levine puts it), overlaid by the other according to position”29

What we are left with is the experience of a surface, “a neutral surface of unvarying value,” a “taut, gray, tonal veil, across which the eye glides without resistance.”30 Levine’s work consists, then, only in its plausible sameness and its tiny difference; it exists only in its not being an Evans or a Weston. But its not being seems unarrestable, for it frames whatever Evans, whatever Weston, we would check against it. We make Levine’s image differ by imagining from it a real Weston, yet the one that we conjure up is still not the object we need. It, too, has the thinness of an image, an image constructed in and magnified by its difference from Levine’s version, a picture of itself as real. Through the washed- out surfaces of Levine’s photographs, we see, if only dimly, a “genuine” picture that has been reduced to a picture of itself, a representation of itself as something—as the sign for another, more proper name. • Let Us Now Praise Famous Men31

What would it be like to read a certain set of photographs as if there were by Walker Evans? The Aperture monograph on Evans begins with the premise that it would be like nothing else: “Walker Evans’s mani- fold portrait of America defies the ordinary categories of photographic criticism. There is certainly no other body of American photographs quite like it.”32 Now, there are those of Sherrie Levine, which are precisely “quite like it,” except that they are marked as “not quite” by virtue of Levine’s difference. To read Evans’s images as if they were originally signed by Sherrie Levine, as if they were made by a woman, would be to engender the work differently, or at least to raise the issue of gender. For in the Aperture monograph not only has Evans no equal, he has no gender. And in Lincoln Kirstein’s 1938 essay for the Museum of Modern Art, he hasn’t even a body; there he is only an eye: “the photographic eye of Walker Evans,” “a sophisticated, yet unaffected eye.”33 Repeating its own extraction from the body, “the puritanical eye of Walker Evans” separates, divides, judges; it “knows best what … must be uncovered, cauterized and why. The view is clinical.”34 “Evans,” writes Lloyd Fonvielle, author of the Aperture monograph, “always avoided devices of outright emotional appeal, but he thereby made it possible for his plain, self-effacing records to convince and move the viewer on a level of serious moral reflection and concern.”35 The sublimation that Evans is credited with, the erasure of the self as an emotional body, is opposed in Fonvielle’s formula to the outright emotional appeal, an approach that is not self-effacing, but embodied: it is incar- nated in the body of the woman photographer. The political agenda, he writes, “is quite obvious in the work of some FSA photographers— Dorothea Lange, for example, whose artful sentimentality has often the flavor of propaganda. But Evans had a purer notion of his job, and he followed his own lights.”36 Too political, too sentimental, too flavored, Lange’s work is remarkably excessive; it is at once too artificial and too present, too identified with its object. Beaumont Newhall puts a better face on this closeness, but closeness remains Lange’s attribute. Twice within the space of a paragraph her realism, her own puritanical eye, is softened by an identification that allows neither reflection nor sublimation; hers is not a higher-level discourse, but a deeper one.

During the Depression she was dismayed to see bread lines of the homeless and unemployed and was determined to photograph them so that others might feel the compassion she so deeply felt. … [Thus] her photographs of migratory workers with overladen jalop- ies on the highways, living in tents pitched in fields or in the town dump, in transient camps, working in the fields, are at once an accurate record and a moving comment, for she had a deep feeling of compassion and respect for them.37

If the detached eye that detaches in its image is the leitmotif of Lin- coln Kirstein’s Walker Evans, and if independence and uniqueness—the standard mythology of the male artist—are the themes of Evans’s Aper- ture monograph, then instinct is the organizing thread of Aperture’s volume on Dorothea Lange. What separates her as an artist is what marks her difference from Walker Evans. “Dorothea Lange,” the

Seeing Sherrie Levine 81 82 Howard Singerman monograph by Christopher Cox begins, “lived instinctively, but she always found herself in the right place at the right time.”38 In Cox’s story, not even the political agenda that Evans’s biographer suggested that Lange had too much of is hers: “she instinctively joined a cultural movement to reveal the impact of economic and social changes in the lives of the American people.”39 Her instinct and her ability to feel come at the cost of knowledge; they are predicated on a refusal to know. “Her method,” Cox quotes critic Willard Van Dyke, “is to eradicate from her mind before she starts, all ideas which she might hold regarding the situation—her mind like an unexposed film.”40 Lange’s sensory organ is not the dividing and clinical eye that projects its order on the world; rather, it is an invisible interior rendered as an emptiness, an absence that is filled from without. The figure that Cox paints of Dorothea Lange as a woman artist, instinctively closer to her subjects and directed as though from somewhere else, is not given in her images without the gender of the artist coming into play. Characteristics are looked for and then found as the traces of the overbearing presence of the woman artist, whose work’s primary meaning will then be those necessarily inadvertent indexical traces. The difference of the work is made to signify along the lines of sexual difference, made to tell that story first and foremost, and naturally. This accounts for the familiarity of Max Kozloff’s suggestion that Helen Levitt’s documentary images of the 1940s thematize closeness. They are touching—they make just the outright, overreaching appeal that Lange’s did, and that Evans’s photographs supposedly eschewed—because they are about “the theme of touching”: “A Way of Seeing shows people’s recurrent need to touch each other, to pair …”41 To read a Walker Evans as a Sherrie Levine would be first to see, and then to understand as significant, a certain closeness. Perhaps it would be to see Evans’s Allie May Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama raise her hand to her cheek and touch herself, as does Lange’s Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. Such an attribution might haunt the symmetry of Evans’s image of the Burroughses’ kitchen with James Agee’s touching description of the feel of the towel that currently hangs as the soft glow- ing center of a framework of rough lines: “it is particularly clammy, clinging, and dirty-feeling.”42 Or it might render as crucial detail what is now almost imperceptible in Evans’s image of the Burroughses’ fireplace: the inscription at the edge of a calendar picture of a “pretty brunette with ornate red lips, in a wide-brimmed hat,” hanging above the mantel. “The title is Cherie,” Agee noted, “and written twice, in pencil, in a schoolchild’s hand: Louise, Louise.”43 Signing the picture twice, ten-year-old Louise Burroughs claimed it not only as hers, but as herself; she has signed it not only as its author, as though it was her object, but as its subject, as though it was her being. Louise’s double signature marks her closeness to the image, her place within its story; in that it, doubles Levine’s own. Following Newhall, Cox, Van Dyke, and Kozloff, to read the artist as a woman would be to find the photographer herself deeply within the

Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans 4, 1981. Black-and-white photograph, 10 × 8 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 83 84 Howard Singerman

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936 (printed later). Photogravure, edition 79/300, 12 × 9¼ inches. The Art Institute of Chicago, Bequest of Michael Cohen, 2008.421. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY. image. She is not the artist who stands with us on this side of the surface and understands the object of the image as an object in series, which is how Kirstein described Evans’s detaching, arranging project: “It would be a logical continuation of what he has begun if Evans were to go into every state of the Union making series of his faces, houses, streets, and rivers.”44 Rather, the woman artist exists only within the image as another object like it, imagined as the image’s second story. Her story is inseparable from the story of the seen, the depicted. James Agee made this clear in a 1946 essay on Helen Levitt, which parsed the beauty of Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans 7, 1981. Black-and-white photograph, 10 × 8 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. photography between Levitt’s “fluid,” “volatile” work and the “monu- mentally static” images of Atget, Mathew Brady, and, of course, Walker Evans.45 Not surprisingly, their images are “richest in meditativeness, in mentality … whereas the volatile work is richest in emotion.”46 More to the point, the works of Evans et al. are characterized as the work of authors through their alignment with the hard-won products of other authors; Agee writes of the “Homeric or Tolstoyan nobility” of Brady’s photographs, the “Joycean denseness” of Evans’s.47 Levitt’s lyricism is given neither patrimony not struggle; rather, it is “the simplest and most direct way of seeing,” approaching “the pure spontaneity of true folk

Seeing Sherrie Levine 85 86 Howard Singerman

Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans 8, 1981. Black-and-white photograph, 10 × 8 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. art.”48 As Agee separates Levitt’s practice from that of the authors of photography, he aligns her fully with the figures in her pictures; he describes the folks in Levitt’s photographs with the same adjectives he has used to characterize her: “It is worth noticing that nearly all the people in her photographs … are of the relatively volatile strains; that many are children. … In children and adults alike, of this pastoral stock, there is more spontaneity, more grace, than among human beings of any other kind.”49 In Agee’s model, to read Levine as the picturer of the migrant mother or the sharecropper’s wife would be to read her as one with them, as part of the same series, or rather of the same species, and with them on the other side of the image. • “When the Goods Get Together”50

Writing of the questions of gender that were elided in the first supportive readings of the works of Levine, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Martha Rosler, Craig Owens described the pictures in Levine’s photos as though her project was the same as Walker Evans’s, as though she was, as Kirstein said, “making series.” “The images she appropriates,” he wrote, “are invariably images of the Other: women, nature, children, the poor, the insane. …”51 What Owens’s list of types announces is photography’s insistent conjoining of seeing and knowing, precisely that conjunction which, as Samuel Weber noted, is threatened and split by that uncanny sight whose difference is not given to vision. The task of the Others that Owens lists, and that are available to us “only through the cultural representation” that photography helps to fix,52 repeats the task of the fetish. Each is an attempt to determine and make whole that which is not: the mother’s body, the phenomenal world, and, most crucially, the subject. The Other, like the glance at and the shine on the nose, is a visual product of the subject, a projection. Owens writes that Levine “consistently focuses on mechanisms whereby our own animal instincts, our bestiality, are externalized, projected onto another. … Externalized in an alien and alienating image, our drives come to appear to us as universal and natural forces which must be controlled or repressed.”53 To produce the Other is to place the subject’s split elsewhere, to affix it permanently to a bodily surface where it can be checked on, where it is given to be seen and photographed. Other- ness and fetishism depend on the remarking of the skin of the body. Kaja Silverman, for example, has written of fetishism’s first move, the one before the “discovery” of the mother’s lack, as the inscription of lack “onto the material surface of the female body.”54 And Frantz Fanon noted long ago that “for the white man The Other is perceived at the level of the body image.”55 “I am fixed,” wrote Fanon, as a photograph is fixed and as it fixes; and as he continues, his description includes the chemical thinness of the photographic image as well. “Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. … I feel, I see in those white faces that it is not a new man who has come in, but a new kind of man, a new genus. Why, it’s a Negro!”56 The Others

Seeing Sherrie Levine 87 88 Howard Singerman that Owens lists are, as he notes, always images; even before their photographic representations, they have been made bodies, and their bodies have been rendered both as surface and as natural sign. There is a certain fixity to Owens’s own description of Levine’s project; it has its own invariability as it credits her with an invariable consistency. Owens’s synopsis of Levine’s images appears in a number of places through his writings and always as a list: “Levine does not represent women, the poor, or landscapes, but Woman, Poverty, Nature. … All of Levine’s images have been images of the Other.”57 In his writing, she, too, is fixed, she is like something, and of her images we can say, “I know them … that’s the way they are.” Yet it is just these phrases, Fanon suggests, that mark the colonial discourse on the Other, that betray “a determination to objectify, to confine, to imprison, to harden,” and that “show this maximum objectification successfully achieved.”58 Owens’s repetition allows me to perform a slide in the sentence that begins, “The images she appropriates are invariably images of the Other.” It lets me push Levine across the colon and onto the list, “: women, nature, children, the poor, the insane,” and insist that she stand with the other images in Owens’s queue, the other objects in Evans’s series. There, she can be “distinguished, divided, separated, classified as like or unlike, according to whether [she has] been judged exchange- able.”59 This last insistence on the fungibility of the Other as type and image is from Luce Irigaray’s theorization of the exchange of women as the model for all systems of exchange, and for the properties of the commodity. Irigaray’s woman-as-commodity shares a great deal with the Other I have used Owens to introduce; there is once again an insistence on the body as a surface given to be seen, and on which the subject sees only what is made in—and by—his image. “As medium of exchange, she is no longer anything but semblance.”60 Like the Other, the commodity has no self, it cannot be a subject: “just as a commodity has no mirror that it can use to reflect itself, so woman serves as a reflection, as image of and for man. … Her value invested form amounts to what man inscribes in and on its matter: that is, her body.”61 Owens’s essay rehearses feminism’s critique of theory and “the distance [theory] maintains between itself and its objects—a distance which objectifies and masters.”62 He draws the terms of his argument from Irigaray, quoting her assertion that “investment in the look is not privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance.”63 What feminist criticism makes clear, he argues, is the link between “the privileging of vision [and] sexual privilege.”64 In this reading, Levine’s refusal of “an objectifying that goes forward and masters” (as Owens quotes Heidegger) is one with her refusal of “the paternal rights assigned to the author by law.”65 Her standing with those who have been taken, rather than across from them, can be read as a gesture of solidarity. Levine positions herself—or is positioned—as an object on the side of the picture over and against a viewing subject who marshals the distancing, separating conjunction of vision and theoretical knowledge. In the list and under her name, a name that displaces a proper name, the commodities are, as Irigaray says, among themselves. On the other side of the proper name, outside paternal authority or going behind it, we can imagine “‘another’ kind of commerce,” one that recalls the play that might be given in the birth of the reader: “Exchanges without identifiable terms, without accounts, without end … enjoyment without a fee … pleasure without possession.”66 Buchloh argued that Levine’s work can fulfill its promise only as a commodity; perhaps it is this other commodity, a commodity on the side of the Other, that it must become. Levine’s procedure might then be read as a story of liberation. Indeed, Owens suggest as much when he states that Levine “expropriates the appropriators.”67 Against “appropriationism,” understood as the taking possession of an image for oneself, as one’s private property—and against the setting apart and attaching as an appendage that also define the word—Levine’s procedure is one of expropriation, an act closer to castration than to the envy she has often been accused of. To expropriate, in the OED, is “to put something out of one’s control, to take it out of the owner’s hands.” • “I know very well, but all the same.”68

I have written a sexual politics for “After Walker Evans,” but the effectiveness of those politics, or the value of having them, is still a question. I have derived them by submitting Levine’s images to the familiarly sexist language of mainstream photo history, and by relying on a body of feminist theory that ties the female subject to her body, that renders her in terms of “proximity rather than distance, passivity, overinvolvement and overidentification.”69 The conjoining of Levine’s work—a

Seeing Sherrie Levine 89 90 Howard Singerman work marked by its self-knowledge and its critical distance—with French feminism seems incongruous. Founded in the specific experience of the female body, found in the image of and constructed as an analogue for the specificity of that body,70 the scenarios of Irigaray or Hélène Cixous might be more fruitfully deployed in relation to the works of Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois, works that insist on their materiality, and that recall flesh or fluids or the spread of sexuality across surfaces. More troubling for me, and for the critical claims I want to continue to make for Levine’s work, are the literally eccentric politics of French feminism; as Mary Ann Doane has suggested, those who “acti- vate the tropes of proximity, overpresence or excessive closeness to the body, and contiguity,” do so “in the construction of a kind of ‘ghetto politics’ that maintains and applauds women’s exclusion from language and the symbolic order.”71 Nonetheless, I want to continue to pursue the ramifications of matching a certain description of Levine’s work with French feminism’s rereading of Freudian psychoanalysis. In this I will follow Doane’s linking of the female subject of psychoanalysis and the female spectator posited by the Hollywood “woman’s film” of the 1940s, retracing her outlines of the “coincidence of cinematic scenarios and psychoanalytic scenarios of female subjectivity.”72 Levine’s photographs “After Walker Evans” have been seen; they are, I would argue, the objects of a spectating. Thus, I want to turn to a discussion of female spectatorship borrowed from film theory, through which I hope to come once again to a politics characterized by a conscious assumption of the body as an image, and by the masquerade. It is a commonplace of feminist film theory that the spectator—or his abstraction in and as the gaze—is male, and that woman is the object of his—or its—look. The technologies of cinema, everything that operates in the booth behind the viewer, prop up his look and allow him to align himself with the gaze. Across the theater, at the other end of that looking as it projects itself and as it distances, “all the resources of the cinematic apparatus—including framing, lighting, camera movement, and angle—are brought to bear in the alignment of the woman with the surface of the image.”73 The woman that Doane writes of here is the woman imaged on the screen; her counterpart is “the male character [who] is allowed to inhabit and actively control [the image’s] illusory depths, its constructed three-dimensional space.”74 Yet the tropes of female spectatorship that Doane draws from the woman’s film and from French feminism—proximity, overinvolvement, overidentification— make clear that the woman viewing is equally aligned with “the surface of the image,” with the image of the Other like her on the screen. Like the diegetic male character who acts in a three-dimensional space, however illusionary, the masculine spectatorial gaze opens and operates a distance between subject and object. In contrast, the female spectator’s gaze—or her temporary borrowing of the spectator’s chair—has the effect of erasing her, of pinning her to the spectacle through her identifications and insisting on her presence on the screen. In Lacan’s formula- tion of this overlapping of subject and object for the female spectator, what has been manufactured for her cannot be separated from her own manufacture: “images and symbols for the woman cannot be isolated from images and symbols of the woman.”75 This is the overlapping signed for in Louise Burroughs’s doubled signature. The inability to distance that characterizes the difference of female spectatorship is determined, at least for Irigaray and Michèle Montrelay as Doane presents them, by the difference of her sex, the closeness and the nonvisuality of her sexual organs. “Female specificity is … theorized in terms of spatial proximity. In opposition to this ‘closeness’ to the body, a spatial distance in the male’s relation to his body rapidly becomes a temporal distance in the service of knowledge. … This knowledge … turn[s] on the visibility of the penis.”76 The visibility of that organ has, in theory, two consequences: it is the sight that the little girl sees and knows without pausing to interpret, in Freud’s words, “in a flash”; and it is the narcissistically invested “little man” that provides the boy an image of himself as whole and separate, an autonomous organ that mirrors his equally invested ego, “the organized portion of the id.”77 As Doane quotes Irigaray, “The masculine can partly look at itself, specu- late about itself, represent itself and describe itself for what it is, whilst the feminine can try to speak of itself through a new language, but cannot describe itself from the outside or in formal terms, except by identifying with the masculine, thus by losing itself.”78 The distance that the little boy opens up is not only figured in what he can see over and across his body, but also in the difference he worries over between the little girl’s body and his own: “It is in the distance between the look and the threat that the boy’s relation to knowledge of sexual difference is formed.”79 Castration anxiety is the site where spatial distance becomes temporal distance, and where lack, “a gap between the

Seeing Sherrie Levine 91 92 Howard Singerman visible and the knowable,” is introduced for the male subject.80 The woman in Freud’s scenario is always already castrated; she cannot be threatened—and thereby made into a reader and a desiring subject—by the sight of difference. Thus, for Freud, and for French feminism, “what the woman lacks is lack,”81 the psychic institution of lack that is at once denied and asseverated in the figure of the fetish.82

Fetishism—the ability to balance knowledge and belief and hence to maintain a distance from the lure of the image—is also inaccessible to the woman, who has no need of the fetish as a defense against a castration which has always already taken place. Female spectatorship, because it is conceived of temporally as immediacy (in the reading of the image—the result of the very absence of fetishism) and spatially as proximity (the distance between subject and object, spectator and image is collapsed), can only be understood as a con- founding of desire.83

The inability to fetishize—to say, yes I know, but all the same—has specific ramifications for the female spectator. Given in that inability are the viewing positions left open for her: overidentification and transvestism, the former marked by closeness, the latter by the distance pried open through identification with the masculine. As Doane insists, the female spectator’s assumption of the gaze is a “peculiarly ironic assumption of subjectivity”:84 it comes at the cost of, or simply without, identity and autonomy. Certainly it comes without the coherent boundaries that are crucial to subjectivity, or rather to the fiction of subjectivity that is fashioned in the image of the male subject’s ego. “It is this illusion of a coherent and controlling identity which becomes most important at the level of social subjectivity. And the woman does not even possess the same access to the fiction as the man.”85 The masochistic overidentification of the female spectator with the woman on the screen and with her story effaces whatever subjectivity it offers as it demands that the female spectator, in Freud’s words, “suffer on behalf of a whole crowd of people and to act all the parts in a play single-handed.”86 The “transvestite” identification with the male spectatorial position, too, takes place at the cost of the boundaries of subjectivity. An out-of-body experience, it cannot fulfill the image of subjectivity constructed for the male as coherent and identical; as Laura Mulvey writes, it “does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes.”87 Transvestite identification, playing the role of the artist, is what Levine is most often accused of. She is charged with cross-dressing herself in male artist’s clothes, with stealing a position along with a name. “Levine, with her appropriations, has done what few artists ever do (‘women artists’ especially),” writes one critic, who leaves the scare quotes around “woman artist” unremarked; “she has made a name for herself.”88 Another doubts that she has succeeded in becoming a truly proper name, but the terms of her failure remain whether or not she can be considered an artist, whether or not she passes for one: “her ‘appropriations’ are most effective as expressions of her resentment at the fact that her name will never be as glamorous as Walker Evans’s.”89 For these critics, Levine’s transvestism has a reason; it is symptomatic. Her project for them is precisely one of “laying hold and grasping”—Heidegger’s terms for the appropriation and objectification that Owens hoped to read her work against. What drives their version of Levine is a desire for, rather than a refusal of, the male artist’s image and the father’s rights. Or, more baldly, what drives Levine is envy, an identification with and desire for the father’s place and its marker. “The urge to grasp and hold” in the woman is linked by psychoanalysis to penis envy.90 Kleptomania, the stealing of symbolic replacement parts not for the mother’s penis but for the father’s and the daughter’s, is what would constitute “the female fetishism.”91 At least, that is the formula of George Zavitzianos, an ana- lyst cited in passing by Naomi Schor in her attempt to open up a distance in the body of French feminism and to theorize female fetishism as “not so much, if at all, a perversion, rather a strategy designed to turn the so-called ‘riddle of femininity’ to women’s account.”92 To insist on reading Levine’s rephotographed images as stolen symbols of the father’s most valued object, however, seems strategically difficult; it is hard to separate these critics’ complaints from the charge of perversion and the woman’s forced acknowledgment of her castration. Still, one can remark within this reading on the cleanness and savvy of Levine theft and the appropriateness of her substitute object. • Perversion-Theft93

One of the dissatisfactions of the diagnosis of penis envy and, following from it, of fetishistic kleptomania, is that it reduces Levine’s practice to

Seeing Sherrie Levine 93 94 Howard Singerman the presence or absence of a single object; once again, any image, because it is an image for that most singular object, will do. The task of female fetishism as theorized by Schor and others is not to reduce uncertainty or to secure an image; “what is pertinent to women in fetishism” is not closure or restoration, rather it is “the paradigm of undecidability it offers.”94 Moreover, the politics of transvestism, of stealing what it takes to be one of the guys, are far from clear; the way the world works now, Doane writes, and continuing its working distinctions, “it is understandable that women would want to be men, for everyone wants to be elsewhere than in the feminine position.”95 In order to open up the distance that is crucial to the symbolic, and to open up, as well, a space for female spectatorship outside the difficult and riveting poles of overidentification and transvestism, Doane turns to the masquerade as "a feminine counter to the concept of fetishism.”96 Against the obviousness of transvestism, masquerade raises a peculiarly pointed question.

What is not understandable is why a woman might want to flaunt her femininity, produce herself as an excess of femininity, in other words, foreground the masquerade. Masquerade is not as recupera- ble as transvestism precisely because it constitutes an acknowledge- ment that it is femininity itself which is constructed as a mask—as the decorative layer that conceals a non-identity.97

Masquerade is most obviously a strategy for the woman on the side of the screen, “as spectacle rather than spectator”;98 there, it is a conscious acknowledgment of being positioned as an object, a portrayal of oneself as always already in representation. “The masquerade’s resistance to patriarchal positioning would therefore lie in its denial of the production of femininity as closeness, as presence-to-itself, as, precisely, imagis- tic. … it is the recovery, or more accurately, simulation, of the missing gap or distance. To masquerade is to manufacture a lack in the form of a certain distance between oneself and one’s image.”99 Masquerade manufactures that lack not through the female subject’s refusal of the image, but by her “assuming the image in the most radical way.”100 Levine has always been accused of the most radical assumption of the image—if we take that idea literally—and following Doane, we can read Levine’s images not as versions or copies but as masquerades, as images of themselves that produce a gap, that simulate the distance that is given in representation. Moreover, we can read the proper name “Sherrie Levine” as it manufactures and exaggerates that gap on title cards and in captions, as it constructs an oeuvre, as precisely a stage name, the very image of a name without an identity behind it. Her name does not secure the closeness and presence of the artist—of either artist of her rephotography— but rather insists on his—and her—absence. Levine is, I would argue, not the transvestite male artist; she does not pass for that. Rather, her masquerade is as a female artist; she enacts the readings and plays the part of the “woman artist” in quotes, the artist’s binary Other. “What might it mean,” Doane asks, “to masquerade as spectator? To assume the mask in order to see in a different way?”101 It is precisely this initial masquerade that allows Levine’s further masquerades. Before we ever see them, and frustrating our “scrutinizing After Walker Evans with a gallery-goer’s customary attitude of critical appreciation,” David Deitcher writes, “Levine had already assumed the attitude of critical spectator in relation to the twenty-two photographs she copied, framed, and put on view as her own.”102 Levine’s spectating leaves its mark as a gap, as once again a reading distance within the image. “The effectivity of masquerade lies precisely in its potential to manufacture a distance from the image, to generate a problematic within which the image is manipulable, producible, and readable.”103 The field of that problematic is, Doane makes clear in her reconsideration of the masquerade, the discourse of feminism, and the nature of the distance is temporal. The masquerade can be seen then as the site of “a second moment—a moment made possible by feminist theory.”104 “It is all a question if timing,” she continues. “Feminist critical theory must be attentive to both the temporality of reading and the historicity of reading.”105 It is both timing and seconding—both the incremental “difference between the critical act and the act of reception” and the broader time of the “historicity of the feminist enterprise”—that are figured in Levine’s insistent “after.”106 Levine is the female spectator looking again, and in her looking, she does indeed assume the image. She acts out and insists on her otherness as both artist and image—and on the political alliance that Craig Owens forged in his list of Others.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 95 96 Howard Singerman • He has presented himself in the action of looking through a key- hole. A gaze surprises him in the function of voyeur, disturbs him, overwhelms him, and reduces him to feeling of shame.107

For some time I have been discussing only Levine’s fetish, rather than the scenario that demanded my own. The masquerade, however, “carries a threat” that insists that any reading of Levine’s work continue into the field of the spectator, for it is there, as Doane suggests, that the masquerade functions, “disarticulating male systems of viewing.”108 In the remaining pages, I want to return to the story of looking with which I started, and to the relation between the viewer and Levine’s doubled image. There, at that site, there is another double to account for: the redoubling of the spectator that is figured in my seeing myself looking and in my embarrassment, my fear of being seen. Still, even now, it is easier for me to discuss this by putting someone else’s embarrassment in the place of my own. In conversation with the artist Mary Kelly, Hal Foster spoke of his embarrassment in looking at Kelly’s Corpus, recalling Sartre’s story of the startled voyeur; Lacan’s recounting of that tale forms the heading for this section of the text.

[HAL FOSTER:] I mentioned to you once that, particularly in front of Corpus, I felt like an eavesdropper who was sometimes caught, in a flush of shame—like the voyeur, described by Sartre, who is suddenly seen. You mentioned, in reply, “the fourth look.” What did you mean?

[MARY KELLY:] Women. I mean the psychic consequence of the historical existence of the women’s movement, the word of the “other” internalized in the place of the Law and the father. She sees you seeing.109 The term “the fourth look” comes from Paul Willemen, and while its numerology continues upon the three looks of film theory—“the intra-diegetic looks, the camera’s look at the profilmic event, and the viewer’s look at the image”—Willemen suggests that the fourth look is of a different order: it is the imagination of being seen from somewhere else, of becoming the object of a look.110 Willemen theorizes the fourth look in relation to the male spectator’s stake in pornography, a body of images quite different from Levine’s high-art photographs. Yet there is much in his model that recalls the operations and the effects of her reproductions, and that might situate them on the side of the obscene— it has been one of the premises of this essay, after all, that her images are hard to look at, that something stands against their being seen. In most films, Willemen explains, the look of the viewer and the look of the camera are “mapped onto each other.” “In classic cinema the frame is absented (it functions as a masking of a continuous, homogenous plentitude: the diegetic world in which characters continue to exist even when they are out of the frame) and … the image as seen by the frame is thus naturalized.”111 Conversely, but to the same unifying end, what Willemen terms “arty compositions … emphasize the frame and, in so doing, also stress that the look of the viewer is co-extensive with that of the camera.”112 Where pornography differs is in its direct address to the viewer, an address that overrides both narrative identification and the comfortable separation of the intra-diagetic and the space of the viewer. “There is no way the viewer can fade into the diegesis or, alternatively, shove the responsibility of the discourse onto the author.”113 It is this address to the viewer, an address necessary for pornography’s physicality, that “brings into play the position and activity of the viewer as a distinctly separate factor,” and that in so doing “destabilizes that position and puts it at risk.”114 It is at the moment “when the scopic drive is brought into focus [that] the viewer also runs the risk of becoming the object of the look, of being overlooked in the act of looking.”115 Perhaps Levine’s alignment of her work to a postmodernist “birth of the viewer” is worth recalling her, as is David Deitcher’s suggestion that “the sense of theatricality … is an indispensable element in fostering a more active and reflexive spectatorship.”116 Theatricality is a term from modernist critic Michael Fried; one half of the duality absorption and theatricality, Fried uses it pejoratively to describe the appeal minimal art makes to its viewer—an appeal that has become, as Deitcher suggests, a model for postmodernism. As opposed to the wholeness and the autonomy of the modernist work, the self-absorbed work in front of which the viewer is him- or herself absorbed, the minimal work—or as Fried calls it, the literalist one—is needy, its address to the viewer is overacted, and the conditions of its display—its as-though immodest parade—are inseparable from its experience.

Someone has merely to enter a room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of one—almost

Seeing Sherrie Levine 97 98 Howard Singerman

as though the work in question had been waiting for him. And inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him. And once he is in the room the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone—which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him. (Such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion.)117

The literalist work that lies in wait, that singles out and needs its beholder, shares with pornography what Willemen, after Mulvey, calls its “to-be-looked-at-ness,” as well as the target of that appeal: the isolated viewer, the audience of one. Moreover, the almost abusive relation suggested by Fried’s description matches the physicality of pornography’s address: “the most blatant and uncompromising form of direct address short of physical contact.”118 The viewer is born before the literalist work because, as Willemen notes of pornography, it brings “into play [his or her] position and activity,” and in such a play “the viewer runs the risk of becoming the object of the look.”119 Fried makes clear that minimal art depends on just such an objectification, that it demands that we see ourselves seeing: “The experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder. … It is, I think, worth noting that ‘the entire situation’ means exactly that: all of it—including, it seems, the beholder’s body.”120 To rewrite the effects of Levine’s rephotographs in the terms Wil- lemen and then Fried have offered, we could say that the viewer is born before her images in the split she opens up between our look and the frame. Levine looks in both Evans’s place and ours, and in so doing she establishes a disjunction between the camera’s look and our own. Her retaking insists from the outset that “the look at the image, i.e., the look of the viewer [will be] distinct from that of the camera.”121 In calling the viewer by name, in posing for his look, she refuses the seamless oneness of looking and apparatus that might allow us to think we have caught her unawares, or that we might contemplate from afar. As Willemen notes of pornography, “we cannot fade into the diegesis” and wander the dirt roads of Hale County, nor can we “shove the responsibility of the discourse onto the author,” for, like porn, these images “appear under pseudonyms.”122 Culpability in both cases is hard to assign, except insofar as it rests with us, as we ourselves are guilty and sense ourselves being overlooked. The fourth look glares from the place of the law (as Willemen makes clear, in the case of pornography, the term can be taken quite literally) and the field of the other, the social field as it has been internalized by the subject. Before Levine’s rephotographs, that field is populated by the others of the image that Craig Owens has itemized, those who have been elided in(to) the image and made its object. In the transaction between the viewer and the photograph signed by, and assigned to, Walker Evans, as in the pornographic transaction, “the woman has been eliminated and relegated to the field of the other.” She is not spoken to and cannot talk back; rather, like the others on Owens’s list, she has been spoken and substituted for by an image. By once again assuming the image and aligning herself on the side of the other as pictured, Levine splits my look from Evans’s and refuses me hers. Left alone before the image meant for me, for my look, “the woman [that] has been eliminated and relegated to the field of the other … returns as the subject of the fourth look.”123 And as Mary Kelly suggested in her response, she returns to me insofar as the discourse of feminism has made a difference, insofar as it has constructed a critique of looking, a more and legal critique, that has the power to shame or embarrass. Willemen’s “fourth look” is generated as a theory of pornography, of imaging that sight of too little around which Freud’s account of fetishism is played out, that is, the female body. But pornography also, and most frequently, includes the sight of too much; its primal scene is the sexual act. The fear of castration before the sight of the mother’s genitals is a sympathetic, identificatory response: if I am psychically threatened with “real” castration, it is because the sight before me is already castrated. It has no knowledge and nothing I want. It is a sight as though of nature that leads me then to knowledge and, as I argued with Weber at the beginning of this essay, into the production of theory. The primal scene is different, the positions it offers are not, or not only, masculine and feminine; the phallus is had at least temporarily by both par- ties in the image and the division raised is between the couple and the child. It is two against one, and the one looking stands not on the side of power, but is instead riven from the outset by the fear of discovery, the fear not only of being caught, but of being caught knowing. Certainly, the sight before me knows, and my coming to knowledge amounts to guilt.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 99 100 Howard Singerman

Early in her career, Levine, speaking on a panel of artists, recited without citation and in a strongly “felt” first person a story of just such seeing taken from Alberto Moravia’s “The Wardrobe.”

The splitting of the ego that Levine recounted with Moravia characterizes both the scenario of fetishism and the primal scene. But the actors in this final scene are precisely not split; they are not sacri- ficed or lacking. Rather, like Levine’s images, they are “on top of one another.” It is not the sight of lack but of surplus, not the sight of division but of completion, that has written the child out of the picture and has insisted on her self-division. It is in the spectator rather than in these closely held images that the split between original and imitation becomes painful. This splitting, too, is written in my scenario of looking, in my seeing myself seeing, in my own embarrassment and fear of being seen. Much has been made of the knowledge required to see a Sherrie Levine, the obvious fact that we are required to know from the beginning the work of Walker Evans or Edward Weston in order that we can then know the nature of Levine’s operations. We must all be initiates. “It goes without saying,” Abigail Solomon-Godeau says, “that Levine’s work of this period … could make its critique visible only within the compass of the art world. Outside of this specialized site, a Sherrie Levine could just as well be a ‘genuine’ Edward Weston or a ‘genuine’ Walker Evans.”125 And far enough outside that compass, they might just as well be pictures. But our knowledge is not helpful; certainly, it is not the erudition required to read her more recent works, the sculptures after Duchamp and Man Ray, in which what she has found and doubled is the detail. In front of those works, we can think back to the Large Glass or to the instructions of the Green Box. We can reconstruct Levine’s borrowings and judge her actions, her artistry, and rate their effectiveness. We can engage in a hermeneutics not unlike those we would operate before the first Evans or Weston. We can be canny, thinking. In front of “After Walker Evans,” our looking is law-bound; the story we tell ourselves is one of priority, ownership, and rights. Before these images, Levine refuses us the belief that we are seeing for the first time or that we can see innocently. We cannot see outside the categorizing and cataloging scene in which her work takes place. Where, finally, is Levine in Moravia’s scenario, or in the scenario that I stand before, looking at myself looking? She does not stand with me; I have once again pushed her into the image, and there she marks its completion, its fulfillment. She has what I want, she knows what remains undecidable for me. Indeed, she attracts my gaze, but it is the evil eye that I look with, the “eye made desperate by the gaze” and by the desire to separate. That is, she arouses in me “true envy—the envy that makes the subject pale before the image of a completeness closed upon itself.”126 Lacan’s image of a completeness from which I as a viewer am banished begs one last rereading of Levine’s “After Walker Evans.” To imagine that she has usurped only the place of the father would allow me to stand with her, for us to stand together as those who know. It would place the problem of looking and the divisions it creates elsewhere. But what if the place Levine has usurped is not the father’s, but rather my own? To configure the scenario differently, one could say that she has played the role of a sexual rival. She has come between me and the object, and made impossible my fantasy of completion, of fulfilling the work, of seeing it with fresh eyes. The task of painting, a task that Lacan refers to as Apollonian and restorative, is to trompe-l’oeil, to fool the eye into thinking that the eye will find what it wants and that there it may lay down its gaze. In Levine’s work, that resting place has already been filled by the sight of another. She has already been there on the side of the object, she has filled in, silted up the space in which we could have imagined ourselves. We are banished from the work and refused our innocence. There is no first look, certainly no disinterested—or could we say, no purely theoretical—one; there is only a looking after.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 101 102 Howard Singerman

Notes

* I am indebted to George Dimock, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, and Sherrie Levine for their support and suggestions, and to Louise Neri of Parkett for the initial invitation to write again on Sherrie’s work. My greatest debt is to Kaja Silverman for her teaching. This is for her. 1. Robert Stoller, M.D, in Marjorie Garber, “Fetish Envy,” October 54 (Fall 1990): 5. 2. Howard Singerman, “Sherrie Levine, Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery,” Artforum 22, no. 1 (September 1983): 80. 3. Ibid. 4. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 218–219. 5. Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Boston: David R. Godine, 1984), 11. 6. Samuel Weber, “The Sideshow, or: Remarks on a Canny Moment,” MLN 88 (December 1973): 1112. 7. Ibid., 1119. 8. Ibid., 1132–1133. 9. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 148. 10. Sherrie Levine, “Five Comments,” in Blasted Allegories, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 92. 11. Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” in The New Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1966), 25–26. 12. Ibid. 13. Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” 148. The first italics are mine; the second are Barthes’s. 14. Borges, “Pierre Menard,” 11. 15. Paul Taylor, “Sherrie Levine Plays with Paul Taylor,” Flash Art 135 (Summer 1987): 55. 16. Frank O’Hara, “David Smith: The Color of Steel,” Art News 60 (December 1961): 70. 17. Quoted in Gerald Marzorati, “Art in the (Re)Making,” Art News 85 (May 1986): 97, 93. I am using Levine’s complaint here to second a certain topography for her work, to fashion for it a body where interiority, vision, and the failure to see will all have ramifications. Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s “Living with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics” (in The Critical Image: Essays on Contemporary Photography, ed. Carol Squiers [Seattle: Bay Press, 1990], 59–79) cites those same sentences as part of a critique of Levine’s role in the recuperation of postmodernist photographic practice “under the sign of art photography,” and her apparent attempt to sever her practice from its critical implications and the discourse of its critics. 18. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982): 56. 19. Solomon-Godeau, “Living with Contradictions,” 62. 20. Douglas Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” October 15 (Winter 1980): 97 [reprinted in this volume]. 21. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 168. 22. Ibid. 23. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 166. 24. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 73. [An excerpt from the essay is reprinted in this volume.] 25. Ibid. 26. Crimp, “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,” 97. 27. Ibid. Crimp’s “The Boys in My Bedroom” (Art in America 78, no. 2 [February 1990]: 47) returns to Weston’s image, and Levine’s, and ties them much more closely to the little boy as the object of desire, insisting that representational desire cannot be read sepa- rately from sexual desire, that the logic of representation does not operate outside a politics of sexuality. 28. Carter Ratcliff, “Art and Resentment,” Art in America 70, no. 6 (Summer 1982): 11. 29. Erich Franz, “Presence Withdrawn,” Parkett 32 (June 1992): 98 [reprinted in this volume]. 30. Ibid. 31. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988). 32. Lloyd Fonvielle, Walker Evans, Aperture History of Photography Series 14 (Miller- ton, NY: Aperture, 1979), 5. 33. Lincoln Kirstein, “Photographs of America: Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans: Ameri- can Photographs, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition of American Photographs, originally published in 1938 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 192, 194. 34. Ibid., 193, 197. 35. Fonvielle, Walker Evans, 8. 36. Ibid. 37. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 238. 38. Christopher Cox, Dorothea Lange, Aperture History of Photography Series 16 (Mil- lerton, NY: Aperture, 1981), 5. 39. Ibid., 9. 40. Ibid., 10. 41. Max Kozloff, “A Way of Seeing and the Act of Touching: Helen Levitt’s Photo- graphs of the Forties,” in Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography, ed. David Featherstone (Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography, 1984), 74, 73. 42. Agee and Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 151. 43. Ibid., 64.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 103 104 Howard Singerman

44. Kirstein, “Photographs of America,” 196. 45. Helen Levitt, A Way of Seeing, essay by James Agee (New York: Horizon Press, 1981), vi–vii. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., vii. 48. Ibid., vii, viii. 49. Ibid., xi. 50. Luce Irigaray, “When the Goods Get Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) 51. Owens, “The Discourse of Others,” 73. 52. Craig Owens, “Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks,” in Beyond Recognition: Representa- tion, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 115 [reprinted in this volume]. 53. Ibid. 54. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 22. 55. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 161. 56. Ibid., 116. 57. Owens, “Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks,” 115. 58. Frantz Fanon, in Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question—the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse,” Screen 24 (November–December 1983): 35–36. Bhabha’s essay emphasizes the importance of fixity to colonial discourse, and, as I have done here along somewhat different lines, reads “the racial stereotype of colonial discourse in terms of fetishism” (27). 59. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 188. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 187. 62. Owens, “The Discourse of Others,” 63. 63. Ibid., 70. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 66, 73. 66. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 196–197. 67. Owens, “The Discourse of Others,” 73. 68. Octave Mannoni, in Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 119. 69. Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 2. 70. See Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 142ff. Silverman’s critique of Luce Irigaray and the “isomorphism” of her discourse follows Irigaray’s own critique. Silverman notes Iri- garay’s comment that “it can be shown that all Western discourse presents a certain isomorphism with the masculine sex, the privilege of unity, form of the self, of the visible, of the specularizable, of the erection” (145). 71. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 12. 72. Ibid., 21. 73. Ibid., 5. 74. Ibid. 75. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (New York: W. W. Norton and Pantheon Books, 1985), 90. 76. Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23 (September–October 1982): 79. 77. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, ed. James Strachey, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 17. 78. Irigaray, quoted in Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 80. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 12. 82. Freud, “Fetishism,” 218. 83. Doane, The Desire to Desire, 12–13. 84. Ibid., 11. 85. Ibid. 86. Freud, quoted in Doane, The Desire to Desire, 16. 87. Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 33. 88. Marzorati, “Art in the (Re)Making,” 93. 89. Ratcliff, “Art and Resentment,” 13. 90. George Zavitzianos, “Fetishism and Exhibitionism in the Female and the Relation- ship to Psychopathy and Kleptomania,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 52 (1971): 303. 91. Ibid. 92. Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The Case of George Sand,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 369. 93. Ibid., 371. 94. Ibid., 368. 95. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 81. 96. Mary Ann Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator,” Discourse 11 (Fall–Winter 1988–89): 48. Naomi Schor also points to masquerade (or in her terms “female travesty”) as it is opposed to transvestism as “by far the most disruptive form of bisexuality” (Schor, “Female Fetishism,” 370). 97. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 81. 98. Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered,” 48. 99. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 81–82.

Seeing Sherrie Levine 105 106 Howard Singerman

100. Ibid., 87. 101. Ibid., 82. 102. David Deitcher, “Sherrie Levine: Rules of the Game,” in Sherrie Levine, ed. Bern- hard Burgi (Zurich: Kunsthalle Zurich, 1991), 8. 103. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 87. 104. Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered,” 51. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheri- dan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 84. 108. Doane, “Film and the Masquerade,” 82. 109. Hal Foster and Mary Kelly, “That Obscure Subject of Desire: An Interview with Mary Kelly,” in Interim (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 58. 110. Paul Willemen, “Letter to John,” Screen 21 (Summer 1980): 56. 111. Ibid., 54. 112. Ibid., 55–56. 113. Ibid., 59. 114. Ibid., 56. 115. Ibid. 116. David Deitcher, “The Birth of the Viewer,” in Oeuvres originales (Getigne-Clisson: Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain des Pays de la Loire, 1991), 56. 117. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 140. 118. Willemen, “Letter to John,” 59. 119. Ibid., 56. 120. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 125, 127. 121. Willemen, “Letter to John,” 54. 122. Ibid., 59, 58. 123. Ibid., 63. 124. Alberto Moravia, “The Wardrobe,” in Bought and Sold, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 84–85. Levine’s statement after the Mora- via is quoted in full in Crimp’s “The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism.” 125. Solomon-Godeau, “Living with Contradictions,” 62. 126. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 116. Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld Catherine Ingraham Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld Catherine Ingraham © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

There is a practice common among painters of reproducing an image by placing a fine grid over it, then carefully drawing on another grid only what was seen in each small frame. This is an old and laborious process of reproduction and the results are uncanny in all the ways we might suspect. It seems strange, in the age of mechanical reproduction, that the production of a copy might be about a pathologically slowed-down and narrowed focus rather than a fast copy of the “whole.” The pathology is only partly in the narrowed focus; some of it is in the subsequent arousal of our curiosity about where these images, first and second, drift apart from each other. Where has the copyist fallen short? Where does the copy betray itself as a copy? From both the copyist’s and the observ- er’s point of view, concentrating on the minute details of shadow and line, shades and shapes, has the effect of deferring the comparison between the twin images for a long time.1 The kind of reproduction that I have just been describing is not what Sherrie Levine is doing in her after pieces. But I started with this example because it remains a puzzle to me and I think its lessons in irony, if that is the right word, have bearing on Sherrie Levine’s work, particularly here in the “after Rietveld” work. While I want to argue that the act of aftering architecture is substan- tially different from the aftering of art—because of the scale and expense of architecture—I want first to say a few more things about the “reproductive technology” that Levine sometimes uses. She does not reproduce something piecemeal (Duchamp’s Bachelors … or Brancusi’s 108 Catherine Ingraham

Newborn …) in order to regenerate it as a whole copy. Instead, she takes the outline of the whole original and regenerates it as outline. Thus the inside, or flesh, of the piece is not a reproduction but an “original Levine,” made from different materials, cast at a different scale, and rep- licated. Only the outline is borrowed. The Duchamp is Duchamp’s in outline but Levine’s inside; the Brancusi is Brancusi’s skin and Levine’s flesh. This “giving flesh” to an outline proves to be particularly interesting in Levine’s “after Mies,” where the Seagram’s Building and the Farnsworth House are reproduced on the computer as a series of lines— an elevation of lines with no interior. What would it mean to actually rebuild the Farnsworth House with different materials at a different scale, a larger scale for example? One thing it might mean is that the historically complicated relationship of architecture to functionality would be loosened and explored. “Functionality” is the idea that still holds architecture in a domain that is just beyond, and slightly larger than, say, the domain of sculpture. What would it mean to build six Farnsworth Houses at a slightly larger scale and display them in a museum? Scale change in the aftering of architecture, interestingly enough, can only go in the direction of larger, and this larger scale, in the case of architecture, is necessarily much larger and more consequential than the scale change in sculpture. To go smaller, in architecture or sculpture, would be to go toward the maquette—a mode of representation so familiar that it almost swallows up the ironies of scale to which it, too, is subject. The scale of the architectural project is a delicate and intricate matter and shifts in some already determined scale, such as Mies’s Farnsworth House or the Sea- gram’s Building, constitutes a massive ideological move. But as we shall see, Levine is extremely sensitive to these issues of scale. Here, in the after Rietveld, we are not asked to engage with the extremity of a rebuilt Farnsworth House but, rather, with the relatively small and modest restructuring of a piece of furniture. Some of Levine’s line and outline “technique” undergoes an interesting reversal in her republished book where the Flaubert story remains intact while the disposition of the lines on the page, the typography, the pages in the book, the binding, the title page, and so on are all changed. One might say in a general way that one of the curious by-products of Levine’s work of appropriation is to underwrite and examine the difference between text and object—between lines on a page and outlines in space, between the voided shape of writing and the all-shape of the object. This would also have particularly interesting consequences in architecture, where the difference between text and object is drastically upheld. The architectural model and drawing—precursors to the object in space—seem to absorb the textual energy, the play of significance, of the building itself, releasing it to stand falsely as a silent monument that can be celebrated or vilified. A quite bizarre way of characterizing Levine’s relation to word, line, flesh, object comes to mind here. Her work resonates, in some way, with the same issues that one finds in the science of taxidermy. Donna Haraway recently theorized taxidermy in her remarkable book Primate Visions. In this book she talks about Carl Akeley, who began in the art of taxidermy in 1880 by stuffing P. T. Barnum’s elephant Jumbo, and who went on to create the most magnificent scenes of human and animal origins in natural history museums everywhere. As Haraway says, “The end of [Akeley’s] task came in the 1920s, with his exquisite mounting of the Giant of Karisimbi, the lone silverback male gorilla that dominates the diorama depicting the site of Akeley’s own grave in the mountainous rain forest of the Congo, today’s Zaire. So it could inhabit Akeley’s monument to the purity of nature, this gorilla was killed in 1921. … From the dead body of the primate, Akeley crafted something finer than the living organism; he achieved its true end, a new genesis.” Taxidermy, as Haraway argues, is a foundational modernist instance of genetic experimentation that helps prepare the way for later experiments in genetic restructuring. As she goes on to say: “Decadence—the threat of the city, civilization, machine—was stayed in the politics of eugenics and the art of taxidermy.”2 Taxidermy is a science of preservation, curatorial restaging, and facsimile reproduction. Without going into the details of Haraway’s argument here—which are interesting but not important to this particular discussion—I want to suggest that there is a somewhat parallel, and unsuspected (i.e., surprising to me), critique of “concepts of animacy” in Levine’s work. Architecture is also taxidermic in the sense that architecture outlines specific spaces with specific skins in order to “animate” that space. Part of my point is that Levine is already practicing a kind of architecture with respect to her art—through her technique of

Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld 109 110 Catherine Ingraham outlining—even before she explicitly afters Rietveld. The stuffing part (of taxidermy, architecture, Levine’s objects) is important, but I will return to it later. First, let me speak generally. Architectural practice seeks—like an organism—to maintain differences in the face of undifferentiated space. Among other things, architecture classically partitions space. But architecture also “animalizes” space in the sense of maintaining its distinctness as object from the realm of the subject. And, further, architecture acts as animal in the sense that it makes culture and is made by culture in much the same way as the animal—by filling in, with classifiable difference, the place of the inert, spatial, speechless other. This is also the place, classically, of the sexless, genderless, nameless other. But this form that architecture assumes—the form we see finally as building—can never be, and indeed never is, the form of the human body. The strangeness of this fact is made only more strange by the existence of a humanist tradition in architecture that takes the human body as scaling mechanism. The humanist tradition—broadly stated, the idea that architecture addresses the problem of the human body and spirit in space—is differently configured by different theorists. In Alberti’s Ten Books of Architec- ture, for example, the building itself is repeatedly likened to an anatomy (presumably human), whereas in Le Corbusier’s architecture, the body, fluidly drawn as the modular, is supposed to act as a measure for propor- tional harmony. I am often stopped in my tracks by one thought whenever I consider this humanist tradition: How can it be, how can it be, that these (architectural) forms came out of, and are set in relation to, this (human) body? In other words, I am struck by the almost total incommensurability between architecture and body, both physically and conceptually. Rietveld, in the context of this question and the problem of scale and taxidermy, becomes an interesting case. Rietveld’s theory of both furniture and architecture, like those of many of his contemporaries, was that these acts were about space, the partitioning of space. The Zig-Zag Chair (and, of course, the Red Blue Chair) diagrams the space of its occupation by dissecting it rather than containing it. It tries to “leave the space untouched.”3 The “inside” of this chair is not a positive space of identity. It contains nothing. The planes and planar dissections of modernist buildings in architecture were also attempting to outline space, not contain it as shape. Rietveld came to architecture through furniture. The interesting thing about furniture is that it is also intimately tied with theories of the human body and with the idea of that body in motion and at rest. Rietveld, as with all interesting furniture designers, troubles this difference. One of the most problematic things about designing a chair, for example, is the fact that the body is always moving in it—the chair must be strong enough to endure constant jolting but light enough to be moveable. And, on the other side, the built-ins that Rietveld used in a number of his houses are about attaching this moving furniture to the static house in order to anchor it. So stasis and movement change places frequently in the proprieties of furniture and architecture. But furniture is never felt to impinge in any way on architecture. It is resolutely held at domestic scale and is considered to be a matter of interior design, not architecture. Rietveld was working on both sides of this seemingly immutable difference between furniture and architecture. Because of the many problems attending the position I am setting up, it will be difficult to maintain the deceptively simple distinction between matter and outline, shape and flesh, space and partition. Both the success and the failure of the modernist project were about the confusion of these distinctions. Certainly the idea of the inside—of containment—proved to be more tenacious than many modernists thought. One might say that modernist architecture was undone by its inside stuff. Under scrutiny, the modernist vocabulary of formalism in architecture became a morass of inarticulate limits, falsely held differences, and romantically maintained theories about the inside and outside. At what point does the outline end and matter begin? Where—thinking of Jacques Derrida’s parergon—does the inside begin and the outside end?4 Along with the problem of the inside comes the problem of the original, although the connection is, at first, not so obvious. There has been, perhaps, no theme, no central problem, no conundrum so great in the twentieth century as the so-called “loss of the original.” From Ben- jamin to Baudrillard, the problem of the original is intertwined with technologies of production, reproduction, and media—photography, film, computer, photocopy machines, television, advertising. All of this is familiar to us and we wouldn’t need to go over this ground again except that there is an ongoing perversity to this discourse—mainly the fact that the problematic of the original, indeed the aura of the original itself, never disappears. The idea of the “original copy,” in

Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld 111 112 Catherine Ingraham contemporary culture, is not an oxymoron. Simultaneous with the production of the copy was the desire to frame it, sell it, make it legally binding, make it valuable, etc. Since the discovery of mediation, which is always at work in the appropriation of “originality,” is an infinitely fascinating subject from a critical standpoint—particularly in its early days, when it was a ubiquitous critical strategy that could be deployed with amazing results practically anywhere—it is not surprising that much of the work on Sherrie Levine’s appropriation projects has concentrated on what one might call “degrees of loss and separation.” I am curious about this myself but I am even more curious about the less ideologically clear territory of the “inside” of the forms that are being copied.5 But I do not mean to say that “originals” and “insides” have remained intact and inviolate throughout modernism and poststructural- ism. Instead I want to suggest—and this is why Levine’s work seems so interesting to me from an architectural standpoint—that at some point the inside began to be the same as the taxidermic inside, a different substance than the outline suggests. Thus “space”—partitioned, contained, furniture space, architectural space—can no longer be seen as staying the same, staying neutral, once it has been animated. Taxidermy gives flesh to an outline but not “content” in the usual sense. Levine’s (genetic) alteration of the inside of her pieces—her meticulous dealing with the flesh of the piece—weighs against the borrowed outline just as a stuffed deer weighs against a live deer. The Rietveld table that Levine has “copied” is widely available now in a kit of Rietveld drawings and plans. It was part of the crate furniture that Rietveld began working on in 1934. “These [were] an armchair, a low table [Levine’s model] and bookcase made of deal boards measuring 14.5 centimeters across and varying in length from 45, 60, 90 to 105 centimeters ... joined together with tongue-and-groove screws. The chair also has six smaller boards which are necessary for the construction. The furniture was delivered as a do-it-yourself kit and had to be assem- bled by the customer.” The crate furniture was packaged by Metz and Co. as “weekend furniture.” The deal planks, a cheap crating material, in the table that Levine has copied are of equal width. This, along with the open joints, struck Rietveld as producing a “tranquil impression.”6 Later Rietveld designed many pieces of furniture out of deal planks, often combining, in his architectural projects, crate furniture with his zig-zag furniture. Crate furniture could be easily broken down and Sherrie Levine, Large Krate Table, 1993. Unfinished ash, 25 × 31½ × 32½ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. packed in a crate of the same material for shipping, which produced a strange sense of inside-outness to the table. Rietveld, until recently, rightly or wrongly, has been known to us through only two projects, one of them the Red Blue Chair, the other the Rietveld Schröder House—both done during the de Stijl period of his work. Rietveld designed more than 680 furniture and architectural projects in his life—most of which were built. To pick out one table from this obscure crate-furniture series, enlarge it a bit, fabricate it six times out of white ash, and then exhibit it is complicated in ways that many of Levine’s projects are complicated. Since exhibition instanta- neously produces a kind of history of the object exhibited, we might say that Levine’s “after Rietveld” has the same curatorial cast as some of her

Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld 113 114 Catherine Ingraham other projects. She wants to bring out something that has been hidden, give it some play. But in this case, I would add another persona to the curatorial personas of taxidermist, historian, museum director: namely, the collector—the one who makes certain parts of the past valuable by giving it a price. Her interest in the economy of art and exhibition is long-standing and intimately tied to the issues of originality and authentic/inauthentic interiors that I have been discussing. In Levine’s “after Rietveld,” Rietveld’s table has been troped, as I began to discuss earlier, primarily by a change of scale. On the surface, scale seems as close to a purely formal issue as one can get, and needless to say, like all such apparent neutralities, the issue of scale is loaded. Unlike, say, architectural materials or proportion (relation of parts to whole), there has never really been a theory of scale in architecture. While I find it of immense interest that Levine often changes the material of her “originals,” I find the change of scale (and for different reasons the choice of the number of iterations) even more interesting. In the case of the Rietveld table, Levine enlarged the scale by fifty percent. This was, to paraphrase Levine, a way of giving the table a “sculptural” rather than “furniture” identity. The scale change may push this piece into sculptural space, but it also pushes it in the direction of architectural space. And, further, to make furniture sculptural, and then exhibit it as sculpture in some other space that is, probably, architectural (larger, designed), is a curious twist on the three conditions of furniture, sculpture, and architecture. This would not be true if the piece were “merely” sculptural in the sense of achieving a kind of objecthood different from its functional objecthood as furniture. To after Rietveld is, then, to enter into these problems since Rietveld, perhaps more than most modernists, worked in the midst of these tensions. Architecture is always already an after condition—which is also a point often made about the photographs, painting, and sculpture that Levine copies. Nothing about artistic production is given a priori. But in the case of architecture, it is not only the force of precedent or social and political representation or technical mediation that predates and preconditions the building; it is also the impossibility of doing architecture directly. Architecture is not the science of building a building, it is the science of translation from blueprint to building, where we know that the translation is neither linear nor complete. It is not that I want to make Levine’s work an honorary architecture—which is not only a dubious honor but a presumptuous one. But the architecturality of her work—an architecturality that is embedded in these tenuous issues of how to govern space with an object, the matter of the outline, the outline/interior disjunction, the progression up the ladder of object scales, problems of originality and translation—seems to find an unexpected appropriateness with the subject of architecture that she is now undertaking.

Notes

1. The matter of “delay” is, of course, a crucial temporality in art. Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of the appearance of spontaneity, in nineteenth-century art production, is interesting in this regard. “Originality” is allied with “spontaneity” in the sense that original works of art are seen to be arrived at all at once, without calculation, without guile and strategy. 2. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Sci- ence (New York: Routledge, 1989), 27. 3. Marijke Kuper and Ida van Zijl, eds., Gerrit Th. Rietveld: The Complete Works (Utrecht: Centraal Museum, 1992, distributed in the U.S. by Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1992), 145. 4. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15–149. 5. Levine’s own writing is so different from the writing about her that a critique of this relationship would itself constitute an entire discussion. Her writing is both classical and critical in the sense that she uses the autobiographical, the “I did this because I was thinking that,” but she also ventriloquizes through some of the authors/artists that she is “copying.” For example, after Flaubert she says: The story of “A Simple Heart” is just the account of an obscure life, that of a poor country girl, pious but fervent, discreetly loyal and tender as new-baked bread. She loves one after the other a man, her mistress’ children, a nephew of hers, an old man whom she nurses and her parrot. When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical, as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender-hearted myself. Now, surely, no one will accuse me of being inhuman any more. 6. Gerrit Th. Rietveld: The Complete Works, 155–156.

Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld 115

Habeas Corpus Sylvia Lavin Habeas Corpus Sylvia Lavin © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

The first time I saw Sherrie Levine’s new work, Chimera (1994), I was reminded of a movie I once saw called Fantasmi a Roma. I tried to banish this apparently extraneous thought from my mind. Yet because Levine’s work often involves some level of displacement or indirection, and provokes the sense that there is something lurking just beyond the edge of the frame, I decided that Chimera might have some underlying association with the film that I hadn’t yet been able to identify. Fantasmi a Roma is about an impoverished prince living in Rome during the 1960s in a shabby seventeenth-century palazzo that is inhabited by ghosts.1 When a developer attempts to demolish this palazzo in order to construct a twenty-story supermarket, the biggest in Europe, the ghosts devise a scheme to save the building that involves the services of a wild-eyed and cranky ghost named Caparra—an artist. As the building is about to be razed, the attic is discovered to be completely covered in seventeenth-century frescoes. After the local art historian misattrib- utes the paintings to Caravaggio (so enraging Caparra that he makes the historian trip and break his leg), the building goes on the register of historic monuments, with a plaque at the entrance announcing the Sala di Caravaggio. (I like to think it eventually becomes an erroneous Cara- vaggio museum, replete with gift shop enabling the prince to recover lost revenues.) The ghosts get to stay undisturbed. The frescoes in Fantasmi a Roma may not be readymades in the Duchampian sense of the term, but they are readily made, at least, as well as made to order, and suspended in time and space in an exceedingly 118 Sylvia Lavin odd way: they are “original” seventeenth-century Caravaggios painted in the 1960s by the ghost of a mythical artist, Caparra. Perhaps they must be considered the first works of Conceptual Art, since a ghost has no body, properly speaking, and his art must perforce be the pure issue of his mind. The ghosts are certainly the movie’s heroes, and the viewer is asked to admire them for their faith in salvation through art. But Fantasmi a Roma, in its quirky little way, also raises questions about the autonomy and authorship of art, its status and agency in a world structured by capital. Most compellingly, the film introduces the rather charming idea that ghosts have been controlling the history of art all along. Perhaps there has ever been a secret and ghostly community guiding art’s development, and this spectral sect is in fact the spirit that Hegel sought, the energy motivating all those progressive and teleologi- cal histories of art that we know so well. For those who seek to find in art an escape from and mastery of the messy exigencies of the body, the ghost-artist must be the summum bonum. Is Sherrie Levine a ghost, or at least an honorary member of this artistic ghosthood? Certainly an outstanding feature of her work is the way it makes odd and unimaginable introductions between people, objects, and materials, as though she had her fingers on a Ouija board. With a little sleight of hand, she has made Weston live again, Duchamp collaborate with Brancusi, and has managed to shift the spatiotemporal coordinates, as well as the gender, of some of the most ponderous objects in the history of art. To alter the position of Duchamp’s urinal, to gild that lily, is no small feat. Most recently, if perhaps improbably, Levine has introduced Duch- amp to Charles and Ray Eames, producing out of this admixture Chi- mera: After a Broken Leg, a molded piece of blond plywood mounted vertically in a Plexiglas box, backed with linen, and hung on the wall. The thin sheet of wood forms a symmetrical yet irregular concave volume, as though it had been cast from an absent solid. With its elon- gated holes and openings, organic materials, and natural colors, Chimera peers frontally out of its box like an African mask stretched almost beyond recognition. In considering this fantastical work, one almost cannot avoid day- dreaming a bit, fantasizing about the narrative that would end with this object as its denouement. Although the most immediate starting point is clearly Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm, I like to think the story Sherrie Levine, Chimera: After a Broken Leg, 1994. Plywood and Plexiglas, 48 × 12 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

Habeas Corpus 119 120 Sylvia Lavin picks up speed when Levine causes its protagonist, perhaps just returned from shoveling snow, to fall into Duchamp’s Trap of 1917, the coat rack lethally moved from wall to floor. After organizing this accident, Levine repents and graciously helps the newly broken leg into a splint—one of those that Charles and Ray Eames designed and produced between 1941 and 1943.2 There may be a ghost behind this illusive and illusory story, a ghost that has put these narrative elements into tropic movement, but someone somewhere has to have once had a body, a real body that could break. Indeed, chimeras are not just ghostly dreams, but bodies, combinations of dissimilar bodies, genetically engineered organisms made by grafting, mutating, and mixing different cells and tis- sues. Levine is making monsters—maybe not grotesque combinations of lions, goats, and serpents, but an embodied mutant nevertheless, with a broken leg. Who tripped, whose leg is broken, to whom does this absent body belong? At first glance, the answer would have to be none other than Charles Eames. The splints in question are the result of the Eameses’ first successful foray into mass production. In the late thirties, before they started to make the furniture with which they are so inextricably associated, Charles and Ray worked in a Los Angeles garage concocting strange glues and methods with which to mold plywood, making a sandwich of sheets of Douglas fir, covered in veneers of mahogany and birch. The first objects they realized were free-standing biomorphic sculptures, little creatures that needed no help from plinths or struts to stand up. Quickly thereafter, these generically organic forms turned into the veritable shape of a leg, Charles’s leg specifically. During the period when the Eameses were developing this inexpensive, flexible, yet strong material that could be molded to any shape, they learned that the army was experiencing difficulties with the straight lengths of metal normally lashed at that time to an injured leg—these tended to cause gangrene. Consequently, they approached the military with the idea of producing a leg splint that was, in effect, figurative and isomorphic with the limb that it would immobilize. They also attempted to develop the idea further, fashioning prototypes of an arm splint and a full-body litter using the same molded wood. These latter devices never went into production, but in 1942 the U.S. Navy ordered 5,000 leg splints and by 1943 150,000 had been manufactured. The first furniture the Eameses made and mass-produced, then, was furniture of war, and the shape to which the limbs of all wounded soldiers would be molded was the leg of Charles Eames himself. The story of the triumph of modernism in America is of course also the story of war, the machine through which the country was finally thoroughly industrialized, mechanized, abstracted, and reproduced. Much of America’s postwar suburban landscape and many of its artifacts had their origins in the apparatus of war. Though we normally associate the Eameses with some of the most pleasurable domestic furniture of this century, objects that have become highly collectible, even fetishized (indeed Levine bought the splints she used in Chimera not in an army- surplus outlet or one of the thrift stores where she had found some of the earlier readymades she used, but in an antique shop), it should come as no surprise that they got their start with the military. Is Chimera the memory, the reformulation, or the result of some historic assault? Much of Levine’s oeuvre has engaged the subject of art history by aggressively if politely toppling its canons and hierarchies. Those who have constructed and protected these edifices have been singled out for special consideration in her skirmishes: with its complex artistic genealogies and mind-bending logical conundrums, Levine’s work can perhaps be said to speak most intimately to art historians. Who but an aesthete, scholar, or furniture collector would be able to identify the Eames leg splints? They aren’t Brillo boxes or soup cans, after all. The perfectly erudite art historian or critic may well be the ideal audience for Levine, but the perfection of their relationship with her is oedipal. Maybe out of chagrin, and like Caparra, Levine has finally just gone ahead and tripped one of them up. Certainly both Duchamp and the Eameses were waging wars of a sort, battling the classification and inherited status of objects, engaging the art of contestation. When Duchamp made mass-produced objects into readymades, and when the Eameses designed utilitarian objects for mass production but considered them art, they managed to produce artifacts of ambiguous status—poor targets for return fire, as it were. The primary piece of work that elevated the Eameses from the status of designers and decorators into the loftier realm of architects was their house, built in 1949 in Los Angeles. This structure, number 8 in a series of Case Study Houses sponsored by John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, was meant to be a model of affordable postwar housing.3 Like a chimera, it was to be made from a kit of parts, an

Habeas Corpus 121 122 Sylvia Lavin assemblage of off-the-shelf, readymade industrial components. It was intended, then, to be easily mass-produced, but the apparently machine- made and disparate elements had to be handmade. Asking to be mass- produced, and perhaps endlessly imitated and reinterpreted, it was never actually reproduced. The status of chimeras is perpetually in doubt, in part because their vitalism is undercut by the fact that they are often sterile, intrinsically and genetically unable to reproduce. At least from a certain point of view, the questions posed by the ways in which they are generated are less problematic than the matter of their agency. The interest in Duch- amp’s Trap, for example, lies not only in his aggressive impulse to trip someone, but in the vertiginous desire to fall that the trap evokes in the viewer—a desire defined by Edmund Burke as a quintessential feature of the sublime. When we view Chimera, we are also watching a giddy Levine hoping to fall into Duchamp’s trap, a state that may well describe the predilection of much Conceptual art. It’s not a far leap to this conclusion, since much of Levine’s work is characterized by an endlessly entangling identification with those whose work she borrows. But if it is Levine who has fallen, and if it is her broken leg that is now being placed in Charles’s splint—her name, after all, is inscribed on a plaque attached to the face of the splint in the Plexiglas box—could her leg be mended and healed by the shape of his leg? The process of appropriation, as a strategy, seems to work smoothly enough until two actual body parts, one male, the other female, come to occupy a single site. When we arrive in the space of this object, designed by, for, and from the masculine leg, we see that this supposedly universal model of recuperation does not in fact fit everyone. The absent body presenting itself has never been fully invisible in Levine’s work: her early Westons were decidedly figurative, and her Schieles are, among many other things, images of highly sexualized bodies. More recently, in Newborn, the body, although immature and not fully formed, has even become three-dimensional. Yet as the infant sits atop the piano, its independence is compromised by its relationship to its support: the base, usually a minor and buttressing element in sculpture, has grown out of all proportion, threatening to engulf that to which it should be subservient. Similarly, if the splint in Chimera is an enabling, supplementary device without which the body could not stand and would not be whole, it is also a void and an absence, a mold of a figure no longer present. The prosthesis merges with the body it supports, literally giving it strength; at the same time, it comes after a broken leg.4 The absent body is keenly felt in Chimera, inducing the wrenching and haunted pain of a phantom limb. The veil of modesty provided by the apparently disengaged and conceptual strategies of appropriation does not keep us from sensing, hovering in the shadows of Chimera, a figure that has always haunted Levine’s work: the ghost of the body.5 In fact, the work arouses in the viewer the sense of Levine’s sublime desire to fall bodily into the history of art, to hide and dispose of her body in its texts. If Levine has been deliberate in keeping this figure at bay, so have her critics. The avoid- ance of iconography in studies of Levine’s work seems mostly an effort to recuperate and prop up its element of abstraction and thus, at least in part, to continue and indeed redeem the structures and principles of modernism. And that is to fall into a trap. To believe that Levine can appropriate the speech of an other without engendering difference is to take the words right out of her mouth. Instead, I like to think of Chi- mera: After a Broken Leg as a body Levine has fashioned by joining bits and pieces of the male artists whose work she has purloined. Once con- sumed, these phantoms had to move through the places Levine haunts, the public spaces of museums, the trenches of war, the domestic space of the house, the architecture of the mind, and the channels of birth. As a result, while these body parts may have originally been attached exclusively to men, the chimera that emerges from Levine appears to be a ghostly androgyne.

Notes

1. Fantasmi a Roma was directed by Antonio Pietrangeli in 1961. It stars Marcello Mas- troianni, Vittorio Gassman, and Eduardo De Fillippo. 2. For a brief history of these splints, see John Neuhart, Marilyn Neuhart, and Ray Eames, Eames Design: The Work of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1989), 28–35. 3. For a discussion of the Case Study Houses, see Elizabeth A. T. Smith, ed., Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 4. On Jacques Derrida’s notion of the dangerous supplement, see his Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). Mark Wigley, in his “Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture,” Assemblage 15 (1991): 7–29, has developed this idea in an architectural context.

Habeas Corpus 123 124 Sylvia Lavin

5. I am reminded of a statement made by Levine in 1979, after Alberto Moravia: “Since the door was only half closed, I got a jumbled view of my mother and father on the bed, one on top of the other. Mortified, hurt, horror-struck, I had the hateful sensation of having placed myself blindly and completely in unworthy hands. Instinctively and without effort, I divided myself, so to speak, into two persons, of whom one, the real, the genuine one, continued on her own account, while the other, a successful imitation of the first, was delegated to have relations with the world. My first self remains at a distance, impassive, ironical and watching. I no longer paint faces, only scars, intimations, and signs.” Sherrie Levine: Stalker Susan Kandel Stalker Susan Kandel © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

The most recent thing I’ve heard said of Sherrie Levine—about whom things are, still, always being said, things that are highly impassioned one way or the other—was by a student who, in paraphrasing another professor who teaches at the same institution I do, mimed received wisdom in the Oedipalized fashion Levine has long been said to disrupt—but more on that later. Here was what was for my student a chilling denun- ciation: “Sherrie Levine represents Enlightenment thought, and her work is about the power of reason.” Paraphrases being notoriously untrustworthy, I consulted Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s 1988 essay, “The Impressionist Revolution and Duchamp’s Myopia,” and found this: “In Levine one is offered power over history, the opportunity to own an object which permits one to see through the problem of originality, which is to say, of the unexpected and the irrational.”1 In many ways, this sounds plausible—especially if one is inclined to see in Conceptualism, its progenitor Marcel Duchamp, and its acolytes (i.e., Levine) a naive faith in the Word, all too often transmuted into moralizing tedium, that is, the dubious endeavor of getting things (pictures, texts, histories, and the theories thereof) right. According to this point of view, Levine’s work is illustrative, “merely” an apparatus, a transparent vehicle, or a medium through which something or someone else is spoken: Walker Evans and Edward Weston, whose black and white photographs Levine appropriated to great, early acclaim; Marcel Duchamp, whose notions both of the “readymade” and “anti-retinal” art were pivotal for her; Jacques Lacan, whose investigation of desire 126 Susan Kandel provides her art with one of its most stringent theoretical subtexts; and Roland Barthes, whose 1968 essay on the death of authorship proved a recalcitrant inspiration for her serial acts of theft. Indeed, Levine lifted this latter text, distorting it ever so slightly, and presented it as her own exhibition statement in 1981: “… The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting’s meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.”2 Being disinclined, however, to see in Levine any kind of knowing- ness, much less the self-satisfied kind, I start from a different premise. I start with the premise that Levine is indeed a Conceptualist, but Con- ceptualism’s legendary scientism and austerity are ruses; what’s at stake is something altogether different. “Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists,” wrote Sol LeWitt in l969. Here is a plausible scenario. It allows us to link Levine’s stylized kleptomania to LeWitt’s mathemati- cal conundra and Kosuth’s concentric circles of extra-textual references, and then further back, to an entire mystic tradition: Symbolism’s som- nolent arcana, the gnostic doctrines of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Mannerism’s allegorical substrata. And it also accounts for Conceptualism’s callow, but winning brand of narcissism. Think, that is, of how much one knows, just from looking at the work, about Eleanor Antin’s weight-loss diet, what Christine Kozlov ate for one year, Dennis Oppenheim’s propensity for sunburn, Ian Wilson’s addiction to chat, Tom Marioni’s passion for beer, Vito Acconci’s masturbatory patterns, Bas Jan Ader’s insecurities, Richard Long’s recreations, and Adrian Piper’s reading habits; indeed, to even consider Robert Barry’s Telepathic Piece of 1969, which appears as the statement, “[During the Exhibition I will try to communicate telepathi- cally a work of art …],” and On Kawara’s “I got up at” postcards and “I am still alive” telegrams is to conjure the diaristic nature of all Concep- tual documentations. It is in this context—of Conceptualism’s experimental esotericism and ingenuous egomania—that Levine’s theoretically inflected, post- Conceptual Art becomes most meaningful. And it is likewise in this context that the absurdity of Gilbert-Rolfe’s assessment becomes clear. For how could someone whose engagement with prior texts is so pro- foundly equivocal possibly instantiate any kind of certainty? Isn’t it masochistic to repaint, in miniature, and in visibly feeble hand, one of Miró’s masterpieces? Sadistic to re-photograph a slew of Rodchenkos, admiring them from revolutionary icons into tasteful decor? Pure folly to represent oneself not as an artist, but as a “publisher,” as Levine did in her 1997 show of photographs at Los Angeles’s Margo Leavin Gallery? What are we to make of someone whose art embraces the distinctly bizarre credo of self-actualization through self-erasure? And further to the point, how could a series of objects and images which are themselves so stunningly “unexpected and irrational” possibly see through those very things? Let me skew things a bit further. In a 1996 catalog of her work, Levine offered the following epigraph:

I like transgressional boundaries, leaky distinctions, dualisms, fractured identities, monstrosity and perversity. I like contamination. I like miscegenation. I like a fly in the soup, a pie in the face. I like the territory of slapstick, where amidst general laughter neither death nor crime exists. I like the world of burlesque, with its pure gesticularity. In this guiltless world, where everyone gives and receives blows at will, buildings fall down, bricks fly, the protagonists are immortal and violence is universal, without consequence.3

Here, then, I will take a perspective on Levine that is fractured, perverse, and even comedic, one that allows for the kind of doubt, excess, suspense, and risk this work incarnates—against initial appearances, perhaps. This perspective runs counter not only to the standard critique of Levine’s work, but also to Rosalind Krauss’s rather sober-minded praise. In her 1981 essay, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” Krauss lauds Levine’s rephotography for its deconstructive nature—that which Gilbert-Rolfe assails as its “seeing-through.” (Her take amounts to this: if the discourse of originality upon which modernism is predicated depends upon the repression of the copy, Levine’s work is important in that it refuses this repression, acting to “void the basic propositions of modernism, to liquidate them by exposing their fictitious condition.”)4 Consider Levine, though, not in terms of refusal, liquidation, exposure, nor any other such correlates, but in terms of enthusiasm, devo- tion, admiration, love—that is, in terms of fandom. What Levine dishes up (and gossip is not an unintended metaphor here) is an extended riff upon her own obsession with a host of men (dead art stars, intellectual

Stalker 127 128 Susan Kandel celebrities, and so on); or better yet, a diary that recounts the way she prods their texts into revealing their innermost secrets, refashioning them to satisfy her own needs, while merrily flouting the conventions (social, artistic and otherwise) of good taste. Long-time science fiction fan P. L. Caruthers-Montgomery describes her adolescent initiation into Star Trek fandom thusly:

I met one girl who liked some of the TV shows I liked. … But I was otherwise a bookworm, no friends, working in the school library. Then my friend and I met some other girls a grade ahead of us but ga-ga over [Star Trek]. From the beginning, we met each Friday night at one of the two homes that had a color TV to watch Star Trek together. I had a reel-to-reel [audio] tape recorder. Silence was mandatory except during commercials, and, afterwards, we “discussed” each episode. We re-wrote each story and corrected the wrongs done to “Our Guys” by the writers. We memorized bits of dialog. We even started to write our own adventures. One of us liked Spock, one liked Kirk, one liked Scotty, and two of us were enamored of McCoy. … To this day, I can identify each episode by name within the first few seconds of the teaser. I amaze my husband by reciting lines along with the characters.5

In the admirably deranged 1992 study of fandom from which this excerpt is taken, Henry Jenkins challenges the popular perception of fans as “‘kooks’ obsessed with trivia, celebrities, and collectibles; as misfits and ‘crazies’; as ‘a lot of overweight women, a lot of divorced and single women’; as childish adults; in short as people who have little or no ‘life’ apart from their fascination[s]. …”6 Jenkins argues that in fact, fans—or fen, as they like to be known—are sophisticated textual poachers (borrowing the concept from Michel de Certeau) who take up texts only to transform them by virtue of their interactions. If he overstates the case for the transgressive, even revolutionary potential of fandom, his emphasis on creative engagement is nonetheless pointed. Fandom entails process, and the process itself has something to do with making things— remote, untouchable things—real. Fandom makes a fetish of the marks of loving—if unsanctioned—use. Yet as Levine’s work makes crystalline, the relationship between the fan and the object of her desire is always extremely complex, equal parts adoration and antagonism. Take the bronzed urinals which Levine first produced in multiple in 1991. These are based on Duchamp’s most famous readymade, which, as legend now goes, was purchased from the “Mott Works” company in New York, signed “R. Mutt,” and submit- ted to the jury-free Independents exhibition of 1917 only to be sup- pressed by the hanging committee. After being photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, and perhaps somewhere along the way to the Arensbergs’, Duchamp’s Fountain disappeared, becoming forevermore a multiple in the absence of an original. On the one hand, Levine’s Fountain is an act of homage, a tacit acknowledgment of the piece’s auratic presence within the history of modern art, not to mention Levine’s own oeuvre. Indeed, there has been no better description of Levine’s work than this defense of R. Mutt’s urinal, taken from the second issue of The Blind Man, and probably penned by Duchamp himself: “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.”7 And yet, on the other hand, the “new thought” that Levine creates for this particular object is strangely hostile. Suddenly glitzy, Levine’s tricked-out fetish militates against the whole concept of the anti-retinal. Slyly, it insinuates its predecessor’s failure, for even in Duchamp’s own time, against his protestations, aficionados admired the piece’s sinuous curves and uninflected surface. In the end, I think of the tradition of bronzing a cherished pair of baby shoes. Levine gets to play Mommy, and in the process, infantilize the man who, after all, was only too happy to show up in drag whenever the occasion warranted. The publication that accompanied Levine’s 1991 show at Mary Boone Gallery should be noted: this time, it is Levine who shows up in drag. Designed to precisely mimic the cover of a catalogue of two years earlier, put out by the Menil Collection on the occasion of an exhibition marking the centen- nial of Duchamp’s birth, this slim volume plays out all sorts of fantasy identifications: try, Levine as Duchamp, Levine as immortal, Levine as God. In this ritualization of masculine imposture, the catalogue functions remarkably like a specific genre of fan writing: the slash zine. In slash fiction, which is written almost exclusively by female fans, unsuspecting T.V. series protagonists—always male—become involved in steamy homo-erotic affairs. Kirk/Spock Star Trek erotica is by and

Stalker 129 130 Susan Kandel

Sherrie Levine, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), 1991. Cast bronze, 15 × 15 × 25 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy of the artist. large the favorite. In Gayle Feyrer’s vintage Cosmic Fuck series, Kirk and Spock are marooned on a desert planet and rescue seems unlikely, as the Enterprise has been waylaid on an emergency mission. Unexpectedly, Spock enters Pon Farr, the Vulcan mating fever; he will die if his sexual tension is not immediately assuaged. It dawns on Kirk that the only way to save Spock’s life is to make love to him. The younger man, shaken by the very notion, tells himself that, “No one is asking you to enjoy yourself.” Eventually, however, Kirk gives in to pleasure, and the two fall in love. Fan writer Joan Martin claims that slash “offers detailed and loving descriptions of beautiful men making love lovingly. It presents love as entailing mutual respect and possible only between equals.”8 In a slash video produced by a Star Trek fan known only by the initials M.V.D., and set to the tune of the schmaltz classic “I Needed You,” decontextu- alized images of Spock and Kirk, gleaned from the T.V. series and four of the movies, celebrate the lovers’ connection. Indeed, in slash, along with sex, the emotional quality of the interactions is stressed. Slash is, then, most often seen as a form of female pornography, a kind of projection of female fantasies, desires, and experiences onto male bodies. Here, we go straight back to Levine, who once queried, “Where as a woman artist could I situate myself? What I was doing was making this explicit; how this Oedipal relationship artists have with artists of the past gets repressed, and how I, as a woman, was only allowed to represent male desire.”9 Indeed, representing male desire can be liberating—and it can also be stifling, as can all protracted fantasy scenarios. What happens when the process of identification breaks down? Or, worse yet, what happens when the frustrated fantasy takes violent form? Let’s consider the prospect of Sherrie Levine as stalker, following in the footsteps of the Other, provoking a situation only to ritualize it in death, which, after all, is the purest form of erasure. It is not so very far-fetched to see Levine’s work in these terms, for one of her least-remarked upon series would seem to enact the stalker’s scenario of obsessive love and its inevitable end in violence. These elegant, untitled paintings on raw mahogany panels, dating from 1988, are based upon characters from George Herriman’s comic strip, Krazy Kat. As the story goes, Krazy Kat is in love with Ignatz Mouse. Krazy Kat pursues the object of his desire, but his love is unrequited, engendering a cycle of sado-masochistic behavior: Ignatz, in desperation, defends himself from the unwanted attention by hurling a brick at Krazy Kat, who interprets this action as a sign of Ignatz’s affection, and thus continues his pursuit. Levine selects two moments from the narrative, each of which is repeated six times: the moment which Ignatz is preparing to “Krease that Kat’s bean with a brick”; and the moment in which Krazy Kat is being struck. Here is a tacit acknowledgment of the violence of appropriation— not in terms of objects and theft, but souls and obliteration. To shadow someone, as Levine does, is to take his life and passions and art as your

Stalker 131 132 Susan Kandel own, to wipe away his traces with yours. It is murder at its most civil, mostly because it’s construed as a game. If there’s humor here, it’s black; and if there’s mastery, it’s soft. That is, Levine “masters” a set of texts the way the fan “masters” Star Trek: only to render the whole lot limp, and thus, eminently malleable. This act of ontological obfuscation is particularly characteristic of Levine’s willful perversity, which is radically different both from an approach based in reason and from the “anxiety of influence” otherwise attributed to her. It is also evidence that her work is not about power, but pleasure; and less—far less—about knowing than it is about feeling.

Notes

1. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, “The Impressionist Revolution and Duchamp’s Myopia,” in Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1995), 25. 2. Sherrie Levine, “Five Comments,” in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 92. 3. Sherrie Levine, epigraph to Sherrie Levine: Sculpture, ed. David Frankel (Cologne: Gal- erie Jablonka, and Los Angeles: Margo Leavin Gallery, 1996), 5. 4. Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 170. [An excerpt from the essay is reprinted in this volume.] 5. Cited in Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 52. 6. Ibid., 11. 7. Beatrice Wood, “Editorial,” The Blind Man 2 (May 1917), quoted in William A. Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Its History and Aesthetics in the Context of 1917,” in Marcel Duchamp: Artist of the Century, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Francis M. Naumann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 6. 8. Cited in Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 188. 9. Gerald Marzorati, “Art in the (Re)Making,” Art News 85 (May 1986): 97. After Sherrie Levine, Repetition?1 Michel Assenmaker After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? Michel Assenmaker © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Note 1. “The old poet comes back at him with the eternal arguments that all ages, all journalists and all old men love to deploy: ‘There are no artists any more. Money has ruined art (Pecuniae cupiditas haec tropica insti- tuit). Painting is dead (Pictura defecit). The world in tatters is sinking into Stygian regions (ad Stygios manes laceratus ducitur orbis).”2 The symptom repeats itself at any moment. The symptom of art, for example. One cannot put a stop to it. Art is compulsive. One might well want to kill it—modernity is this imaginary murder—it resists. It even laughs about the impossibility of our separating ourselves from it. We could not, in fact, separate our selves from ourselves. Walter Benja- min saw it justly: reproducibility. The sign has something to do with that. It reproduces something suspended beneath another form. The flight of the aura. At the same time, Freud and Benjamin talk about the loss of the singular. The aftermath of the primal scene.

(Is it already the mirror: already postmodernity?) In this scenario, what I could not have access to, is from whence I come. (It is already identification; already linguistic repetition.)

Note 2. A friend does me the honor of commissioning a text. About, on, starting from repetition. No precise idea comes to me. Time passes. Nevertheless, an apologue from Jacques Lacan preoccupies me: it’s from there that I ought to reflect. The story about the match boxes. It will be given at the end of the text. In extenso. It is uncertain whether I will fully fathom the significance in this. These notes are merely a sort of echo. They don’t form an article. Perhaps they will lead there. How can I say that an art critic doesn’t necessarily write a critique of art? One could theoretically, a bit foolishly and very quickly, find bodies of work that seem manifestly to put the theme in place, the question of repetition: music known as “repetitive,” the gestures of Warhol, the work of Carl Andre, the obsessive babble of Sol LeWitt.4 Or, according to certain people, one could ponder over the return of figurative painting. But there is also the repetition of the “barbaric,” of violence, of money. There is nothing more repetitive than that. Yet even more recently there is the return of concentration camps in former Yugoslavia. (The request for a text also has its context: why repetition? When there was perhaps never an end of the camps? Pasolini never believed in such an end. Needless to say, there had never been an end to violence.)5 In this disarray, snippets of psychoanalysis indicate this theme to me, this question—what is it?—they cover a delineated territory, poorly, without a doubt, because there is some goal behind the substance. The compulsion to repeat is central. In the theorization of analysis, obviously, but also insofar as it could introduce litigation, suspension, double bind. I ought to have concentrated on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Princi- ple, where repetition is embodied by the death drive. More still, resem- bling art, to concentrate on the repetition of the letter (of the law)—conceiving the phoneme, and beyond, the complex, the language of blindness. It is Derrida who reminds me of this: repetition is the very possibility for analysis (comprising the philosophic). I cite him: “On the one hand, iterability, the condition of the constitution of identities, of ideality, and, to go quickly, let’s say of any concept in general, is for this reason the becoming-objective of the object or the becoming-subjective of the subject, thus the becoming-analyzable in general.”6 Several lines later (before resituating the compulsion to repeat according to Freud and Lacan as a “resource” and the “limit” of psychoanalysis), he adds: “On the contrary, iterability allows one to take into account, in the project of a new general analytic, the phenomena of anomaly, accident, the mar- ginal, and the parasitic. Thus it also allows one to take into account what resists analysis, for example, what resists analysis as psychoanalysis.” To write beginning from a commission seems impossible to me: I must read and reread all the texts to which Derrida refers, among others. Already, the accumulation risks undermining the slightest utterance and depriving these sentences of all their originality. However, I can’t help but notice a concordance between the moment where Freud perceives this resistance and, in art, the myth of the tabula rasa, or, more accurately, of that tendency from Duchamp to Schoenberg, to center the analysis of art in its own history. Yet, understanding that the origin isn’t such a big deal: this story has already defined our modernity in art since the Renaissance, and further, back to the Greeks themselves.

Note 3. To analyze. But what? Starting from what? From failure. Thus, this reminds me of a quasi-fictional, quasi-autobiographical, painful failure: Repetition by Søren Kierkegaard. Repetition or reprise?7 Written under the strange and mimetic pseudonym of Constantin Constantius, the book is, a priori, merely a recounting of the repetitive cycles and rup- tures of amorous relationships. Still, after Sherrie Levine, the terms reprise and repetition are always philosophical (one could have grasped from the title that these notes are my introduction to her work, to the doubts it inspires in me, to its intelligence). Bearing in mind all the differences, it corresponds to the concept of iterability: because it summons the same paradox (there is an old one and a new one, there is a same one and a different one), because it designates simultaneously “the repetition of the same and alteration.”8 It is the horizon of this concept that forces my interest; in Kierkegaard’s work, it concerns movement: the sway- ing, the putting of being into action (the kineticism) as the measure of its freedom. At the end of his book, Kierkegaard writes a false supplement, addressed to “Mr. X, true reader of this book.” In it, he situates his project (after the reader has effectively read it, nonetheless), at the place where “the exception arises in the midst of the universal …”9 and he explains it. “The exception thus grasps the universal with intense passion.”10 Kierkegaard notes that the poet is an exception “of this sort.”

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 135 136 Michel Assenmaker

Why couldn’t I choose an exception—an artist—who would introduce into the universal, not the exceptional but the habitual? Not Rrose Sélavy, because the transference that operates by the readymade is the exception. The transference would need to occur without our knowing. But with manifest proof. Here we have the paradoxical character of iterability that I’m seeking.

Note 4. More than thirty years after The Reprise (1843), Flaubert wrote "A Simple Heart" (1877). A parrot (named Loulou, and evidently not Jacquot) ends up impaled and the subject of prayers just before becoming a relic on an “altar.” Something about repetition is looming there. It’s the same with the readers Bouvard and Pécuchet. And again with The Temptation of Saint Anthony: “It may appear as merely another new book to be shelved alongside all the others, but it serves, in actuality, to extend the space that existing books can occupy,” writes Michel Fou- cault.11 The muteness of the material for Saint Anthony, the copy for Bouvard and Pécuchet. But what is there to copy and what are they copying? They are "copying books, copying their own books, copying every book; and unquestionably they will copy Bouvard and Pécuchet. Because to copy is to do nothing; it is to be the books being copied. It is to be this tiny protrusion of redoubled language, of discourse folded in upon itself; this invisible existence transforms fleeting words into an enduring and distant murmur.”12 (How to grasp this meaning of the copy, if there is a copy, according to Sherrie Levine? Would that have some meaning? Copy, apprentice work, identification, all the history of modernity, in all its flux? What murmuring?)

Note 5. Sherrie Levine published “A Simple Heart,” word for word, under the title “A Simple Heart (After Gustave Flaubert)”;13 the text appeared again under the same title in a catalog along with reproductions of her works, and their similar titles.14 Here is one of her remarks about the Flaubert (and according to him):

The story of ‘A Simple Heart’ is just the account of an obscure life, that of a poor country girl, pious but fervent, discreetly loyal and tender as new-baked bread. She loves one after the other a man, her mistress’ children, a nephew of hers, an old man whom she nurses and her parrot. When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when Sherrie Levine, Loulou, 2004. Cast bronze, 12 × 8 × 6 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical, as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender-hearted myself. Now, surely, no one will accuse me of being inhuman any more.15

In 1982, Craig Owens wrote: “In all her work Levine has assumed the functions of the dealer, the curator, the critic—everything but the creative artist.”16

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 137 138 Michel Assenmaker

Note 6. Foucault has defined the relationship between stupidity and sainthood, a connection “visible,” he says, in “A Simple Heart.” This visibility has a relationship not only to Sherrie Levine’s choice of Flau- bert’s text, but also to the general visibility that she gives her work, which is a sort of excess. As Foucault observed, this same relationship is the “essential” character in Bouvard and Pécuchet. This duality operates on all levels of Flaubert’s last book; does it play out in all facets of Sher- rie Levine’s work as well? After Flaubert, and after Duchamp and the related strategy of the ready-made. After photography. After Benjamin.17 What is effective or in what domain will reproduction’s effectiveness henceforth produce its effects? Iterability is implemented in each of these moments. Sherrie Levine takes forms that are central to modernity, not exclusively photographic, but essentially industrial.18 But is there repetition or reprise in this? Should I have indexed the alterations? (The After, after all, signals me.) The alteration of the same and of the other, all at the same time. If alteration is a process,19 a process leading “themes and substances” astray, then it can only mine likenesses, as Georges Didi- Huberman analyzed it in La ressemblance informe:20 a title that I find fits the work of Sherrie Levine like a glove—but turned inside out21—since something in the likeness cries out. At the center of mimesis there is a hollow, a lack. (With Sherrie Levine there is no translation or substitu- tion; in most of her works there are none of the montage effects that usually characterize collage: this is the origin of my reticence to speak about citation and simulacrum in relation to her project.) I can only refer to this lack subjectively. An entire philosophy of art is constructed around this hollow. Analogy, the “as if,” has undoubtedly attempted to fill it. Reread the “Parergon”:22 it concludes in part III by putting analogy into perspective: Kant understands the expression of aesthetic ideas “nach der Analogie einer Sprache”23 (according to the analogy of a language). What is the consequence of that? “Analogism recapitulates or reheads it. It saturates the hiatus by repetition: the mise en abyme resists the abyss24 of collapse, reconstitutes the economy of mimesis. This latter is the same (economimesis), the law of the same and of the proper which always re-forms itself. Against imitation but by analogy.”25

Note 7. How to grasp all this in comparison to a work? Around the subject of the symptom. From failures? From the symptom as a failure. How to make the bridge (yet another analogy) between the works and readings of Sherrie Levine? Can one make such a bridge? What gears have caught me? Could I say, for example, that Sherrie Levine’s work imitates Edward Weston’s photographs? Does she elevate them to the height of their iconic status? “A Simple Heart,” by Flaubert, is a text; but introduced in the work of Sherrie Levine, it is also an object. From where (and from what) does one perceive this difference? This light difference—this distance, in the greatest proximity—has always already taken place. The modern model of this mechanism would be in Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), in which, as we know, he reproduced a scene at the margins of Raphael’s The Judgment of Paris by way of Marcantonio Raimondi’s transitional engraving. Yet as Hubert Damisch has shown, The Judgment of Paris is the very paradigm of the judgment of taste. Here, I shall insist only that this “evidence” “is not unrelated (assuming my hypothesis is correct) to Raphael’s agenda in choosing the judgment of Paris as the subject of what might properly be called a preliminary essay in the art of the reproducible. … Manet’s operation … was a kind of experiment to test the limits of represent- ablility: the role of the woman in this configuration, her calculated

Marcantonio Raimondi, The Judgment of Paris, after Raphael, c. 1510–1520. Engraving, 7 3 11/16 × 17 /16 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1919, Accession Number: 19.74.1.

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 139 140 Michel Assenmaker

‘absence,’ constituting the best illustration of the system’s inherent defi- ciencies, prompting the addition, by way of compensation, of the parergon, the ‘supplement.’”26 Now this painting, The Judgment of Paris, immediately poses the question of reproducibility—simultaneously in its theme (for example in the analogy between Venus and Helen); in its medium, by the reprise of the engraving; and in its subject, because a judgment of taste condi- tionally has to be reiterated—and establishes in one of its facets the modern question of painting. And this painting, Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, marks, at the same time, a closure (hilarity—as a response—is raised straightaway by Bataille in his Manet)27 and a recovery—a death— beyond the pleasure principle. Manet thus used Raphael. Employing him where he would follow up himself. Does Sherrie Levine use herself in the same way? In the case of the Westons, for example, I would say rather not to use, but to reuse. The prefix knots itself thus to the re of petition.28

Note 8. As a first example of reuse (and these notes don’t claim to be a reuse of readings), I would point out the front of the Roman sarcophagus representing the judgment of Paris—inserted in the facade of Villa Medici. A second, stranger still, is that of the Madonna della Vallicella painted by Rubens. In these two cases it is the work itself—the object— that is installed in another context.29 This “insetting” doesn’t occur without raising several problems. Aby Warburg has shown how “Roman sarcophagi were among the most important vehicles for the transmission of the pagan pantheon to modern culture.”30 The case of the Madonna of the Chiesa Nuova of Rome also has to do with transmission: one that entails a coming back (a remounting) thanks to the inset image (and of course to the image in which it is inset) of the prototype—that is, of the Virgin herself. Which certainly is not to say that every reuse serves as a transmission. But in the case of Sherrie Levine: is it a reuse in the first place? And does it also have to do with transmission described here? And what is she dealing with? A second problem, evident in the case of the Chiesa Nuova, concerns insetting itself as “a way of ex-position,”31 posing questions of scenogra- phy, of hierarchy, etc. “The Judgment of Paris sarcophagus underwent a singular transformation,” set into a facade conceived by the architect and sculptor Bartolomeo Ammannati as a “wall of images.” An ex-position Peter Paul Rubens, Madonna della Vallicella, 1606–1608. Oil on slate, 167 × 98½ inches. Rome, Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova).

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 141 142 Michel Assenmaker again—a set—one “devised … to exalt the virtues and magnificenza of the villa’s owner, Ferdinando de’ Medici.”32 To what effects of the ex- position am I subject in the works of Sherrie Levine? Ex-position and transmission both pose the question of responsibility to the past. Finally, a third problem, the insetting in these two examples required a transformation of the object. In the case of the Judgment, a “stucco ‘sky’” had to be added, “punctuated by trees and clouds and traversed by an art of the Zodiac modeled after Marcantonio’s engraving.”33 What is the goal of this transformation? To make a reproduction correspond to a design. Without wanting to go back through all the details of this design, I shall however mention its narcissistic dimension, evidenced by the game of looks shared among the sculpted figures and by its placement in the facade. In the case of the Rubens, the treatment is extraordinary. His Madonna is comprised of three panels! That which installs, that which is installed (the original, an icon), and that which recovers (by a system of shutters) the icon under normal conditions, in this way letting it be revealed during celebrations. By doing so, as Stoichita strikingly points out, Rubens was articulating the image on the panel by extension and (I underline) by similarity (the panel-shutters renewing the figure of the Virgin of the icon). Yet he articulated this in absentia, which is, for me, essential in the framework of these notes. As a matter of fact, Stoichita points toward the major effect of this in absentia: “Thanks to Rubens, icon and painting have become mutually exclusive.”34 With Levine, however, there is no insetting, outside of the texts. But why not linger for a moment on the questions of transmission, of “ex-position,” of treatment, in their differences? Of their unequal relationship to reproducibility? And what of the narcissistic function? And that which her work excludes?

Note 9. Art was conceived of as a “thing of the past” (“ein Vergan- genes,” said Hegel), and a philosophy of art was built on that ground, a ground whose first trait is its relationship to mourning. Second trait (following Derrida): this philosophical discourse “presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and the outside of the art object, here a discourse on the frame. ...”35 That is to say, on the parergon. What does Sherrie Levine make from her mourning? What grief does she lean on to make this work? If her work simultaneously encompasses the imaginary Museum, the history of modern art, the flight of the aura (the delirium associated with the parrot on the monstrance), would there be, in this case, a limit of the parergon? Is such a question even able to be formulated? The Museum as parergon for example? Yet what would be “essential and what is accessory in a work?”36 And this, in any manner. The after of Sherrie Levine: the sign of para and ergon?

Note 10. Insofar as Sherrie Levine’s work manifestly poses the question of representation (in all its senses), I am redirected to the question of art as paradox. An entire section of Stoichita’s book recovers this question. In what ways is reflection on painting—and beyond it, on art—of a paradoxical nature? Reflection produced in and about painting expands. Whether or not the Vanitas plays a decisive role is not important: the image would be in vain and vain at the same time, the convergence being doubtless a pleonasm. The fiction of art and the fiction of the supratemporal character of art would be displayed simultaneously. Yet there is still another turn. Modern painting (and its birth) emerged from this reflection: about representation, about the means that it gives of itself, creating a self-reflexive object. On the other end of this period (but where is the border of this end?), Sherrie Levine, among others, folds this question in on itself. The self-reflexive object finishes with the monstrance, but stuffed? Stuffed,37 because emptied of its organic content, preserved as the semblance of living by photography, though never the less exposed as dead? Could there be anything as metaphorical? Exposed as dead? No. Because as much as the Judgment of Paris and the Madonna are, in a certain way, dead, representations of the intentions of their time, as insets they become signs, carriers of a new intention (the implication of the spectator in the spectacle, for example). And for Sherrie Levine? Her choice is not indifferent. Nor is her manner of exhibiting work. Does design concern the cyclical, a debasing, the parergon of the ergon of modernity? For that which haunts the work of Sherrie Levine is also that which has conditioned modern painting. This haunting has a relation to the body. (We already suspected this with the work of Rubens, as it is also already at stake in Déjeuner.)

Note 11. “I like to think of paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and the future, between my history and yours.”38

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 143 144 Michel Assenmaker

Note 12. This is, I repeat, only a question of notes concerning a warp- ing of readings after Sherrie Levine. The order of a text is the source of this distortion. Could there be specific readings for a work? Could the dream be interpreted on the basis of universal symbols? It seems to me that Freud struggles against this in the strongest manner. It’s his modernity. I must return to Stoichita’s proof. When the Reformation placed the meaning of images and their role in society in question, the effort of reflection led to the invention of two new modes of independent thought: history and art theory. But they couldn’t emerge on their own, as autonomous discourses in which to think the end of art, its temporal end as its goal, its diachrony as its syn- chrony. In practice, this birth finds its coherence (which is a collusion) with the material reception of works in the form of the collection and the catalog. Modern art—which, in a manner of speaking, allows art’s ancient function as an icon to escape, and whose iconic function necessarily becomes more and more paradoxical—cannot see itself to assess its boundaries, or the horizon of this double intertexuality (of history, of theory and of collection). What Sherrie Levine radically reveals comes with evidence. Her art of “collaging” refers to the decontextualization inherent in the collection, in the museum.

Note 13. In the sense that I intend it here, this iconic rupture—the distancing of the ancient function of the icon—responds to another rupture intrinsic to modern thought: the schism of thought that thinks itself. The Cartesian schism, insofar as Descartes inaugurates the modern, auto-referential discourse that implicates whatever it might be of the other in order that one obtains a response.39 If Poussin introduces the context (and the expectation of a painter) in his self-portrait for Chante- lou, then Sherrie Levine pushes this deal nearly to the absurd in her series of Self-Portraits after Egon Schiele. Only the constant sameness of the self-portrait remains: the signature. The author is absent, as well as his image—only his name remains. The distance is maximal. This distance has always taken place. How does one figure the absence to (of) the self?40 By going through an earlier image (another one) with a history; a mythic one, for example, Saint Luke, Apelles. Is it death that’s showing itself there? “If there is a death, then it is a ‘figurative’ death,” writes Stoichita. “The painter is this side of the space where the images are made; he is in the space from where we see the empty scenario of the act.”41 It remains up to Vermeer and to Velázquez to establish the modern paradigm of the schism between the painted subject and the scene of production. Whether it is Las Meninas’s affirmation of the unstable character of all representation—its constitutive aporia—or the disrobing in The Art of the Painting, what is figured is the absence of the painter from his proper place. From the un-painting which supports the possibility of a painting (Velázquez) to the white wall that renders the image possible (Vermeer), the classical reflection on the meta-pictorial gives rise to the beginning of (modern) art “deliberating its own nothingness.”42 The paradox at the center of this thought in the second half of the seventeenth century is that of thinking of nothingness; not only thinking about it, but making a eulogy of it, because this reflection on painting ends by painting the back of the painting: “It represents ‘nothing’ save a painting turned around.”43 Nothing. But from this nothing, from this about-face, everything. Not “pure nothing” but “the nothing of something.” As Stoichita lucidly concludes: “It is for this reason that Gijs- brecht’s ‘closure,’ far from being ‘definitive’ is introduced—and this is the final paradox—like the full stop of the opening act. Through the use of this introductory approach, the painting has become fully aware of itself: of its being and of its nothingness.”44 How to reconcile this—isn’t it an abuse? Does Sherrie Levine’s work establish itself on a painting that represents a reversed painting? Think of her work not as an end of painting, not as a death, but as a dis- establishment of some sort. Painting has concentrated within itself the modern stakes of art as such; thus it has fallen to art (since Duchamp and from now on), and to the paradox of that designation itself, to reconcile painting’s classical and inaugural self-reflection. Art is not so much a general notion or concept, but an effect of its modern tropes: the museum, the collection, the exhibition, its historicity, its critique, its commercialization, …

Note 14. In its turn inward, the establishment of painting (and thus of the modern notion of art) operates under the phantomization of the body. In the Rubens in Rome, it’s the body of the Virgin that is the ultimate reference (the prototype) of the inset. Phantomization and inaccessibility asserted by the body itself? Without a doubt, the virginity of the Virgin is the necessary support in this separation. This

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 145 146 Michel Assenmaker inaccessibility of the body—representing the reference to painting— always seemed to me what was at issue in Vermeer’s Girl with Pearl Ear- ring. If the major part of his work (including A View of Delft) properly constitutes a meta-pictorial reflection, the Girl with Pearl Earring in the Mauritshuis and Portrait of a Young Woman at the Metropolitan emerge as particular cases. But it is only by thinking of the inaccessibility of the body as the issue of these paintings that we can understand what is formative, dialectically, in his other paintings.

Note 15. Henceforth, only music will still be able to “speak”45 the body: it will be Mozart’s Don Giovanni. And only this opera as Kierke gaard wanted to show it. Only the abstraction of music is able to meet the sensuality of the body. Not this or that sensuality, not a specific sensuality, but a generic one. The latter is what Don Juan desired. As Kierkegaard brilliantly remarked, only a ghost could have stopped this quest: “Understood correctly, this in turn will illuminate the interpretation of Don Juan. A spirit, an apparition, is reproduction; this is the secret implicit in the coming again. But Don Juan is capable of everything, can withstand everything, except the reproduction of life, precisely because he is immediate, sensate life, of which spirit is the negation.”46 The death of Flaubert’s Felicity is both linked to and mir- rored by Loulou’s ghost. Her last breath was also linked to the spirit. Sherrie Levine has produced a work that is, in part, explicitly linked to the phantomization of the body—but hasn’t a haunting spanned her work since Shoe Sale? This work, Chimera: After a Broken Leg, as Sylvia Lavin underlined, is in relation to the wounded, mutilated, wartime body.47 Can we understand the body as the ideal—fantasmatic—site of reference (of the real?).

Note 16. Yet, it is the sense of the body as inaccessible that provokes repetition. Man is a speaking being. Captured in language, his body felled by the effects of the signifier. This loss “takes the form a loss of being of which language bears the trace: we don’t say that man is a body, but instead that he has one.”48 Not only do our real bodies evidently disappear, but we are disjointed in them. Our body “remains beyond the reach of what can be named or symbolized” and thus “the subject and the body as such have no relation that can be formulated; the body is always a remainder over and beyond what could be said of it.”49 Divided, “proven” by this division, nonetheless the subject is bound to “unify itself”—by the means of the Other. Even if the attempt ends in failure. “Unable to become One with the woman, the man has to take women one by one like Don Juan (the universe scattered in an infinity of units), or else identify with a woman, that is, make himself uniform with her, like the parakeet that was in love with Picasso’s jacket. …”50 From Don Juan to the parakeet, from the phantom to the spirit, to me, the road no longer seems as long if one reads one of the effects of Sherrie Levine’s work as the tension between these two positions. “The place of an Other jouissance evoked by the feminine position nevertheless remains a pure conjecture for which there is only a negative formula: since woman is not-all in phallic jouissance, a part of her must be located elsewhere. But, being outside of language, the jouissance of the Other is unsubjectivizable and hence it is the cause of an anxiety less easily mastered than castration anxiety.”51 How to attempt to master this “less easily mastered” anxiety? A number of responses are possible, one of which is creation. That which returns to produce a new signifier “in the place of the missing signifier.” But not just any new signifier: not one that would obscure the hollowness of the unsubjectivizable, but on the contrary, one that would seek to “reveal it and let it operate as such.”52 Thus, it is no accident that Sherrie Levine works in series: the concept of a series transcends the elements it contains, and “withdrawn from the meaning that it confers, it comes to deprive of meaning the very thing to which it gives meaning.”53 From Self-Portraits to Knots, from Chimera to the Black Newborn installation, it is the unbridged aporia of modernity that is the intention, the growing awareness of the pointlessness of the attempt to rejoin a self-reflexive art with its being. (And for the artist subject, the same?) The mute cry of The Newborn as it rests on the closed piano: endors- ing the call to the other and the potentiality of music, this medium that gathers all, there “where language ceases.”54

End Note.55 An apologue56 by Jacques Lacan. “During that great period of penitence that our country went through under Pétain, in the time of ‘Work, Family, Homeland’ and of belt-tightening, I once went to visit my friend Jacques Prévert in Saint- Paul-de-Vence. And I saw there a collection of match boxes. …

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 147 148 Michel Assenmaker

“It was the kind of collection that it was easy to afford at that time; it was perhaps the only kind of collection possible. Only the match boxes appeared as follows: they were all the same and were laid out in an extremely agreeable way that involved each one being so close to the one next to it that the little drawer was slightly displaced. As a result, they were all threaded together so as to form a continuous ribbon that ran along the mantelpiece, climbed the wall, extended to the molding, and climbed down again next to the door. I don’t say that it went on to infinity, but it was extremely satisfying from an ornamental point of view. “… In other words, this arrangement demonstrated that a match box isn’t simply something that has a certain utility, that it isn’t even a type in the Platonic sense, an abstract matchbox, that the matchbox all by itself is a thing with all its coherence of being. The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box. Thus the collector found his motive in this form of apprehension that concerns less the matchbox than the Thing that subsists in a matchbox. “Whatever you do, however, you don’t find that in a random way in any object whatsoever. For if you think about it, the match box appears to be a mutant form of something that has so much importance for us that it can occasionally take on a moral meaning; it is what we call a drawer. In this case, the drawer was liberated and no longer fixed in the rounded fullness of a chest, thus presenting itself with a copulatory force that the picture drawn by Prévert’s composition was designed to make us perceive. “So now, that little fable of the revelation of the Thing beyond the object shows you one of the most innocent forms of sublimation. Per- haps you can even see something emerge in it that, goodness knows, society is able to find satisfaction in. “If it is a satisfaction, it is in this case one that doesn’t ask anything of anyone.”57 (Translation: Howard Singerman and Jocelyn Spaar)

Notes

1. Editor’s note: In French, the essay is entitled “D’Après Sherrie Levine, la répétition,” a title that plays on Levine’s subtitles After Walker Evans, After Edward Weston, and the like. The “after” in Levine’s titles is usually translated into the French as d’après rather than simply après, following the model of copies or engravings made after the master, after Raphael, in an example that appears here. Conventionally, d’après is translated “according to” or “from” and its use here suggests not only temporal difference but also indebtedness. 2. Petronius, cited in Pascal Quignard, Sex and Terror, trans. Chris Turner (Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012), 76. 3. Sherrie Levine, artist’s statement, 1979. 4. See Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 244–259. 5. I return here to the essential work of Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 6. Jacques Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Nas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 31–32. 7. See the introduction to the Éditions Flammarion’s 2008 translation of Kierkegaard’s Repetition by Nelly Viallaneix. Viallaneix gives her translation from the Danish the title La reprise rather than the more conventional La répétition. 8. Derrida, Resistances, 31. 9. Søren Kierkegaard, La reprise, trans. Nelly Viallaneix (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2008), 171: “où l’exception fait irruption dans le général.” English translation adapted from Kierkegaard’s Writings IV, Fear and Trembling/Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 226. 10. Ibid., 172. Editor’s note: Assenmaker writes: “L’exception pense donc le général ‘avec l’énergie de la passion,’” quoting again from Viallaneix, 172. English translation adapted from M. G. Piety’s translation in Repetition and Philosophical Crumbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 78. 11. Michel Foucault, “The Fantasia of the Library,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Prac- tice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 91. 12. Foucault, “Fantasia,” 109. 13. In New Observations 35 (1985): 15–19. 14. See Sherrie Levine, ed. Dieter Schwarz (Vienna: Galerie Nächst St. Stephan / Rose- marie Schwarzwälder, 1988). 15. Sherrie Levine, artist’s statement, 1994, cited by Catherine Ingraham, “Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld,” in Sherrie Levine Sculpture, ed. David Frankel (Cologne: Galerie Jablonka, and Los Angeles: Margo Leavin Gallery, 1996), 30, n. 5 [reprinted in this volume]. The text is drawn from a letter from Flaubert to Mme. Roger des Genettes, and published in translation in Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales, trans. Robert Baldick (London: Penguin, 1961), 15. 16. Craig Owens, “Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks,” Art in America 70, no. 6 (Summer 1982): 148 [reprinted in this volume]. 17. Editor’s note: Here, Assenmaker stresses the difference that the preposition “de” makes in the French construction “d’après,” writing in this passage: “(D’)Après Flaubert, et (d’) après Duchamp,” etc., calling attention to both temporal afterness and indebtedness. 18. See Terry Smith’s very beautiful book, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993).

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 149 150 Michel Assenmaker

19. See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, L’informe, mode d’emploi (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996). 20. Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, ou le gai savoir visual selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995). While Didi-Huberman’s essay and that of Bois and Krauss (n. 17) take radically opposing points of view, they both nevertheless aim to question both oculocentrism and modernism. 21. It fits Levine’s work; that is, according to what Dennis Hollier has pinpointed with Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein as “the decisive contribution” of modern art: “Modern art begins at the precise moment where the same causes cease to produce the same effects. It thwarts the reproduction of the same, the creation of the same by the same.” Cited in Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe, 14. 22. Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 15–147. 23. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 116. 24. See Rosalind Krauss on the work of Sherrie Levine, “Bachelors,” October 52 (Spring 1990) [reprinted in this volume]. 25. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 117–18. 26. Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans. John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 234. 27. Georges Bataille, Manet (Paris: Skira, 1955). Bataille opens the book with a quote from Duranty that evokes the particularity of a painting by Manet: “One can laugh because it is bizarre that not one thing resembles any others. …” At the end of this first page, Bataille writes “But Olympia is the first masterpiece about which the crowd laughed an immense laugh.” On the following page, he suggests that one of the “subjects of hilarity in Manet” was his “reconstitution of historical figures” (17–18). 28. Petere, “to pursue”; re, a prefix both iterative and “intensitive,” according to Le Robert dictionnaire historique de la langue française. Concerning “repetition,” the dictionary notes that it is “recorded for the first time specifically in the sense of a ‘copy of the document’ (in relation to the law of Moïse).” 29. The first example is analyzed by Damisch in The Judgment of Paris. The second is addressed by Victor I. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta- Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 71. I will take up the notion of insetting again. 30. Damisch, Judgment of Paris, 220. 31. Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 71. 32. Damisch, Judgment of Paris, 220–221. 33. Ibid., 221. 34. Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 76. 35. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 45. 36. Ibid., 63. 37. This taxidermy report is revealed by Catherine Ingraham, but she doesn’t address the origins of Flaubert’s Loulou. See Ingraham, “Sherrie Levine’s After Rietveld,” 26 [reprinted in this volume]. 38. Sherrie Levine, “Five Comments,” in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987). 39. See Stoichita for all references on meta-pictorial criticism. 40. “Impossible to be one’s own spectator,” wrote Luigi Pirandello in his book One, No One and a Hundred Thousand, and further in the text, this: “Voilà: to be the self, to be no one.” 41. Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 236. 42. Ibid., 269. 43. The reference is to Cornelius Norbertus Gijbrechts, Tableau retourné, around 1670– 1675, oil on canvas, in the collection of the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. 44. Stoichita, Self-Aware Image, 279. 45. A lapsus calami made me write “perler” (translator’s note: perler—“to form droplets,” rather than parler—“to speak.” 46. Editor’s note: Assenmaker quotes Søren Kierkegaard’s essay, “Les étapes érotiques spontanées ou l’érotisme musical,” from the French translation Ou bien … ou bien … (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 89: “Si on veut bien comprendre ceci, la conception de Don Juan deviendra plus Claire. Un esprit, un revenant est reproduction, et c’est là le secret du retour; Don Juan peut tout, il peut resister à tout, excepté à la reproduction de la vie, jus- tement parce qu’il est la vie sensuelle et spontanée dont l’esprit est la négation.” The Eng- lish citation is drawn from Kierkegaard’s Writings III, Part 1, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 112–113. 47. Sylvia Lavin, “Habeas Corpus,” in Sherrie Levine Sculpture (as in note 15) [reprinted in this volume]. 48. Serge André, What Does a Woman Want?” trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other Press, 1999), 260. My discussion here draws in particular on the three last chapters of Serge André’s book. 49. Ibid., 262. 50. Ibid., 264. 51. Ibid., 319. 52. Ibid., 322. 53. Derrida, Resistances of Psychoanalysis, 23. See Rosalind Krauss’s “Bachelors” for an articulation of the different functions of the series in Sherrie Levine’s work. Built on the notion of the body without organs of the anti-Oedipal, Krauss evokes the notion of loss, all by linking it to castration. 54. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 57. 55. Editor’s note: “Note de départ” also implies a beginning, a point from which to depart, and could be more literally translated as “Note of Departure.” 56. Editor’s note: An “apologue,” a brief moral fable or tale, from the Greek, meaning “statement,” or “account,” resonates with the word “epilogue,” or a comment at the end of the work intended to bring closure. Assenmaker yet again chooses to refuse conclusion to these notes, this series. 57. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book VII, The Ethics of Psycho- analysis, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 113–114.

After Sherrie Levine, Repetition? 151

pathos: Trois Contes1 Sherrie Levine pathos: Trois Contes Sherrie Levine © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

pa thos\n. 1. The quality or power in life or art of evoking a feeling of pity or compassion. 2. Pity. 3. Obs. Suffering. (1570–80; < Gk pathos suffering, sensation, akin to paschein to suffer)2 pathos\n. The book had so much pathos I wept all through it: pathetic quality, power to affect, ability to touch, ability to arouse sympathy, poignancy, plaintiveness, sadness, feeling, sentiment, sentimen- talism, sentimentality, pitiableness, anguish, heartache, agony, misery, distress, woe, desolation. —Antonyms comicality, amusement, humor, fun.3

Trois Contes 2

Gustave Flaubert is born in 1821, the second son of the head surgeon at the Hotel-Dieu in Rouen. While studying law in Paris, Flaubert meets Victor Hugo in 1843. The following year Flaubert’s shattering first epi- leptic attack puts an end to his legal studies and confines him to the new 154 Sherrie Levine family house in Croisset and his mother’s care. His confinement brings both the solitude and stability necessary for a life of writing. In 1849, Flaubert reads his first full-length adult work, The Tempta- tion of Saint Anthony, to his two closest friends. The reading takes four days, at the rate of eight hours per day. After embarrassed consultation, the listeners tell him to throw it on the fire. Flaubert contracts syphilis in Egypt in 1850. Much of his hair falls out; he grows stout. Madame Flaubert, meeting him in Rome the following year, scarcely recognizes her son, and finds that he has become very coarse. Middle age begins here. “Scarcely are you born before you begin rotting.”4 Over the years all but one of his teeth will fall out; his saliva will be permanently blackened by mercury treatment. Flaubert writes Madame Bovary between 1851 and 1857, which, in its graphic naturalism, becomes a succès de scandale. He declares “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” In later years Flaubert comes to resent the insistent fame of his masterpiece, which makes others see him as a one-book author. The publication of A Sentimental Education, in 1869, is a critical and commercial flop. Of the 150 complimentary copies sent to friends and acquaintances, barely thirty are even acknowledged. In 1874, The Temptation of Saint Anthony is published. Flaubert notes, “What comes as surprise is the hatred underlying much of this criticism—hatred for me, for my person—deliberate denigration. … This avalanche of abuse does depress me.”5 Gustave Flaubert said that he wrote “A Simple Heart,” in 1876, to please his friend, the writer George Sand. She did not live to read it. Of the story, he wrote,

It is just the account of an obscure life, that of a poor country girl, pious but fervent, discreetly loyal, and tender as new-baked bread. She loves one after the other a man, her mistress’ children, a nephew of hers, an old man whom she nurses, and her parrot. When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender- hearted myself. Now surely, no one will accuse me of being inhuman any more. …6 By the time Flaubert wrote “A Simple Heart,” he had suffered a long series of financial and personal losses, including ill health, unhappy love affairs, and the deaths of many close friends and beloved family members. He said that his heart had become a necropolis. In an ironic reversal, this story of accumulated loss and mediated redemption becomes a critical and popular success, when it is published in 1877, in a collection titled Trois Contes. However, Flaubert, nicknamed “the consumer” by his niece, dies impoverished, bitter, and lonely in 1880. Émile Zola, in his obituary notice, comments that Flaubert was unknown to four-fifths of Rouen, and detested by the other fifth.

Trois Contes 3

—Here they are. I’ll begin. What of shoes? What, shoes? Whose are the shoes? What are they made of? Is a pair a repetition? And even, who are they? Here they are, the questions, that’s all.

Sherrie Levine, Small Sabots, 2001. Cast Bronze, 4 × 11 × 4 inches each. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

pathos: Trois Contes 155 156 Sherrie Levine

Trois Contes 4

Paul Gauguin, who shared van Gogh’s quarters in Arles in 1881, sensed a personal history behind his friend’s painting of a pair of shoes. He has told in his reminiscences of van Gogh a deeply affecting story linked with van Gogh’s shoes:

In the studio was a pair of big hob-nailed shoes, all worn and spotted with mud; van Gogh made of them a remarkable still life painting. I sensed that there was a story behind this old relic, and ventured one day to ask him if he had some reason for preserving, with respect, what one ordinarily throws out for the rag-picker’s basket. His father, he said, was a pastor, and at his urging he pursued theological studies in order to prepare for his future vocation. As a young pastor, he left for Belgium one fine morning, without telling his family, to preach the gospel in the factories, not as he had been taught but as he understood it himself. He said that these shoes had bravely endured the fatigue of that trip. Preaching to the miners in the Borinage, van Gogh undertook to nurse a victim of the fire in the mine. The man was so badly burned and mutilated that the doctor had no hope for his recovery. Only a miracle, he thought, could save him. Van Gogh tended him forty days with loving care and saved the miner’s life. He told me that before leaving Belgium he had, in the presence of this man who bore on his brow a series of scars, a vision of the crown of thorns, a vision of the resurrected Christ. After the story, van Gogh took up his palette again, working silently. Beside him was a white canvas. And when I began a portrait of him, I too had the vision of a Jesus preaching kindness and humility.7

Trois Contes 5

Reflecting on the inevitable decay of the living body, Flaubert wrote to his mistress, in 1846:

In the mere sight of an old pair of shoes there is something pro- foundly melancholy. When you think of all the steps you have taken in them to only God knows where, of all the grass you have trodden, all the mud you have collected … the cracked leather that yawns as if to tell you: “well, you dope, buy another pair of patent leather, shiny, crackling they will get to be like me, like you some day, after you have soiled many an upper and sweated in many a vamp.”8

Since this letter, dated December 13, 1846, was published in 1887, it could have been read by Flaubert’s great admirer van Gogh.

Trois Contes 6

The idea of a picture of his shoes was perhaps suggested by a drawing reproduced in Alfred Sensier’s book on Jean-François Millet, Painter and Peasant, published in 1864. Van Gogh was deeply impressed by this book and referred to it often in his letters. The name of the peasant- painter Millet appears over two hundred times in van Gogh’s corre- spondence. Comparison of Millet’s drawing of his wooden sabot with van Gogh’s painting of shoes confirms what has been said about the pathos and crucial personal reference in the latter. Millet’s sabots are presented in profile on the ground with indications of grass and hay. It was Millet’s practice to give to friends and admirers a drawing of a pair of sabots in profile, as a sign of his own lifelong commitment to peasant life.

Trois Contes 7

A fellow student wrote of a visit to van Gogh’s Paris studio. There he was shown an unfinished painting of a pair of shoes. Van Gogh told him that he had bought a pair of old shoes at the flea market, heavy and thick, the shoes of a carter but clean and freshly polished. They were fancy shoes. He put them on, one rainy afternoon, and went out for a walk among the fortifications. Spotted with mud, they became interesting. … Vincent copied his pair of shoes faithfully.

Trois Contes 8

In 1950 Martin Heidegger wrote an essay titled “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In this essay he describes a well-known painting by van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes:

pathos: Trois Contes 157 158 Sherrie Levine

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toil- some tread of the worker stands forth. In the stiffly solid heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever uniform furrows of the field, swept by a raw wind. On the leather there lies the dampness and saturation of the soil. Under the soles there slides the loneliness of the field path as the evening declines. In the shoes there vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening corn and its enigmatic self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety about the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the advent of birth and shivering at the surrounding menace of death.9

Trois Contes 9

In 1968 Meyer Schapiro responded to Heidegger in his essay, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh”:

Professor Heidegger is aware that van Gogh painted such shoes several times, but he does not identify the picture he has in mind, as if the different versions are interchangeable, all disclosing the same truth. A reader who wished to compare his account with the original picture or its photograph will have some difficulty in deciding which one to select. Eight paintings of shoes by van Gogh were recorded at the time Heidegger wrote his essay. Of these, only three show the “dark openings of worn insides” which speak so distinctly to the philosopher. They are more likely pictures of the artist’s own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant. They might be shoes he had worn in Holland but the pictures were painted during van Gogh’s stay in Paris in 1886–87; one of them bears the date: “87.” From the time before 1886 when he painted Dutch peasants are two pictures of shoes—a pair of clean wooden clogs set on a table beside other objects. Later in Arles he painted, as he wrote in a letter of August 1888 to his brother, “une paire de vieux souliers” which are evidently his own. A second still life of “vieux souliers de paysan” is mentioned in a letter of September 1888 to the painter Emile Bernard, but it lacks the characteristic worn surface and dark insides of Heidegger’s description.10

In reply to Schapiro, Heidegger wrote that the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show in Amsterdam in March 1930. Schapiro responded that there had also been exhibited at the same time a painting with three pairs of shoes, and that it was possible the exposed sole of a shoe in this picture inspired the reference to the sole in the philosopher’s account, but from neither of these pictures, nor from any of the others, could one properly say that a painting of shoes by van Gogh expresses the being or essence of a peasant woman’s shoes and her relation to nature and work. They are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town and city.

Trois Contes 10

Meyer Schapiro dedicated his essay “The Still Life as Personal Object— A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” to the memory of Kurt Gold- stein, who had, during his lifetime, earned Schapiro’s gratitude by at least one gesture: having given him “The Origin of the Work of Art,” by Martin Heidegger, to read. Goldstein said nothing to Schapiro about van Gogh’s shoes. He simply pointed out Heidegger’s text. Goldstein fled Nazi Germany in 1933, after being imprisoned there and then being freed on the condition that he leave the country. He spent a painful period in Amsterdam, before arriving in New York in 1936 to teach at Columbia University. Having emigrated when he was very young, Schapiro was already teaching at Columbia, which had become a haven for many émigré professors. During this same period, Heidegger was giving his lectures on “The Origin of the Work of Art” and his Introduction to Metaphysics course, the two texts in which he refers to van Gogh. Schapiro delivered Goldstein’s funeral oration in New York in 1965.

—Los Angeles, Spring 2001

pathos: Trois Contes 159 160 Sherrie Levine

Notes

1. I would like to thank my colleagues at the Getty Research Institute for their friend- ship and intelligence. And many thanks to Julian Barnes. 2. Editor’s note: From Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1977). 3. Editor’s note: From Random House Roget’s Thesaurus, 4th ed. (New York: Ballentine Books, 2001). 4. Editor’s note: From Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 29. 5. Editor’s note: Cited in Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot, 31. From a letter to George Sand, May, 1, 1874. See Frances Steegmuller, ed., The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1857–1880 (Cam- bridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982), 212. 6. Editor’s note: Flaubert in a letter to Mme. Roger des des Genettes, June 19, 1876, as cited by Roger Baldick in his introduction to Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales (London: Penguin Classics, 1961), 15. 7. Editor’s note: Paul Gauguin, cited in Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society. Selected Papers (New York: George Brazilier, 1994), 140–141. First published in Marianne L. Simmel, ed., The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York: Springer, 1968), 203–209. 8. Editor’s note: Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, December 13, 1846, cited in Schapiro, “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art, 145. 9. Editor’s note: Martin Heidegger from “The Origin of the Work of Art,” as cited in Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” 135–136. 10. Editor’s note: Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” 135–136.

pathos: Trois Contes 161

Since the door was only half closed, I got a jumbled view of my mother and father on the bed, one on top of the other. Mortified, hurt, horror- struck, I had the hateful sensation of having placed myself blindly and completely in unworthy hands. Instinctively and without effort, I divided myself, so to speak, into two persons, of whom one, the real, the genuine one, continued on her own account, while the other, a successful imitation of the first, was delegated to have relations with the world. My first self remains at a distance, impassive, ironical and watching. I no longer paint faces, only scars, intimations, and signs.1 —1979 I have become interested in issues of authenticity, identity and property—that is to say, What do we own? What is the same? —1979 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, 164 Some Statements by Sherrie Levine which contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both worlds. —1980 The world is filled to suffocating. Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. A painting’s meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter.2 —1981 In the seventeenth century Miguel de Cervantes published Don Quixote. In 1939 Jorge Luis Borges wrote “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quix- ote,” the story of a Frenchman who rewrites the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Don Quixote in the twentieth century. Pierre Menard was not interested in provoking plebian delight in anachronism or charming us with the primary idea that all epochs are the same, or that they are different. He did not want to compose another Don Quixote—which would be easy—but the Don Quixote. It is unnec- essary to add that his aim was never to produce a mechanical transcription of the original: he did not propose to copy it. His admirable ambition was to produce pages which would coincide—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist to the seventeenth seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way Cervantes and to arrive at Don Quixote seemed to him less arduous—and consequently less interesting—than to continue being Pierre Menard and to arrive at Don Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard. His solitary game was governed by two polar laws. The first permitted him to attempt variants of a formal and psychological nature; the second obliged him to sacrifice them to the “original” text and irrefutably to rationalize this annihilation. To these artificial obstacles he added another congenital one. To compose Don Quixote at the beginning of the seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary and perhaps inevitable undertaking; at the beginning of the twentieth century it was almost impossible. It was not in vain that three hundred years had passed, charged with the most complex happenings—among them, to mention only one, that same Don Quixote. There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately useless. A philosophical doctrine is in the beginning a seemingly true description of the universe; as the years pass it becomes a mere chap- ter—if not a paragraph or a noun—in the history of philosophy. In literature, this ultimate decay is even more notorious. Don Quixote was above all an agreeable book; now it is an occasion for patriotic toasts, grammatical arrogance and obscene deluxe editions. Glory is an incom- prehension, and perhaps the worst. These nihilist arguments contain nothing new; what is unusual is the decision Pierre Menard derived from them. He resolved to outstrip that vanity which awaits all the woes of mankind: he dedicated his conscience and nightly studies to the repetition of a pre-existing book in a foreign tongue. In spite of many obstacles, the fragmentary Don Quixote of Menard is more subtle than that of Cervantes. The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. More ambiguous, his detractors will say; but ambiguity is a richness. Menard has enriched, by means of a new technique, the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions. With its infinite applications, it urges us to run through the Odyssey as if it were written after the Aeneid. This technique would fill the dullest books with adventure. Would not the attribution of The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Celine or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?3 I have also allowed myself variants of a formal and psychological nature. —1983 We like to imagine the future as a place where people loved abstraction before they encountered sentimentality. —1984

Some Statements by Sherrie Levine 165 166 Some Statements by Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine, installation view of 1917, Nature Morte Gallery, New York, October 1984. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

I consider myself a still-life artist—with the bookplate as my subject. I want to make pictures that maintain their reference to the bookplates. And I want my pictures to have a material presence that is as interesting as, but quite different from the originals. —1984 The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationship to the original images is tertiary, i.e., three or four times removed. By the time a picture becomes a bookplate it’s already been re-photographed several times. When I started doing this work, I wanted to make a picture that 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. —1985 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. —1985 I try to make art which celebrates doubt and uncertainty. Which provokes answers but doesn’t give them. Which withholds absolute meaning by incorporating parasite meanings. Which suspends meaning while perpetually dispatching you toward interpretation, urging you beyond dogmatism, beyond doctrine, beyond ideology, beyond authority. —1987 I think the seduction of photography has something to do with its potential for reconciliation—its false promise of a mediation between the symbolic and the real. —1987 I put one image on top of another, hopefully creating an interesting gap between the original and the new one. This allegorical procedure seems to me a good method to produce a paradigm of historical movement, a sort of history of influence. —1992 The dreamer has an appointment with the real, which always eludes her. She waits for her dreams to bring her the outrageous similes of her unconscious wishes. Using the strategic achievements of anxiety, she produces the images of what she fears in order to protect herself from what she fears. For the dreamer, desire will always presume a missed encounter, in which she is always either too early or too late. In these dreams, culled from cultural and family romances, the missed encounter produces not excitement but loss, or rather excitement as loss. The repetition set in motion by this injury will work, therefore to restore that unknown thing. It is this object that the dreamer sets out to find, sup- plying herself with an endless series of substitutes. The readymades she will come to identify as hers commemorate an event that never hap- pened, an encounter whose profound effect on her arises from the very fact that she missed it. A quality of anxious uncanniness surrounds the

Some Statements by Sherrie Levine 167 168 Some Statements by Sherrie Levine discovery of each of these objects, an aura of happenstance. The appearance of each of these figures, as it rises from behind the barrier of the missed encounter, out of the field of the unconscious and into that of perception, will strike her with surprise, will seem to her the result of chance.4 —1993 I am interested in the physical and the sensory. I am also interested in the contingent and the unstable. I like the aura of happenstance. I like repetition, because it implies an endless succession of substitutes and missed encounters. I want to maximize the historical references and the metaphorical possibilities. I would like you to experience one of those privileged moments of aesthetic negation, when high art and popular culture coalesce. I would like high art to shake hands with its cynical nemesis—kitsch, which in its sentimentality makes a mockery of desire. I would like the meaning of my work to become so over determined and congealed that it implodes and brokers a new paradigm. —1993 I am interested in repetition because it constitutes the most radical diversity. It also denies the accidental, implies intentionality and meaning. Doubling is a preservation against extinction, an assurance of immortality. A ghostly harbinger of death, the double stands at the porous border between life and death, allowing one side to contaminate the other. —1994 I am interested in that infra thin difference between what was decided on but does not make its way into the work, and what makes its way into the work but was not decided upon. —1994 The story of “A Simple Heart” is just the account of an obscure life, that of a poor country girl, pious but fervent, discreetly loyal and tender as new-baked bread. She loves one after the other a man, her mistress’ children, a nephew of hers, an old man whom she nurses and her parrot. When the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she herself comes to die she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost. This is not at all ironical, as you may suppose, but on the contrary very serious and very sad. I want to move tender hearts to pity and tears, for I am tender-hearted myself. Now, surely, no one will accuse me of being inhuman any more.5 —1994 I like to collapse the distinction between the allographic and the autographic. I aspire to the condition of music and poetry, where there is no such thing as a forgery, every performance, every reading, every photograph, every sculpture, every drawing, every painting is an original— genuine, the authentic, the same. I like a situation where notation becomes content and style. All the different manifestations equally represent the work. —1994 I’d like the viewer to skid across the surface of my work. —1994 I like transgressional boundaries, leaky distinctions, dualisms, fractured identities, monstrosity and perversity. I like contamination. I like miscegenation. I like a fly in the soup, a pie in the face. I like the territory of slapstick, where amid general laughter neither death nor crime exists. I like the world of burlesque with its pure gesticularity. In this guiltless world, where everyone gives and receives blows at will, buildings fall down, bricks fly, the protagonists are immortal and violence is universal, without consequence. —1995 In “The Death of the Cathedrals,” Marcel Proust imagines a near future when the Catholic mass will be reconstituted as a theatrical display, actors performing the roles of the clergy as well as the faithful. He wrote and rewrote this essay between 1904 and 1919, a period contemporaneous with the development of abstraction and the readymade, that were disparate attempts to reclaim art from the realm of representation and imitation. Reading his ruminations on the loss of the real, I was

Some Statements by Sherrie Levine 169 170 Some Statements by Sherrie Levine reminded that this anxiety, which we now call postmodern, is precisely what motivates my work. —1996 I’m interested in representing two opposing, idealized notions of nature—one that nature is ordered and the other that it is chaotic. I’m always trying to collapse the utopian and dystopian. —1996 I don’t think it’s useful now to see dominant culture as monolithic. I’d rather see it as polyphonic with unconscious voices, which may be at odds with one another. If we are attentive to these voices, we can collaborate with them to create something almost new. —1997 Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck trying to recite “The boy stood on the burning deck.” Love’s the son stood stammering elocution while the poor ship in flames went down. Love’s the obstinate boy, the ship, even the swimming sailors, who would like a schoolroom platform, too, or an excuse to stay on deck. And love’s the burning boy.6 —1997 I have the same relationship to Van Gogh as Pierre Menard had to Miguel de Cervantes, that is to say, I have influenced him. —1998 I am basically more interested in questions than answers—questions larger than the sum of their answers, questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them. —2001 I like my paintings to vibrate. One of the things that painters have known all along is that you build energy by the interaction between things, that one and one don’t always make two, but sometimes five or eight or ten, depending on the number of interactions you can get going in a situation. Like the burlesque comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement: Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I’d hit her with a brick. Or—A hotdog walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a beer. The bartender says, I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve food here. —2001 I do consider myself a painter, as well as a photographer and sculptor. And I do aspire to some sort of auratic art making. And I believe that visceral sensation is an important part of the aesthetic experience. I also believe that aura is something that is culturally and historically inscribed and so it changes. Let me also add that I think aura is created by a certain amount of slight of hand, bells and whistles, technique, if you will. I like to make art that is performative and troubled, rather than merely reactive and proscriptive. —2002 A short story by Franz Kafka reads in its entirety, “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”7 —2010 A hotdog walks into a bar and says: I’d like a beer. The bartender says: I’m sorry sir, we don’t serve food here. —2010

Notes

1. Editor’s note: Levine adapted, and in a sense, adopted this text from Alberto Moravia’s short story “The Wardrobe,” as published in Moravia, Bought and Sold, trans. Angus Davidson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 84–85. The final sentence does not appear in the Moravia, or in most citations of the artist’s statement.

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2. Editor’s note: The first three sentences of Levine's statement are taken from a text by the painter Franz Marc published as “Preface to the Planned Second Book,” in Paul Vogt, The Blue Rider, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Woodbury, NY: Barron’s, 1980), 112. The remainder is adapted—shifted from writing to painting—from Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author,” as printed in Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 143, 145. 3. Editor’s note: Levine’s statement is adapted from Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” as it appears in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 36–44. It is not a word-for-word copy, but something closer to an alternate translation. 4. Editor’s note: Levine’s statement borrows from Rosalind Krauss’s essay “The Master’s Bedroom,” Representations, no. 28 (Autumn 1989): 55–76. 5. Editor’s note: Levine’s statement is taken from Gustave Flaubert’s letter to Mme. Roger des des Genettes, June 19, 1876, as cited by Roger Baldick in his introduction to Gustave Flaubert, Three Tales (London: Penguin Classics, 1961), 15. 6. Editor’s note: Levine’s statement repeats Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Casabianca” (1946), which is itself a borrowed poem (from a longer and far more melodramatic one, published by Felicia Dorothea Hemans in 1826), and one marked by repetition and displacement. See Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). 7. Editor’s note: The Kafka story Levine refers to appears in numerous places. It is published in Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 93. Sherrie Levine: On Painting Howard Singerman On Painting Howard Singerman © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

In his recent study of the way that style as a narrative relation shapes the practice of art history, the aesthetician Jonathan Gilmore argues that an individual artist’s style—or a movement’s or period’s—is not a question of likeness or even of appearance, but of intention and discourse. Using Michael Baxandall’s concept of the artist’s brief (fashioned after the law- yer’s brief), he suggests that what we see and narrate as style is formed by a historically specific “set of views or mental representations concerning the proper ends of painting, and the proper means for reaching those ends.”1 Thus, at the limits of his argument, even seemingly identical works might answer to different briefs: “while Sherrie Levine’s photographs of photographs by Edward Weston and Walker Evans are nearly visually identical,” Gilmore argues, “they exhibit very different styles.”2 “Exhibit” is a curious word here, since Gilmore’s concept of style is extra-visual, precisely not exhibitable, but his claim makes both historical and philosophical sense. If style is necessarily historically and discursively situated, then, he continues, when Mike Bidlo makes paintings after Jackson Pollock and Fernand Léger, Bidlo’s copies are very much in the same style as one another, while “Pollock’s and Léger’s styles are very far apart.” For Gilmore, this question of stylistic likeness and difference is not a matter of Bidlo’s touch, just as it is not a question of his look, rather it is of the development of a “narrative” around such “considerations” as “art as a commodity, institutions of art as elitist, art history as closed,” and so on. Bidlo and Levine share this narrative and, Gilmore concludes, they “are closer in their styles to each other than to 174 Howard Singerman any of the works they reproduce.”3 On one hand, this is obvious, if style means, as Gilmore argues, the possibilities and protocols developed in response to a narrative, but I’d like to resist his linking of Levine and Bidlo, however sensible it is, around the question of painting. Although his argument is more subtle and particular than most, Gilmore is hardly the first to have linked Levine and Bidlo, and to assume that they work in the same style, something that has come recently to be called appropriationism. Theirs are exemplary works, and together with Elaine Sturtevant, who exhibited paintings after Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol as early as 1965, and Hank Herron, the fictional appropriator of Stella’s entire oeuvre invented in 1973 by the art historian Carol Duncan writing after Borges and under the pseudonym Cheryl Bernstein, they stand as perfect examples of the problem contemporary art poses to its philosophers, to those aestheti- cians who turn to the question of the copy to test the definition of art. But tying Bildlo’s works and Levine’s together as examples tends to strip them of their specific material differences; it reduces them to the same, to the statement in language of a representative philosophical problem— and, it seems, to the same thing: to painting. The differences between Bidlo and Levine that matter are elided in the term “appropriationism” and in formulations concerning the copy, because in whatever medium it takes place, appropriation is assumed to be a sort of painting, situated in relation to the ontological problem of the “forgery” or the fake. Levine is the only non-painter Gilmore addresses in The Life of a Style, and when he expands his discussion of Levine’s appropriation of Edward Weston’s nudes to include Bidlo’s Pollocks and Légers, he takes her as a painter; he assumes painting as the category in which her brief, as his and Hank Herron’s, is written. As the exemplary modern work, singular and singularly bound to the name of the artist—to “ideas of originality, creativity, and beauty”4—painting is the medium against which the work of appropriation performs its critique, or its refusal. One can say, as Gilmore does, that “Bidlo and Levine are closer in their styles to each other than to any of the works they reproduce,” but their modes of reproduction are quite different, in ways that bear on the question of medium, even on the definition of an art, and what is proper to it. Bidlo, Léger, and Pollock are, like Hank Herron, all painters; Levine is not, at least not in any familiar way. Or, to be more accurate, she is rarely a painter when she works directly after—when she copies—another artist; it is not only that her works after Evans or Weston are not paintings after paintings but photographs of photographs, though clearly that is important. It is also that when her work is directly after Kirchner or Cézanne or Degas, it is not painting. When she does paint—and here she might be a much more familiar or typical sort of painter than Bidlo, it is not after a specific painter, in his guise, but after painting, or in it, as a medium. In contrast, painting and the role of the painter as a public actor have been central to Bidlo’s practice; if Levine’s work has isolated the “after” of the work, situating itself over and after an existing image—“I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture”—Bidlo’s repainted Pollocks and Picassos are situated before the picture, and behind it. He does not simply reproduce the image, he reenacts its making, staging the act of painting as performance, and more, casting the painter as a historical performer: he has reenacted Duchamp’s chess game with a nude at Pasadena and Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” happening in Paris in 1960, and had himself photographed peeing into a fireplace after Jackson Pollock, legendarily, in Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment. Joseph Masheck, one of Bidlo’s most supportive critics in the 1980s, emphasized the performative nature of the painter’s copies more than once by linking them to musical performance. For him, Bidlo is a “virtuoso,”5 and it is not the death of painting nor the closure of art history, nor even “critique” that Masheck feels in Bidlo’s paintings, but “intensity,” the presence of life. They are, he writes, “images restated as if in enlivening musical performances modeled on the ‘composer’s’ own, complete with human, more or less expressive, inflections emanating from them both. … I am thinking, also, that in music one piece can be by ‘Bach-Mendelssohn,’ so why not a painting ‘by’ Morandi-Bidlo?”6 Masheck’s shifting of media, his turn to a musical analogy to discuss Bidlo’s paintings and to value them, is neither arbitrary nor simple. As painting, Bidlo’s work is troubling or false or empty, but, as the philosopher Nelson Goodman has argued, composed music’s relation to its repetition or extension is quite different from painting’s. Paintings are characterized by the singular, more or less permanent instance, an “original” for which any copy would necessarily be either a reproduction or a forgery; musical compositions, in contrast, are marked not by a realized original, but by a readily multipliable score that is realized only in its multiple performances. In Goodman’s terms, painting is “autographic”:

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“The distinction between original and forgery of it is significant … even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine.” Music, on the other hand, is “allographic,” “all accurate copies … are equally genuine instances of the score” and “all correct performances are equally genuine instances of the work.”7 In Masheck’s reading, Bidlo misrecognizes painting; he takes paintings as though they were musical, as though they could be performed (“in music, unlike painting, there is no such thing as a forgery of a known work”).8 But in his focus on Bidlo’s virtuosity, on the studio and the performative behind of the painting, he points necessarily to the site of forgery: painting’s claim to singularity, to a specific authenticity, is guaranteed by what Goodman has called its “history of production,” the historically verifiable prehis- tory, as it were, of that singular making. Bidlo’s performances stage as theater painting’s “history of production,” and that is what is falsified in the exact copy: “a forgery of a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original work of art.”9 Painting, writes Gérard Genette following Goodman, “certainly provides the most obvious examples of material works which cannot be multiplied, and it is no accident that Nelson Goodman regards it as the art which most stubbornly resists evolving in the direction of the allographic regime,” toward notation or multiple instances or realiza- tions.10 Other visual mediums, and as it happens specifically those mediums in which Sherrie Levine has worked most insistently—sculpture and photography—are extendable and multiple in their nature, or more importantly, in their conventions. Both cast sculpture, like Levine’s work after both Duchamp and Brancusi, and photography operate on a relationship not of original and copy (the relationship of painting to its identical other) but of model and “imprint” or instance. Levine’s photographs after Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Karl Blossfeldt, and others, are different from Bidlo’s paintings after Pollock or Picasso because they are photographs after photographs, rather than paintings after painters. That distinction makes a difference: Levine’s copy is implied in the original; it is underwritten by the medium she shares with her models, and it is reproduced according to the medium’s rules, to its “automatism,” to borrow a word that Stanley Cavell uses to speak of the specificity and the logic of mediums. Levine’s repetition belongs to photography, at least under Walter Benjamin’s description; it understands that photography can duplicate without changing its object, that it can keep its material hands off, and that once made, any number of prints can be made from an individual negative. There is, at least in theory, no limit to the images that can be made, and any stop, any difference in the conditions of their appearance, whether framed and matted, or reproduced as a text illustration, is in some sense contingent and arbitrary. There is clearly a way in which an Evans print, overseen by the artist, is of a different order than Levine’s copy after it, taken from an already published illustration, and one might want to characterize that difference as aesthetic, a difference of quality; Genette’s counter is that “since any proof pulled on paper is an imprint, and since a photo, and therefore a reproduction, is also a (phototonic) imprint, we must again admit that these distinctions, which can take on decisive importance at the legal or commercial level (where an original print must not be confused with a reproduction on a postcard or in an album), are of an institutional rather than a genuinely technical nature.”11 This very sense that a rule has been enforced, that it has required the exercise of an extra-aesthetic power (in the form of letters to cease and desist, for example) to bind together a work or an oeuvre, has been a part of what is read as Levine’s “institutional critique” from the outset. Levine’s sculptures, works after Brancusi, Duchamp, and the architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld are underwritten by their originals in a way similar to the photographs—and in a way Pollock or Picasso could not imagine, or are not imagined by their paintings. Duchamp’s urinal and Rietveld’s Berlin chair or Krate table, each in its specific way, pointed even before Levine’s arrival to the system of mass production, and to the multiples she has made of them: Duchamp’s Fountain was in a strong sense his answer to the commodity form, or at least to his 1913 “interrogation of shop windows,” and Rietveld’s designs were attempts, in Mart Stam’s well-known evocation, to “arrive at an industrial product. He thinks of metal, of fiberboard.”12 Levine has merely completed their thought (although insofar as completion suggests a stoppage or fulfillment, one might say, she merely continues them). Her project, as Rosalind Krauss remarks of her glass casts after Duchamp’s Nine Malic Molds, has been “to add nothing, to create nothing.”13 Cast in frosted glass, her Bachelors appear as though Duchamp had indeed envisioned them as molds, or had contracted for them in his notes in the Green Box: “we understand the group of uniforms or hollow liveries destined

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Sherrie Levine, Crystal Newborn, 1993. Cast glass, 5 × 8 × 5½ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. to receive the illuminating gas … the gas castings so obtained … a thousand spangles of frosty gas.”14 Levine’s sculptures after Brancusi’s Newborn are made the same way as the Bachelors, the same way as the urinal—not only her Fountain, but also Duchamp’s, and in fact most any porcelain urinal: they continue the material repetition of the cast. They take the cast as though a photographic negative, and as the potential for always further replications: her reproductive process is already implicit in the original as the possibility and the automatism of its medium. Unlike the bronze Newborn at the Museum of Modern Art or the bronze and stainless-steel Newborns in Paris, Brancusi’s Philadelphia Newborn—the source of Levine’s mold—is carved rather than cast; its object is unique, and yet one could argue, as Genette does, that here too “the difference between instance and copy … is more a matter of convention than technique.”15 Since the Renaissance and with increasing frequency into the nineteenth century, marbles were carved after plaster or clay models, whether full-size or scaled, that served not as sketches, as drawings do for paintings, but as physical templates in the way that cartoons do for frescos or tapestries: they are binding. Forms—or more accurately a grid of relations in depth—were transferred mechanically from the model to the block that would become the finished work, by one or another method of “pointing off,” a term whose indexicality might help to tie it to the photograph and the cast. What makes the process of pointing sculpture different, and more readily reproductive than a painting, or even a fresco after a cartoon, is that there is nothing to fill in, no interior to the con- tour to be colored or modeled. Thus, Genette continues, “Nothing, except perhaps custom, requires [carved sculpture] to remain on the level of an autographic art with multiple products. … Here, as before, the answer is convention.”16 The idea that media have a relationship to their own extension that is at once both material and conventional might be taken as one of the lessons of Levine’s work, and that, perhaps, is why painting is decentered within it. Painting is “the art that most stubbornly resists evolving in the direction of the allographic regime” and “the most recalcitrant of the arts.”17 It is not mere happenstance, then, but a kind of theoretical insistence that when Levine works directly after painters rather than photographers or sculptors, the work she produces is most often not painting. I discussed Levine’s Bachelors above as though Duchamp was a sculptor, but their source is, of course, a painting, or two: Duchamp’s Nine Malic Molds of 1914–15 and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). Levine’s work after Duchamp’s paintings is clearly not a copy or an appropriation in any strong sense; it is rather a quotation. She respects a kind of citational “fair use” that acknowledges the recalcitrant singularity of the painting even as she works, through Duchamp’s notes, to find a way to continue its project. Medium is shifted, but it is shifted, one could say, specifically, and in ways that raise the question of medium quite directly. Most often she takes the work of painting up whole, and photographically, as she does in her 1995–96 series after Monet’s Rouen cathedrals. Rather than recreating it at the scene of creation, she takes his cathedrals as they are finished, as they have already been reproduced and circulated. To use a distinction offered by Hillel Schwartz in The Culture of the Copy, she works after him not in the role of copyist, reproducing the original “s/t/r/o/k/e /-b/y/-/s/t/r/o/k/e.” Rather she takes his paintings, like the camera (and indeed with the camera), “in its

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ENTIRETY.” This “copying>as>appropriation,” Schwartz writes, echoing Goodman’s distinction, is “oriented not toward reenacting the original process (painting on a second canvas, or engraving, or resetting type in facsimile), but toward appropriating complete images, all at once.”18 Copying as reenacting requires that the copyist reproduce the labor and method of the original; copying as appropriation relies on processes, often chemical processes, quite different from the way in which the original work was crafted. It assumes, and maybe produces, the kind of deskilling one might tie to industrial rather than craft labor, to the readymade, and to Levine’s work. Monet’s studies of the Rouen cathedral, painted hour by hour, and season by season, painstakingly build a record of seeing, recording “s/t/r/o/k/e /-b/y/-/s/t/r/o/k/e” Zola’s “corner of nature viewed through a temperament,” as seen through a small shop window. Levine’s photographs look out on something different; they are taken from illustrations already photographed, and produced both instantly and one after another: in Levine’s work, Monet’s record of difference, of moments of specialized, singular experience, becomes a record of seriality, repetition, and even a certain blindness or at least Cavell’s photographic “automatism.” But what Levine’s work points to, what it is propped up on, or draws out, is that same vision in Monet. Levine works, one could say, as a new art historian, pointing to the trace of technology, to a conjunction of science and photography in Monet’s attempt to look directly and objectively, even automatically, and to the rationalization of artistic practice and exhibition in his systematization of manufacture. The cathedrals were Monet’s first preplanned series: its motif and point-of-view fixed and determined beforehand, its size regular. And while the canvases were to record moments of viewing, effects of light in nature, they were only partially painted in Rouen and completed, simultaneously, laid out in his studio in Giverney, as though in exhibition.19 His repetition, his series in exhibition preceded hers. As she has done with Duchamp, Levine has taken Monet in his own terms; once again, “she adds nothing.” “Forget the objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever,” Monet instructed a young American student. “Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow.”20 Levine follows his advice quite closely, severing color and the envelope of atmosphere from the object, and systematizing her presentation of effects. Each of the color reproductions of Monet’s cathedrals generates two of Levine’s, one a black-and-white 8 × 10 of the cathedral, the other a color iris print whose gridded blocks separate and computer-average Monet’s color across the surface, presenting a system of color separated from the object and the task of representation. Even before Levine, Monet’s separation is mechanical and automatic; those are the terms he uses to describe his urge to paint his wife Camille on her deathbed: “I caught myself, my eyes fixed on her tragic forehead, in the act of mechanically analyzing the succession of appropriate colour gradations which death was imposing on her immobile face. … My organism automatically reacted to the color stimuli, and my reflexes caught me up in spite of myself, in an unconscious operation which was the daily course of my life.”21 Under Levine’s pressure, Monet’s unconscious operation turns out to be a photographic one, or one that mimics the photograph, both in its automatism and in its industrial logic. One might think of Levine’s activity here as viral, as seeking that within the organism itself that will allow for its reduplication and decentering. However much her repetition mimics and underscores Monet’s own, of course, her medium here is photography, a medium that seems to govern all her work, that sets its logic of repetition and hands-off distance. But medium may not be the correct term to use in this instance: Rosalind Krauss has recently argued that photography, at least under Benjamin’s description (a description that would include the practices of artists such as Levine’s as they were written about in October in the early 1980s), is precisely not a medium but rather a “theoretical object”: “in becoming a theoretical object, photography loses its specificity as a medium. … As a theoretical object, photography assumes the revelatory power to set forth the reasons for a wholesale transformation of art that will include itself in that same transformation.”22 To suggest that Levine’s practice involves an insistence, or even a play, on “medium specificity,” as I have been doing, might seem more than counter-intuitive, particularly if photography as she uses it is now somehow “extra-medial.” But I would go further, to suggest that her work on medium is structured by painting’s resistance, by the difference or the space between painting and its representations. Before I go there, however, I would note in passing that it is painting that allows Levine to acknowledge photography as a medium, and to situate her work in relation to a history it is most often

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Sherrie Levine, Cathedral 3, 1996. Iris print, 34 × 28 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. read against. Her silky black-and-white photographs after Cézanne and Degas are taken, like her Cathedrals, from color reproductions, from photographic images in circulation outside the gallery and some distance not only from painting, but also, and not surprisingly, from the fine art photograph. But exhibited one after another, matted and framed, the 8 × 10 black-and-whites work in the gallery as photographs rather than as reproductions, in part because they are scaled that way: posters are larger, illustrations smaller, and the black-and-white that would mark relatively down-market illustration signals instead, in these works, the language of fine art photography. Levine’s Degas and Cézannes might allow one to think again about the relationship of painting and photography in the 1870s and 1880s, the traces of photography in Degas’s composition, perhaps, or even a certain to-be-photographedness about the crisp, gridded, folded frontality of Cézanne’s still lives as they turn toward the eye. But it is their presence as photographs rather than reproductions or, indeed, copies that is striking; they have a generic autonomy—one that belongs to their genre of presentation, one could say—that her rephotographs after Evans or Weston do not have. Their indebtedness to the original ballet lessons and still lives is oddly displaced; rather than situated in the comparative play of original and copy as an oscillation in the surface, it is stretched across the surface of the series and along the wall. Photography is Levine’s primary tool for appropriating painting, for displacing it in relation to the proper name, and severing it from the scene of its making. And again, it is the post-medium photography that Krauss has labeled a “theoretical object” that allows her to take the work

On Painting 183 184 Howard Singerman whole. But it seems worth noting that Levine’s Cathedral series might be taken as working in some interesting way in relation to painting, that indeed her photographs might be taken as painting, as they were in 2001, when they were included in the exhibition As Painting, curated by Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville, at the Wexner Center at Ohio State. Levine was represented by a heterogeneous group of fifteen objects, only three or four of which were in some obvious way paintings: in addition to three paintings on wood and a blue triangle painted directly on the wall (which could be counted as the fourth), she was represented by a photocollage, a slide projection, and the suite of nine black-and-white Cathedral photographs. The subtitle of the Wexner exhibition was Division and Displacement, which was intended to suggest that taking painting as a medium seriously might also might mean that it is no longer obvious what the name “painting” includes, whether a specific practice coheres in that name, or even whether the questions painting asks as a medium are asked in a form that is still recognizable as painting. The question of what counts as painting, at least past the number one, was an organizing question not only for the exhibition but for modernism as well. In a well-known footnote to his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried responded to Clement Greenberg’s comment that “a stretched or tacked up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily a successful one” to articulate the broader differences between Greenberg’s understanding of modernism and his own:

To begin with, it is not quite enough to say that a bare canvas tacked to a wall is not “necessarily” a successful picture; it would, I think, be less of an exaggeration to say that it is not conceivably one. It may be countered that future circumstances might be such as to make it a successful painting; but I would argue that, for that to happen, the enterprise of painting would have to change so drastically that nothing more than the name would remain. […] More- over, seeing something as a painting in the sense that one sees the tacked-up canvas as a painting, and being convinced that a particular work can stand comparison with the painting of the past whose quality is not in doubt, are altogether different experiences: it is, I want to say, as though unless something compels conviction as to its quality it is no more than trivially or nominally a painting. Here, Fried is offering us, and painting, a choice of the ways it might fail: triviality and nominalism are two different ways of not mat- tering. Not all paintings speak to or require the category “painting”— in fact, most paintings, or most pictures, to use Greenberg’s old word, do not need the category actively however much they rely tacitly on its forms and its history: they are trivially paintings. Greenberg’s blank canvas, on the other hand, needs the name “painting” to be invoked in order to be seen as painting, as any class of thing at all, but it takes painting nominally, as merely a name. Which is how the footnote continues:

This suggests that flatness and the delimition of flatness ought not to be thought of as the “irreducible essence of pictorial art” but rather as something like the minimal conditions for something’s being seen as a painting; and that the crucial question is not what these minimal and, so to speak, timeless conditions are, but rather what, at a given moment, is capable of compelling conviction, of succeeding as painting. … The essence of painting is not something irreducible. Rather the task of the modernist painter is to discover those conventions that, at a given moment, alone are capable of establishing his work’s identity as painting.23

Fried’s subject at the end of this account is different from the one he started with. He began with the single object that Greenberg posed— that is, a picture—but over the course of the note, a picture becomes first of all, and grudgingly, a painting and then, triumphantly, painting, which might be still a singular entity, but precisely not the one the note started with. A painting is a difficult thing: the tacked-up canvas is “no more than trivially or nominally a painting”; flatness and its delimitation are the “minimal conditions for something’s being seen as a painting.” Con- viction, identity, and success lie on the side not of the instance but of the medium: the work that is in the end Fried’s subject succeeds, it “compel[s] conviction,” only when its identity is established “as painting.” This is the modernist demand: that each work of art be actively not only an incident or example of its medium, but constitutive of it. “Not many years ago,” writes Melville in his essay for As Painting, “paintings came clearly as wholes and came one at a time. … Painting appeared entirely capable of doing its own sums, of summing itself up,

On Painting 185 186 Howard Singerman

… the summing up within a single work of painting as a whole.” He said further:

We catch a glimpse here of a central and defining scene: it consists of a single painting through which all of painting can come into view—a moment of reduction in its strong, theoretical sense as a determination of the means by which the terms of a practice are rendered transparent and wholly mutually translatable.24

The single painting that encapsulates painting, that calls forth and embodies its medium and its question, has for some time been one of the descriptions of modernist painting. “Each instance of the medium is an absolute realization of it”; wrote Stanley Cavell in 1971, “each totally eclipses the other.”25 The question of the edge, of the relation between literal shape and pictorial form might matter because that edge is, as it were, the same as the boundary, and the unity, of the medium itself. A unity that, as “division and displacement” suggests, gets harder and harder to hold. The concept of medium—of painting construed as a discipline, an inquiry organized around question and demand, rather than a craft skill or métier—was central to the theorization of modernist painting, and for its dissolution: as Clement Greenberg famously put it in 1960, “the essence of Modernism lies … in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench itself more firmly in its area of competence. … It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coincided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium.”26 Within that disciplinary logic, a medium and its historical and strong conventional limits are necessary not only for definition but also for judgment. Following Greenberg’s argument a few years later but different from it in ways that a number of commentators have made quite clear, Fried argued that “the concepts of quality and value—and to the extent that these are central to art, the concept of art itself—are meaningful, or wholly meaningful, only within the individual arts. … [W]ithin the modernist arts nothing short of conviction—specifically the conviction that a particular painting or sculpture or poem or piece of music can or cannot support comparison with past work within that art whose quality is not in doubt—matters at all.”27 Fried’s impassioned “Art and Objecthood,” the essay in which these words appeared, was written in part as a response to the threat posed to the discipline of painting, and to the historical consciousness that founded modernism and that seemed to be secured by medium specificity, by minimalism in particular and more broadly by the happenings, events, and environments that pressed on the space of painting after Jackson Pollock. As Donald Judd, one of Fried’s targets, had noticed “half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture. … They are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms.”28 One could say, with Rosalind Krauss, among others, that Judd has won; that we are now in a “post-medium age.”29 Almost forty years after Judd’s “Specific Objects” the spread of installation across the gallery floor and through the art world, and of institutional critique, on its heels and equally focused on the boundaries and breaches, has voided the specificity of medium, and even the semi-autonomous space that was held within and by that specificity. (In her recent writings Krauss has linked installation’s surrender of specificity to both the art world and the university, which share installation’s metonymic spread without resistance. In the academy the study of visual culture marks a de-disciplining of art history, a “dismantling of the idea of the proper,” and in the art world, in the very image of installation, “every material support, including the site itself—whether art magazine, dealer’s fair booth, or museum gallery—will now be leveled, reduced to a system of pure equivalency by the homogenizing principle of commodification.”)30 But even within the discourse of modernism and at its moment, the question of what constituted a medium, of what produced the effect of the autonomy or interiority of an individual art, was not given, at least not in its most thoughtful commentators. Medium taken seriously is not the same as the conventionally derived physical support of the work of art, it is not recognizable; for modernism in particular, because it is medium that poses the questions and imposes a discipline, “what modernist painting proves is that we do not know a priori what painting has to do. … [T]he task is no longer to produce another instance of an art but a new medium within it.”31 Cavell’s argument worked to secure the autonomy and the definition of individual paintings as painting, as significant demands in and on the medium, but what for him would situate and secure a new medium within painting, was also what for postmodernism, or a

On Painting 187 188 Howard Singerman modernism in parallax one might say, threatened to disperse and displace it: the work in series. For Cavell, writing in the 1960s, “a new medium establishes and is established by a series”; the series situates and restates its generative problematic, and in so doing it mimics the long work of history or tradition, “as if to attest that what has been discovered is indeed more than a single work could convey.”32 But series also threatens the individual work of art, opening the work up to the spaces between and beyond it, to the terms of installation, perhaps: dispersal, temporality, theatricality; or those of the assembly line: the sheer repetition of Donald Judd’s “one thing after another.” In what might be the earliest citation of Walter Benjamin in the pages of Artforum, Rosalind Krauss noted in 1971 that in the case of Stella “serialization” meant that “some crucially important aspects of the object are no longer included in the immediate givens of that object. And the consequence of this is a withering away of one’s feeling that one is copresent with the painting in any full sense.”33 What painting as a medium would mean without the conjunction of exclusion and unity is what the exhibition As Painting attempted to address. I want to take seriously Melville’s case for Levine’s work “as painting,” which is different, of course, from Jonathan Gilmore’s forget- ting that her works are not paintings, or that insofar as they are copies they are not paintings. Perhaps I can leave the question of painting or not on the table—to suggest that it is undecidable even when her works are obviously or conventionally paintings. Writing on “neo-geo” in Art in America in 1986, Hal Foster argued that Levine’s presence among the new abstract painters situated her works and theirs outside painting: “As suggested by the involvement of [Jack] Goldstein and Levine, this new abstraction develops mostly out of appropriation art. … It is not at all derived, genealogically, from critical abstract painting—that of Stella, Ryman, Marden.” Levine’s abstract paintings, in particular, he continues, “simulate modes of abstraction, as if to demonstrate that they are no longer critically reflexive or historically necessary forms … —that they are simply styles among others.”34 Perhaps, but how can he tell; where is the ground for that telling, and even, what does it mean to tell or to say that? That was Stephen Melville’s question at the time: “Foster’s confidence notwithstanding [his confidence, that is, in what these paintings are or are not], it is not clear that there really is a necessary choice here.”35 “Exclusion,” Melville writes in Philosophy Beside Itself, “belongs to the way the issues are set up for modernism: so that one will, on the one hand, always want to find that artifact (dadaist or minimalist or conceptual …) that lies beyond the limits of art (and one will be led inevitably to acknowledge such exclusions); and one will, on the other hand, be equally inevitably led to acknowledge that this ‘far side’ of art always lies within art itself (so that one’s exclusions will always be given in terms of theatricality, and such an exclusion is, finally, no exclusion at all).”36 Melville himself titled an essay on Levine’s paintings of the mid- 1980s “Not Painting,” not to exclude Levine’s paintings as painting, but to allow them to be about painting, beside or after it, but also within it as its problem. Still, even he has trouble identifying what the work is, or allowing its name: “We may feel invited to place these things [and here he is talking about Levine’s knot paintings, plywood sheets on which the knots in the wood have been painted over in gold that date from 1985–86] … beside Allan McCollum’s generic paintings and frame- heavy simulacra,” which is where Foster works to put them, “but Levine means these objects to count nonetheless as works and not simply as allusions to works.”37 What would it mean to take them not only as “works” but also as paintings—for painting it might mean that field that is always historical and relational, that is, marked not by its unity but by the question of what constitutes it. Clearly the history of painting and the proper names of painters have been Levine’s target, as much if not more than it has been sculptors or photographers. But while she has made photographs after Degas and Monet, sculptures after Man Ray and Van Gogh, and delicate, sheer watercolors that sit up on the page like the early bookplate collages after Mondrian, Miró, and a number of other painters—often in black-and- white, to make clear they are painted directly after reproductions, that they are precisely not copies of originals—she has made only a handful of paintings after paintings, and their proper names. In 1984, she made copies of Kasimir Malevich’s 1918 White on White and Ilya Chasnik’s 1923 Suprematist Cross; more recently she has remade paintings in situ after Blinky Palermo. Why Levine chose these painters in particular is in part thematic; the paintings after Malevich and Chasnik were made for an exhibition entitled 1917, where they were exhibited alongside a suite of drawings and watercolors after Egon Schiele, as images of a different modernism, and of the utopian promise and aesthetic possibility of the period just after the October revolution. One might also argue that unlike Bidlo’s models, Picasso and Moriandi, Malevich and Chasnik are

On Painting 189 190 Howard Singerman easy to copy; in Levine’s defense, I would turn to Clement Greenberg on Barnett Newman, “Newman’s pictures look easy to copy, and maybe they really are. Like Rothko and Still, Newman happens to be a conventionally skilled artist—need I say it?”38 Certainly, the paintings Levine has chosen are marked by their makers’ attempt to reduce the image to a single form understood as absolute or objective, and there is a strong link between that image, precisely in its objective anonymity, and its author—they share, one could say, a kind of branding. The Malevich and Chasnik are more obviously or recognizably paintings than the transportable triangular color shapes that Blinky Palermo installed in situ, usually above doorways (as Levine installs her copies) beginning in 1966. They are secured as paintings not only, or not simply, because they are rectangles hung at eye level, but also because they bear at least the vestiges of composition, of a spatial and narrativizable relationship, however reduced, between a bounded figure and continuous ground: “the square=feeling, the white field=the void beyond this feeling.”39 Palermo’s color shapes are figures without grounds, or rather, they take the architectural space of installation as their ground; like Levine’s Bach- elors, then, and even before her arrival, Palermo’s paintings might be seen as details. They hover between painting and sculpture, and Levine continues their three-dimensionality: her copy after Palermo is not only of the colored figure—it cannot be—but of its installation, as though it were once again after a photographic reproduction, after the installation shot. As Melville puts it, Palermo’s work is taken up by Levine “into a logic of repetition and displacement that now appears as a part of its initial condition.”40 If Levine continues Palermo according to his logic on the ground of installation, she continues the formal reductions of Malevich and Chas- nik on the ground of painting. Her works after them both restate and displace the single, stark relation of figure to ground they had reduced painting to, but in so doing, she reproduces them as images rather than as paintings. Levine’s works after Malevich and Chasnik are painted in casein on mahogany, on a surface that is larger than the purloined image. The grained surface continues beyond the image, and is felt behind it as well, flattening it out as a shape and pushing it forward, so that the original painting’s image becomes the formed figure for another ground. Despite the opacity and leaden palpability of the casein surface, the paintings are marked by a thinness, by a sense that they are a skin or Sherrie Levine, After Ilya Chasnik, 1984. Casein and wax on mahogany, 24 × 20 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. covering over the wood, or perhaps an image projected on to it. Levine’s surface is no longer the open, forward-turned surface of modernist painting (the surface Cavell referred to as “revelation” and that Melville glosses in the letter but not quite the spirit of Cavell’s revelation as “superficial”), rather, as a number of her critics have noted, it is covered over. Not only is the painted image a cover, but there is the odd sense that it too is seen only through the film of another image—the image it is just like but not the same as. Despite their material thinness, despite their layering, Levine’s surfaces do not allow entry; they do not suggest an interior or an underneath, whether perspectival or optical, or empathetic. What they figure, instead, is a rupture, or at least a spacing, first between the image as surface and the physicality of the ground, and then

On Painting 191 192 Howard Singerman

Sherrie Levine, After Blinky Palermo, 1996. Paint on wall, dimensions variable. Installation view at Städtisches Museum Leverkusen, Schloss Morsbroich, Germany. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. between the image and a space that is no longer there. Their physical, palpable blankness is a product not only of her surface, but also of the sense that it hides, obscures, covers, over nothing. The hermetic surfacedness of the work of art that I am trying to describe is not unique to Levine’s painting practice. Indeed it characterizes much painting, much art since the 1960s, particularly that work that, as Donald Judd put it, “resembles sculpture more than it does painting, but is nearer to painting”;41 Levine’s might be nearest to Jasper Johns’s targets and flags, paintings that were important models for Judd’s “Specific Objects.” I want to situate Levine’s work in relation to Johns’s, and to address, as a way of closing, those paintings that Levine calls “generic,” and that are clearly—or at least somewhat more clearly—her paintings in the sense that they belong to no other proper name: the Broad Stripe, Narrow Stripe, Chevron, and Check paintings painted, for the most part, in casein on lead, mahogany, or plywood. Before I turn to them, and in order to, I would like to hazard that, insofar as she works on paintings, the medium in which Levine works is collage, and that its automatism, to use Cavell’s term again, what it cannot help but do, is to cover. I should note that Melville has preceded me here, and that one of the ways that Levine was included in As Painting was under the sign of collage; a category the curators marked out—cut out, one could say—with the inclusion of her early Presidential Profiles. In slide projection or on paper, the familiar profiles of Lincoln and Washington that Levine used to outline and shape images clipped from fashion magazines do not work to secure or frame them; rather, the outside cut comes to lean on the inside, to bias it. In his catalogue entry on Levine, Mel- ville quotes Deleuze on the history of philosophy: “the history of philosophy should play a role roughly analogous to that of collage in painting. The history of philosophy is the reproduction of philosophy itself. In the history of philosophy, a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximal modification appropriate to the double. (One imagines a philosophically bearded Hegel, a philosophically clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa.)”42 In Deleuze’s writing, collage is both of and about painting: it is painting’s double and its double consciousness, but it is of a different order: “the most exact, the most strict repetition has as its correlate the maximum of difference.” To reverse Deleuze’s metaphor, or his example, collage works in relation to painting as commentary, and historical commentary at that, situating

On Painting 193 194 Howard Singerman itself after and over—and in—painting’s image: “a kind of slow motion, a congelation or immobilization.”43 In Levine’s work, it is painting’s own image that is immobilized, pinned to the plywood or mahogany board, and congealed like, or in, casein. Levine signaled the connection between collage and her painting practice quite consciously, even iconographically, early on. Her Knot paintings on plywood play, at one remove, on Picasso’s and Braque’s own play with the artifice of wood graining. Theirs oscillates between the craft artifice of wood graining in paint and the industrial artifice of the printed image; hers between the natural, or at least given, grain of sheets of commercial, interior grade plywood, and the regularized wooden plugs lumber mills use to stamp out and fill in knots and imper- fections. The plugs mimic the ovoid knot shape and regularize it—theirs is a sort of false, generalized nature, a biomorph that fills in for nature’s particularity or its mistake. The paintings, with their patches of gold, pink, or putty-green paint over the top of the filled knots, are composed, then, according to the laws of chance, as Arp famously had it, but also according to the conventions of construction or production, and mechanization and regularization. The knots both represent and replace nature, and Levine places her image over, or builds it out of, that displacement, overpainting each patch with her own synthetic cubist patch of paint. Levine nodded to the history of collage, to Picasso’s first collage, the 1912 Still Life with Chair Caning, quite literally in a series of stripe paintings from 1986, painted on the seats of chairs. Levine’s seats are identical, and familiar from myriad kitchens and coffee shops: shield shaped, scrolled along the edges, and indented as though shaped by the act of sitting. While they cite Still Life with Chair Caning, they close off even its closely packed space; there is no picture plane to look through, however clotted. They are, quite simply, painted-on objects; their surfaces are covered over and sealed by paint, as objects are, rather than opened up by it, as paintings are. Paintings that turn their back on the viewer, that close themselves to vision or that trap and map it in their literalness are a figure of the 1960s. There is something in Levine’s generic stripe paintings that recalls Brice Marden’s “back series” of 1968, in which the encaustic skin worked to close down the canvas surface, to cover over blankness. But the crucial figure for that refusal is Jasper Johns; clearly Levine’s paintings reference Johns’s in their flattened image surfaces and opaque Sherrie Levine, Chair Seat 3, 1986. Casein and wax on wood, 18½ × 20½ × 1¾ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. materials—wax, casein, lead—and perhaps most obviously in her use of the game board. Levine matches Johns’s targets and alphabet and number grids with checkerboards and backgammon boards, subjects that work like Johns’s in their already flattened abstractness. As Clement Green- berg pointed out early on, following a cue from William Rubin, Johns’s motifs, too, are tied to collage; they are “taken from a repertory of man- made signs and images not too different from the one on which Picasso and Braque drew for the stenciled and affixed elements of their 1911–1913 Cubism.” And one could say of Levine, as Greenberg does of Johns, that she too is “interested in the literary irony that results from representing flat and artificial configurations which in actuality can only be reproduced.”44 Greenberg is referring to Johns’s flags, targets, and alpha- bets, but the category of flat, human-designed things that can only be reproduced—or that at least conventionally are only reproduced—also includes other artists’ paintings, which can appear as reproductions, of course, but never quite as representations.

On Painting 195 196 Howard Singerman

There are differences, though. The first and most obvious is that Levine’s images do not fill their ground; the perfect coincidence of motif and support that Leo Steinberg suggested was crucial to the representational questions Johns’s paintings raised is missing in Levine’s: as in her paintings after Malevich and Chasnik, the casein backgammon boards and checkerboards float on their lead grounds. The ground exceeds the image, framing it and situating the image on it rather than in it, as though she were demonstrating Steinberg’s description of how Johns’s paintings surface, how they present themselves: “Things ON pictures, it should be; like things on trays or on walls.”45 It is telling that even in the Broad Stripe and Check paintings on wood, where the repeated pattern does fill the ground, there is still an excess, a deliberate noncoincidence between figure and ground, but that excess is reversed: the image is, as it were, too big for the support. In each painting, the leftmost stripe or column of checker boxes is truncated, cut as though to make clear the separation of image and support, as well as the materiality, the wooden- ness of the support itself. Moreover, while Johns’s target and flag are vertical objects, objects that situate themselves perpendicular to vision, the game boards Levine uses are held horizontally, at least before her arrival. The relations they map are not so much visual, designed to be looked at and addressed to vision as its image, as they are plotted in relation to a practice. This might be the shift that Leo Steinberg began to describe in the idea of the flatbed picture, in reference to Rauschenberg, a shift in the “psychic address of the image” from vertical to horizon- tal that marked for him a larger “shift from nature to culture.”46 Even more than Johns’s targets, or his ordered letters and numbers, Levine’s game boards suggest a rule-bound order, a bounded play of relations that Hubert Damisch has linked to not only to composition and the emergence of the tableau, precisely the vertical visual field, but also to the professional play of the art world, to the field of painting’s possibilities understood as a game. The game Damisch chooses for his demonstra- tion is chess, which has a modern history far too iconographically rich to pursue here, but it is worth noting that the relationship of Levine’s choice of board games to the chess master Duchamp was not missed by critics when the work first appeared. What has tended to be missed is that she switched Duchamp’s game, or at least deskilled it: she has always referred to the chessboards as checks, a title that points to a different, younger and rather more American game (and at least in France, to a more feminine game: checkers in French is, quite explicitly, le jeu de dames), as well as to the particular kind of commodity paintings were seen to be in the art world in New York in the second half of the 1980s. I do want to take up at least one of Damisch’s readings of the chessboard, not its link to the tableau and to Alberti’s conjunction of the perspectival grid and the narrative istoria, but to his use of the difference between the game and the match (of chess) to plot the structure of a medium, its historical work. This is a different sort of conjunction between field or grid and narrative, but it is a conjunction nonetheless: it is the relation that is described in the idea of the medium, of material technique and historical endeavor.47 At some point, the grid of perspective slips horizontally, like the flatbed picture, to map the grid of the art world described as a system. Now the chessboard constructs not the floor plane of perspective or the relations of the picture plane, but the moves in relation to one another of an artistic practice. Levine’s checks and chevrons might be seen to figure quite deliberately the move she made into painting in the mid-1980s: painting is the field of her profes- sionalization, and it is curiously without names, or without the same proper names, the same dependencies and debts, that her photographs rely on. The paintings are not attempts to obliterate, or foreclose other names, far from it; rather they invoke them as other possibilities, more knowledge of the field, as they foreground the kind of play they are engaged in. Those names might include “Newman, McLaughlin, and Marden, as well as other painters of a more generic stripe: Gene Davis, Blinky Palermo, even Daniel Buren,” according to the list in one review of the first show of the stripes at Baskerville + Watson,48 but it would also include Julian Schnabel and David Salle and the return to painting in which her work would situate itself as the same and different. If Johns aimed for the bulls-eye, one could say, Levine plotted the spaces between: “It’s a no-man’s land that a lot of us enjoy moving around in, and the thing is not to lose your sense of humor, because it’s only art.” Certainly “play” is a theme that emerges in her interviews of the time, both play as an opposition to work, as an opening out, and play as in a move, a ploy. “In the present stage of the artistic field, there is no room for naiveté,” writes Pierre Bourdieu, “never has the very structure of the field been present so practically in every act of production.”49 Or so literally.

On Painting 197 198 Howard Singerman

My attempt to situate Levine’s work in relation to Jasper Johns’s or to the practice of collage has not been an attempt to historicize it, or to normalize its still uncomfortable presence. Rather, what I have tried to do is to characterize how her work situates itself in relation to the idea of the copy and the question of medium—even the medium’s own sense of the copy or of its extension. I have also, though less intentionally, ended up characterizing something like Levine’s sensibility, however unfamiliar that word might be in relation to her work and the way it is usually received. Sensibility is perhaps too lyrical a word for the “thinness” or the “experience of surface” that critics have marked in Levine’s work in their attempts to describe its address, its blankness, and its oscillating stutter. It might be that she is a particular kind of lyricist, a lyricist after Baudelaire, or after Benjamin’s Baudelaire, situated in the crowd and in consciousness rather than in reverie, and on something very like Damisch’s chessboard field. Citing Valéry’s comment that Baude- laire’s poetic “reason of state” was to become a great poet, “yet neither Lamartine nor Hugo nor Musset,” Benjamin argued that having such a professional goal meant, necessarily, “the emancipation of poetry from experiences. Baudelaire’s poetic output is assigned a mission. He envisioned blank spaces which he filled in with his poems. His work cannot merely be categorized as historical, like everyone else’s, but it intended to be so and understood itself as such.”50 Levine’s checks might be said to be precisely the vision of blank spaces, or a kind of blank vision; her plywood knots, the occupying of a space opened up mechanically, in and on the field. Such a program might be thought of as polemical, and while we tend to imagine polemical objects as noisier, more strident and direct than the blankness or thinness, or even the paintedness I have attributed to Levine’s work, her work in collage, a surface that depends on and necessarily hangs from another, that both opens up and covers over the space between images, might just fill the definition of polemic that the editors of this issue of Res offer: polemos as the “inner work of struggle and difference.” The oscillation that Levine produces—“the vibration,” “the space in the middle where there’s no picture”—might also satisfy something like the definition of medium that Krauss offers in a strong reading of Cavell’s recognition that an aesthetic medium is not the same thing as its material support, but that it is in some sense at each moment historically derived, that it always has to be established, as a “recursive structure,” one marked by an “internal plurality,” a “dif- ferential specificity.” In this recursivity, this feedback, Levine’s collage resembles the mediums Krauss has derived from the work of artists such as William Kentridge and James Coleman, marked in each case by an oscillation or a pulse, in and around questions of technology and representation.51 This approaches an ending, then, but there are ways in which collage, at least in Levine’s practice, does not quite fit the definition, or the sense of medium as a project of a generative self-examination. Collage in the terms that Deleuze offers or within which Levine operates is an insistently, necessarily dependent practice; it is propped too heavily on painting to not be about it in some way that it is not quite about itself. Perhaps one could think of it and the way it is not a medium with a different term from Krauss: could one say that collage here is painting’s theoretical object? For Krauss, labeling photography a “theoretical object” is a way of describing how it governs a system it is no longer a part of, how it determines impossibilities or histories not through individual practices or instances, but from outside them, as if it were history itself. This is what I take her to mean when she writes that photography “assumes the revelatory power to set forth the reasons for a wholesale transformation of art that will include itself in that same transformation.”52 It might be that the sort of a theoretical object I am looking for is closer to the one written by Barthes—one that returns us differently to the language Hal Foster used when he described Levine’s painting as a simulation of abstraction. “The goal of all structuralist activity,” wrote Barthes in 1963, “is to reconstruct an ‘object’ in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the ‘functions’) of this object. Structure is therefore actually a simulacrum of the object, but a directed, interested simulacrum, since the imitated object makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object. … [T]he simulacrum is intellect added to the object.”53 Levine’s collage makes clear—that is, it theorizes—the terms and limits of painting; it insists on its flat, literal surface even as it relies on it for its back- ing. The questions it poses—to paraphrase those that Melville and Foster have posed—is whether her work on painting as a material and historical practice proceeds theoretically and linguistically or historically and mate- rially, and whether that is a difference we need to, or even can, tell.

On Painting 199 200 Howard Singerman

Notes

1. Jonathan Gilmore, The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 81. 2. Ibid., 92. 3. Ibid., 92–93. 4. Ibid., 92. 5. Joseph Masheck, “Mike Bidlo as Pablo,” in Modernities: Art-Matters in the Present (Uni- versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 243–244. He takes the term virtuoso from the traditional language of musical performance, but he links it as well to the art historian Henri Focillon: “With a mere imitator a reliance on memory narrows the field of metamorphoses; with a virtuoso such a reliance does not necessarily diminish their intensity in any way.” Henri Focillon, The Life Forms of Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 125. 6. Joseph Masheck, “Tendering Rendering: 9 Notes Apropos of Still Lifes by Giorgio Morandi by Mike Bidlo,” Arts Magazine 60, no. 7 (March 1986): 81–83. 7. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 112–113. Here let me say parenthetically that Goodman’s distinction between painting and music around the question of the fake is not the only possibility. For Stanley Cavell, whose discussion of medium will be important in the coming pages, music in its contemporary form is where the question of authenticity is raised most insistently: “the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music.” The question is not whether or not the work is a copy, rather it is the sense that “something is imitation—not: an imitation.” In the kind of fraud music can be, “the emphasis is not on copying a particular object, as in forgery and counterfeit, but on producing the effect of the genuine, or having some of its properties” (Cavell, “Music Decomposed,” in Art, Mind, and Religion, ed. W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill [Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1965], 76–77). 8. Goodman, Languages of Art, 112. 9. Ibid., 122. 10. Gérard Genette, The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, trans. G. M. Goshgar- ian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 34. 11. Ibid., 41. 12. Marcel Duchamp, Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel), ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 74; and Mart Stam, in Paul Overy, “From Icon to Prototype,” in The Complete Reitveld Fur- niture, ed. Peter Vöge (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 1993), 18. 13. Rosalind Krauss, “Bachelors,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 58. 14. Duchamp, Salt Seller, 51. 15. Genette, The Work of Art, 37. 16. Ibid., 39, italics in original. 17. Ibid., 34, 18. 18. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 223–229. 19. On the series in Monet, and the importance of the cathedrals in particular, see Grace Seiberling, Monet’s Series (New York: Garland, 1981). 20. In John House, Monet: Nature into Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 75. 21. In Linda Nochlin, Realism (New York: Penguin, 1971), 63. 22. Rosalind Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 1 (Winter 1999), 291. 23. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 169. 24. Stephen Melville, “Counting/As/Painting,” in As Painting: Division and Displacement, ed. Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 3. 25. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 115. 26. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85–86. The essay was not as punctual as the 1960 date suggests; it was recorded for the USIA in 1960, and broadcast and reprinted as spoken in a USIA pamphlet that following year. It was published in slightly different form later that year in Arts Yearbook 4, and then again with more obvious revisions in Art and Literature in 1965. For more on this chronology and its appearance of “Modernist Paint- ing,” see Francis Frascina, “Institutions, Culture, and America’s ‘Cold War Years’: The Making of Greenberg’s ‘Modernist Painting,’” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 69–97. 27. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 164, italics in original. 28. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975 (Hal- ifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and New York: New York University Press, 1975), 181. 29. Rosalind Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Con- dition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). I am indebted throughout to Krauss’s writing on the question of medium, not only in “Voyage on the North Sea” but in a number of recent essays, particularly those on James Coleman and William Kentridge in October. 30. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” 32, 15. 31. Cavell, The World Viewed, 106, 103. 32. Ibid., 115. 33. Rosalind Krauss, “Pictorial Space and the Question of Documentary,” Artforum 10, no. 3 (November 1971): 69. 34. Hal Foster, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Art in America 74, no. 6 (June 1986): 82. 35. Stephen Melville, “Criticism, Theory, and Materiality,” Arts Magazine 61, no. 3 (November 1986): 45. 36. Stephen Melville, Philosophy Beside Itself: On Deconstruction and Modernism (Minneap- olis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. 37. Stephen Melville, “Not Painting: The New Work of Sherrie Levine,” Arts Magazine 60, no. 6 (February 1986): 23, 25 [reprinted in this volume].

On Painting 201 202 Howard Singerman

38. Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 132. 39. Kasimir Malevich, “Suprematism,” excerpt from The Non-Objective World, in Theories of Modern Art: A Sourcebook for Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press, 1968), 343. 40. In Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville, As Painting: Division and Displacement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 133. 41. Judd, “Specific Objects,” 183. 42. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xxi. See also Armstrong, Lisbon, and Melville, As Painting, 133, n. 2. 43. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xxii. 44. Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” 126. 45. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press), 48. 46. Ibid., 84. 47. On the chessboard and tableau see Hubert Damisch, “L’Échiquier et la forme ‘Tab- leau,’” in World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity, vol. 1, Acts of the 26th International Con- gress of the History of Art, ed. Irving Lavin (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1989), 187–191; on game and match and the field of contemporary art, see his “Straté- gies, 1950–1960,” in Fenêtre jaune cadmium, ou les dessous de la peinture (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 142–179. 48. Stephen Westfall, “Sherrie Levine at Baskerville + Watson,” Art in America 74, no. 3 (March 1986): 147. 49. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Sym- bolic Goods,” Media, Culture and Society 2, no. 3 (July 1980): 291. 50. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 162. 51. Krauss, “A Voyage on the North Sea,” 53, 56. 52. Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium,” 291. 53. Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 214–215. Last Laugh David Joselit Last Laugh David Joselit © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

I think this work is very funny. I’m always surprised when people apologize to me for thinking it’s funny. I want the work to be funny, but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious. —Sherrie Levine, 19851

Mayhem

“Like a burlesque comedian,” Sherrie Levine stated in 2001, “I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement: Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I’d hit her with a brick.”2 The movement that carries this joke—the movement that rightly qualifies as “burlesque”—results from a modest change of a modest preposition. The word with shifts from modifying one noun, “a child,” to modifying another, “a brick,” and by doing so changes its connotation dramatically—from solicitous admonition (You wouldn’t hit a woman accompanied by a child, would you?) to aggressive bravado (No, I’d use a brick to bludgeon her!).3 Like the unconscious in overdrive, a simple word moves from innocent to aggressive, wheeling through countless positions in between. The resulting vertigo is what we call humor. It’s Sherrie Levine’s brand of mayhem. Despite the prevailing critical attitude that Levine (along with others associated with the strategy of “appropriation”) is devoted to stealing pictures, theft requires a permanent and complete transfer of property 204 David Joselit inconsistent with the actual promiscuity of images. Indeed, as Levine shrewdly pointed out in 1985, it isn’t even clear that images can be property:

Originality was always something I was thinking about, but there’s also the idea of ownership and property. … It’s not that I’m trying to deny that people own things. That isn’t even the point. The point is that people want to own things, which is more interesting to me. What does it mean to own something, and, stranger still, what does it mean to own an image?4

What does it mean to own an image? In fact, it can’t be done (as I think Levine’s quizzical remarks imply). Owning an image is as impossible as owning the preposition with. The movement of images may be slowed down—even to a glacial pace that simulates stasis—but within our ubiquitous and user-friendly economies of mechanical and digital reproduction, images simply cannot be arrested. Copyright protection, prohibitions against photography or file sharing, litigious feints of every kind may impede, but will never stop, reproduction. And if an image cannot be wholly reduced to property, how can it be stolen? The real question, as Levine has always clearly indicated both in her work and in her statements, is: How do images function as prepositions? Or, in other words, how do they produce meaning through “that [burlesque] precision which creates movement”? Levine feels free to transform images produced by others because she recognizes that content—what an image contains—is not identical to its meaning but rather a subset of it. On the contrary, meaning arises between, among, and after images. In short, images behave prepositionally—they modify one another and themselves (both in the sense of their former manifestations and their “identical” copies). It is in modification, for instance, that Levine’s famous titular preposition makes sense: After Claude Monet, or After Edward Weston, or After Piet Mondrian. What she says of her own oeuvre might well be applied to image economies tout court: “I orches- trate each series so that each series re-informs everything that came before.”5 Significance lies not in information but in re-information. Or, put differently, images function as qualifiers rather than nouns. Before proposing a genealogy of Levine’s array of prepositional strategies, I need to make one further observation. In order for there to be movement, as in the precise dislocations of burlesque, there must be a space within which movement may take place. This is what Harold Rosenberg famously called “an arena in which to act,”6 with regard to Abstract Expressionist painting, and what Levine calls the “gap” between pictures. In 1985 she defined this gap as follows:

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.7

I will come back to the issue of putting “a picture on top of a picture,” but first, I wish to consider the phrase “that space in the middle where there’s no picture.” In a later interview, Levine defined this space as a gap: “I think a lot of people seem to get lost in the gap and think that there’s no picture there, when in fact there are two pictures there.”8 This gap that opens up between pictures and is alternately no picture and many pictures is Levine’s “arena in which to act.” Much more important than her use of readymade content (which, after all, has been a widespread practice throughout the twentieth century) is her evocation of a space of modification, a prepositional space in which images, rather than posing as singular (as property), display their plural nature (their properties) as dynamic entities.

Three Routines

Burlesque is a physical form of comedy characterized by sight gags, puns, and implied or actual violence. Levine’s image choreography has a similar acrobatic repertory. Three types of routines organize her work, each with its own set of assumptions about the space, placement, and movement of images.

1. Palimpsest. The palimpsest, a laminate of layered images, is Levine’s most famous routine.9 Early on, in cutouts where the profiles of Ameri- can presidents served as frames or templates through which to view fashion models culled from women’s magazines, one image was seen through another (the absence of one marking the presence of the other).

Last Laugh 205 206 David Joselit

But with her discovery of rephotography, and in her drawings or watercolors after bookplate illustrations, it was no longer evident which image one looked at and which image one saw through, since the palimpsest had become virtual, and its expansions and contractions occurred around a single picture. As Douglas Crimp movingly wrote of a work from Levine’s After Edward Weston series (1979) that represents Weston’s nubile son in a nude classicizing pose, for certain intimate guests who might see the picture hanging in the critic’s bedroom, it connoted illicit homoeroticism, while for an art historian, its palimpsestic allusions could lead all the way back to Greek antiquity.10 Crimp’s recognition of the photograph’s eroticism is already implicit in Levine’s suggestive language: “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.” Sometimes it’s hard to determine which is the “top” and which is the “bottom.” This layering routine is multivalent and complex, and it has many moods, some of which are related to identical copies and others not. As I’ve already argued, jokes can be seen as a kind of palimpsest where one meaning contradicts the other, and love, too, is a palimpsest where images, on the contrary, harmonize. Levine has frequently worked with dichot- omous palimpsests, such as her pairs of images like the dual dwarves of Avant-Garde and Kitsch or Repetition and Difference (both 2002), phrases drawn from famous critical arguments (those of Clement Greenberg and Gilles Deleuze, respectively) that have greatly influenced art theory. But even her abstract paintings display the logic of the palimpsest. As Levine remarked in 1987:

That’s what I think is so amusing about the stripe paintings, that ostensibly they are non-referential, but on the other hand they have all these references. The idea was to make an abstract painting, a non-objective painting, that in fact had lots of references.11

2. Projection. Many accounts of modernist or Minimalist seriality emphasize the philosophical ramifications of repeating identical units. But in Levine’s practice of seriality, as in Postcard Collage #4, 1–24 (2000), for instance, which includes twenty-four of “the same” roman- tic postcard of a seascape, each framed individually and installed in an array, repetition produces a subtle experience of difference. If you Sherrie Levine, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 2002. Cast crystal, 7 × 2 × 1¾ inches, and cast bronze, 7½ × 2½ × 2 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. slowly move from postcard to postcard and really look, something marvelous happens: Each picture is both the same as and different from the others. Within their population, the postcards function as both figure and ground, since revisiting the “same” image is never the same experience, and it occurs against the “ground” of every other occasion of looking. These sets of identical postcards function almost diagnostically as a tool for tracking a viewer’s thoughts and emotions. An attentive spectator—she who patiently looks at all twenty-four postcards rather than “grasping” a meaning right away (“Oh, it’s all about mechanical reproduction!”)—is paradoxically pulled in two directions at once: drawn in and pushed out of the individual postcard (in order to see the next and to gauge whether anything has changed). The viewer is thus confronted with two distinct, and even contradictory, perspectives: the image as an immersive virtual world, and the image as an array of reiterations, which forms a network. In this sense, Levine’s choice of a postcard—an image that is meant to circulate in order to convey a distant scene—is far from arbitrary.12 In routines like the postcard collages, the gap between pictures, which was virtual in Levine’s palimpsestic laminates, is externalized: It is

Last Laugh 207 208 David Joselit

Sherrie Levine, detail of Postcard Collage #4, 1–24, 2000. Postcards and mat board, set of 24, 16 × 20 inches each. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. the physical space between framed copies on the wall. But since each of the cards has the same content, the work causes its viewers to dis- count the repetitive motif per se in favor of noticing their own prepositional movement from picture to picture. I call this effect projection, because, like the widespread practice of video or film projection with which the postcard collages are contemporaneous, Levine’s ganged postcards—what she has sometimes called “posses”—transform, or project, flat pictures into an immersive space.

3. Meltdown. If Levine’s palimpsests create a virtual gap—a historical prepositional space of pictorial movement—by placing one picture on top of another, her projections literalize this space by placing one picture beside another for the viewer to move between and among. These routines are sight gags of the highest order, in which one situational connotation modifies another in time and/or in space. But a meltdown is something else altogether. Whether nuclear or emotional, a meltdown collapses boundaries and releases energy; it’s a physical form of humor that is usually as tragic as it is funny. The first Levine Meltdown was a 1989 series of woodblock prints made with Maurice Sanchez. Levine and Sanchez took four images, each derived from a digital reproduction of a painting by Marcel Duchamp, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Piet Mon- drian, or Claude Monet, and pixelated them to form a grid four squares high and three across. Fission in these works was joined with fusion: The color of each square pixel (resulting from digital fission) was derived from the “average” of color within that segment of the “original” reproduction (i.e., digital fusion). Given the scale of the grids, the original motifs of the paintings were entirely lost in abstract blocks of color. More recently, in Levine’s Blue and Gray Monochromes After Stieg- litz (2010), fusion is all there is: The monochromes are derived from the averaged surfaces of Alfred Stieglitz’s series of cloud pictures, the Equiv- alents.13 It is vertiginous to see something so beautiful suffused with such implied violence: Malevich meets meltdown in Levine’s reinvigoration of monochrome painting. Here the “gap” Levine had opened between pictures—through palimpsests and projections—is fused into a nuanced surface whose ostensible dryness is paradoxically sensual, manifested in the pigment’s absorption into a rich mahogany ground. “I’d like the viewer to skid across the surface of my work,” Levine has said,14 employing a verb that implies a tragicomic form of movement—one that echoes the treachery of “skating on thin ice” as well as the burlesque shtick of slipping on a banana peel. Levine’s routines have always been emotionally charged despite their expert timing. She is one of the first and best to understand what it is to live in a world saturated with images—not to take up toy swords and tilt at The Spec- tacle (as though image worlds could ever be monolithic), but to experiment in how to be human when images speak louder than words. She is our Mallarmé in the age of Google.

Notes

1. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Jeanne Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” Arts Magazine 59, no. 10 (Summer 1985): 144. 2. Sherrie Levine, artist’s statement, 2001. 3. It may be more than coincidence that in the late 1960s Levine did a series in which the cartoon character Ignatz hits Krazy Kat with a brickbat. 4. Levine, quoted in Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” 143. 5. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Constance Lewallen, “Sherrie Levine,” Journal of Contempo- rary Art 6, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 71.

Last Laugh 209 210 David Joselit

6. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” (1952), reprinted in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1968), 569. 7. Levine, quoted in Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” 141. 8. Ibid., 144. 9. Is it fanciful to suggest in this regard that this is one of the reasons Levine was drawn to plywood—the industrial laminate par excellence—as a ground for her “Knot” paintings? 10. See Douglas Crimp, “The Boys in My Bedroom” (1990), reprinted in Crimp, Mel- ancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 156. 11. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Paul Taylor, “Sherrie Levine Plays with Paul Taylor,” Flash Art 135 (Summer 1987): 58. 12. For a related discussion of painting and networks, see my “Painting Beside Itself,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 125–134. 13. In 2010, these works were exhibited alongside Levine’s Equivalents: After Stieglitz (2006), the digital pixelations she made from Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, November 6–December 15. 14. Sherrie Levine, artist’s statement, 1994. Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork Maria H. Loh Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork Maria H. Loh © Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll Rights Reserved

Of Little Masters and Old Men

One of the outstanding canvases hanging in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a poignant landscape by the seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin depicting the Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658). In ancient mythology, the king of Chios is said to have punished Orion after the giant got drunk at a banquet and aggressed the king’s daughter. Wandering in shame and darkness, Orion arrived like a beggar on the shores of Lemnos where Hephaistos—the god of blacksmiths, artisans, and sculptors—took pity on him and instructed his assistant Kedalion to guide him to the healing powers of the sun. In the Poussin painting, we see the little metalworker perched on the giant hunter’s back, the two setting off for the kingdom of Helios where Orion would find his redemptive, happy ending. Poussin’s interpretation of the tale also invokes the famous line attributed to the twelfth-century monk Bernard de Chartres, “We are dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants,” an adage that underscores the cheerful reception by the present of the illus- trious achievements of the past in a historical moment before the onset of what Harold Bloom would morosely diagnose as the “anxiety of influence.”1 But for those who lived in the premodernist past, the condition was not so acute. As in the Blind Orion, ultimately it was the ability of today’s men to find the golden light of the future that enabled the towering denizens of the past to dream again—to see the world anew. 212 Maria H. Loh

Nicholas Poussin, Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun, 1658. Oil on canvas, 46⅞ × 72 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fletcher Fund, 1924 (24.45.1).

Poussin’s painting and Bernard de Chartres’s motto serve as a point of departure for an anachronistic history of Sherrie Levine’s work, for they exemplify several of the themes that lurk behind her art and practice: vision and knowledge; humor and wit; humility and empathy; repetition and difference. It is a disruptive model of history that snips straightforward time lines in favor of more entangled relationships between befores and afters. Bernard’s expression, for example, is only known to us because John of Salisbury (nicknamed “Johannes Parvus,” or “Little John”) carefully safeguarded this phrase in the Metalogicon, a twelfth-century defense of the liberal arts written against a group of crabby anti-intellectualists known as the Cornificians.2 It is perhaps in the shadows of this affective, retrospective history that the pathos of Levine’s work finds its most sympathetic stage. If we draw close enough to Levine’s two little smirking dwarfs in Repetition and Difference (2002), it is this story of double belonging that they seem to be rehearsing. If you linger long enough, they might just whisper: “Come back later, and we’ll tell you the story about our cous- ins, Avant-Garde and Kitsch!” (2002). Like the diminutive metalworker Kedalion who would save Orion, these little men possess a power of expansion that is magnified in their doubling. The empathetic formula for repetition adds the past and the present, befores and afters, originals and copies so that each pair is the sum of its parts: The opacity of cast crystal and the philosophical gravitas of black glass is intensified by the glimmering reflection of its significant other; likewise, the sheen of the bronze surface glows twice as brightly next to the flat sobriety of its companion. The relationship between both “Avant-Garde” and “Kitsch,” on the one hand, and “Repetition” and “Difference,” on the other, is defined by a certain incurable codependency—the one cannot exist without the other; the identity of one depends upon the other.

One Inside the Other

But the cheerful men of the past—the Kedalions and Little Johns of history—were not without mischief and subversive antics. If Levine claims that “it’s often more useful to think of artmaking as play rather than work,” and that “[f]antasies of aggression and control have an interesting place there,” it is because dwarfs sometimes play pranks on giants, too.3 Levine’s The Three Muses (2006), for instance, stands as a witty riposte to all those classicizing yet utterly predictable, tasteful yet insipid marbles and plaster casts littering elite European gardens (as well as not-so-elite American pizzerias); however, it is in Levine’s use of rar- efied bronze as her material where the final punch line is delivered, rather than in the more obvious deployment of the three little pigs. And here Levine is thinking perhaps like Raphael when the young artist draws Michelangelo’s formidable David, but seen from behind—literally making an ass out of the heroic model. The colossal block of flawed marble, as historians and guidebooks love to say, was nicknamed “il Gigante” until Michelangelo took pity upon it and transformed it into a representation of the biblical underdog who would defeat the giant Goliath, conflating and collapsing the dwarf/giant dichotomy through the cleverness of art. Raphael’s gesture was undoubtedly one of admiration for and humility toward that which came before him, but that same gesture is also a cheeky afterthought demonstrating a healthy sense of humor toward the achievements of his predecessor. I mock you, but only because I secretly love you—this ribald, “aggressive/ passive” stance is also seen in a print by an unknown artist that itself is predicated on a long sequence of “afters”: it is a work after a woodcut

Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork 213 214 Maria H. Loh

Sherrie Levine, The Three Muses, 2006. Cast bronze, three parts: 6 × 9½ × 5½ inches; 5½ × 7½ × 4½ inches; 4 × 7 × 4 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. by Nicolò Boldrini, which was after a lost drawing said to have been made by Titian that, in turn, was after the ancient statue Laocoön and His Sons that had been unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506 to everyone’s marvel and surprise. In Boldrini’s version, the composition of the sculpture is reversed in production, as was common in printmaking. The anonymous engraving returns the figures to their original positions, but we are no longer dealing with a simple tale of repetition as classical imitation or as reproductive prints. Titian and the others undercut the seri- ousness of this momentous occasion not only by flipping the prototype back and forth and by moving the cliché across a hierarchy of different media, but by metamorphosing the calm grandeur and noble simplicity of the ancient heroes into screaming monkeys. In spite of the vast temporal distance that separates Raphael, Titian, Boldrini, and our anonymous engraver from Levine, they would have found much to like in her art. Early modern Italians especially prized wit or acutezza (acuity) in art and language. Representing one thing while saying another produced a surplus pleasure that allowed you to “look with the eyes while contem- plating with the mind.”4 This kind of double vision operated metaphorically, for the metaphor, as a seventeenth-century writer explained, packs “objects tightly together in a single word and almost miraculously allows you to see one inside the other.”5 It is through this bifurcated optic that Levine’s cutouts bearing the silhouettes of American presidents speak most eloquently. Form vies with content as the confrontation of the two produces a marvelous third image that lies in between—what Levine might refer to (after Marcel Duchamp) as the “infra-thin.”6 Like the infamous drawing of the duck-rabbit (vari- ously attributed to Joseph Jastrow, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others), wonder is generated not simply in seeing the one or the other but in the moment when simultaneity trumps chronological priority; it is the poetic difference between “two for one” versus “buy one get one free” or the magical formula that enables “1 + 1 = 1” rather than “1 + 1 = 2.” Looking at Annibale Carracci’s drawing of the Annunciation after Jacopo Tintoretto, the pleasure in being able to identify the reference to the painting in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco by the Venetian Old Master is doubled in the pleasure of seeing the comedic differences between the two. Instead of the drama of the biblical narrative as it is portrayed in Tintoretto’s painting, Carracci looks awry at the scene. Everything in this image is about halves: The focus upon Joseph labor- ing away on the left is balanced by Mary dropping her ball of string on the right; the wooden plank is being sawed in two; the angelic body is being split into feet on one side of the window and a pointing finger on the other. But without seeing Tintoretto in the drawing, Carracci’s visual witticism could not function properly; seeing only Tintoretto without Carracci also made for a poor joke. Likewise, mistaking a Levine for a Walker Evans is to misunderstand the work; in contrast, to see the repetition is to produce new meanings out of old images. While the difference between Levine’s photographs and those of the photographers she photographs is often “infra-thin,” the pleasure of repetition and of coming after is bound by a similar incurable codependency.

The Master’s Voice

When Giovanni Tommaso Giglioli writes in the seventeenth century, “Aristotle said we feel great delight when we see two equal forces (or

Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork 215 216 Maria H. Loh two forces between whom we are unable to detect too much difference) come together in competition,” it is as if he were waiting for Levine’s work to come.7 If Emanuele Tesauro precedes Levine by three centuries, his definition of “true imitation,” too, was waiting for her:

True imitation does not mean usurping metaphors and witty expressions exactly as you hear or read them; that way you would not be praised as an imitator but blamed as a thief. Imitating Praxiteles’ Apollo does not mean transporting it from the Cortile del Belvedere into one’s own loggia, but carving another piece of marble to the same proportions, so that Praxiteles on seeing it would marvel and say, “This Apollo is not mine, yet it is mine.”8

Levine’s work “relies on a certain reversal of before and after,” but it is also about a multiplication of possibilities.9 In this regard, her story is not unlike that of Kedalion who, in some accounts, is described as Hep- haistos’s pupil, but in other genealogies is identified as the metalworker who taught Hephaistos his trade. Like the self-portrait of the sixteenth- century painter Sofonisba Anguissola, Levine’s art represents itself as an image of an image (Anguissola as a portrait on the easel) that is being constructed by the image of her master (Bernardino Campi)—a profound reflection on who or what is making and is made. The deliberate anachronism of this comparison connects with Levine’s love for “transgressional boundaries, leaky distinctions, dualisms, fractured identities, monstrosity and perversity,” what she summarized as “a fly in the soup, a pie in the face”—a history of art and artists based on practical jokes rather than theoretical anxiety.10 If Levine is an artist who thinks as an art historian, as Howard Sing- erman has suggested, she is a puckish one who might insist on using slides and likes to put them into the carousel upside down, backwards, and—often—one on top of the other. The artist as historian is an art historian who multiplies temporalities and scrambles tidy genealogies. The sculptural works such as Crystal Newborn (1993) and Black Newborn (1994), perhaps more so than Levine’s photographs, stand as testament to how one can be both the daughter of a modernist past that came before and the mother (of us all) who gives new life to those weary fathers. To come after is a position of knowledge and power. If Levine comes after a venerable chorus of Old and Avant-Garde Masters, it is Sofonisba Anguissola, Bernardino Campi Painting the Portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, c. 1559. Oil on canvas, 43⅝ × 43⅛ inches. Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena. Photo: Scala/Ministero per I Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY. her song—like Anguissola’s meta-portrait of her virtually forgotten teacher Campi—that gives them visibility once more. Rather than wallow in the self-pity of a Bloomian flu brought on by the germs of belatedness and oedipal angst, and groan as old men do for the happy days of the past, Levine’s work embraces the past like a foreign country full of wonders for the taking. If cultural and geographical difference has been the favored subject of alterity studies for the politicians and practi- tioners of identity, Levine’s art demonstrates that History—i.e., time rather than space—is the new Other. Old is the new new … or, if we think about it, perhaps being new (i.e., being Avant-Garde) was

Afterward/Afterword/Afterwork 217 218 Maria H. Loh

Sherrie Levine, Black Newborn, 1994. Cast glass, 5 × 8 × 5½ inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist. always-already the old old? You’ll have to ask Levine’s little crystal, glass, and bronze masters for clarification on that.

Notes

1. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 2. John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), 167. 3. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Jeanne Siegel, “The Anxiety of Influence—Head On: A Conversation between Sherrie Levine and Jeanne Siegel,” in Sherrie Levine, exhibition catalogue (Zurich: Kunsthalle Zurich, 1991), 17. 4. Emanuele Tesauro, quoted in Eugenio Donato, “Tesauro’s Poetics: Through the Looking Glass,” MLN 78, no. 1 (January 1963): 23. 5. Emanuele Tesauro, quoted in Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings, ed. and trans. Brendan Dooley (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 480. 6. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Howard Singerman, “Sherrie Levine’s Art History,” October 101 (Summer 2002): 101. For Duchamp’s use of the term, see Marcel Duchamp, Notes, ed. and trans. Paul Matisse (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983). 7. Giovanni Tomaso Giglioli, letter to Secondo Lancellotti, in L’Hoggidi overo il mondo non peggiore ne più calamitoso del passato (Venice: Guerigli, 1627), n.p. 8. Tesauro, quoted in Italy in the Baroque, 468. 9. Singerman, “Sherrie Levine’s Art History,” 98. 10. Sherrie Levine, epigraph to Sherrie Levine: Sculpture, ed. David Frankel (Cologne: Galerie Jablonka, and Los Angeles: Margo Leavin Gallery, 1996), 5.

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Index of Names Index of Names Index of Names

Acconci, Vito, 126 Bernstein, Cheryl, 174 Ader, Bas Jan, 126 Bettelheim, Bruno, 66 Adorno, Theodor, 49n10 Bidlo, Mike, 173–176, 189 Agee, James, 82–86 Birnbaum, Dara, 45–46 Akeley, Carl, 109 Birrell, James, 12n10 Albers, Josef, 28 Bishop, Elizabeth, 172n6 Alberti, Leon Battista, 110, 197 Bloom, Harold, 52–56, 211, 217 Ammannati, Bartolomeo, 140 Blossfeldt, Karl, 68, 176 Anderson, Laurie, 1, 3, 16–17 Bogosian, Eric, 45 Andre, Carl, 60, 134 Boldrini, Nicolò, 214 Anguissola, Sofonisba, 216, 217f Borges, Jorge Luis, 76, 164, 172n3, 174 Antin, Eleanor, 126 Bourgeois, Louise, 90 Aristotle, 216 Brady, Mathew, 85 Armstrong, Philip, 184 Brancusi, Constantin, 60, 62, 65, Arp, Hans, 70, 194 107–108, 118, 176–178 Artists Space, 1 Braque, Georges, 194–195 Assenmaker, Michel, 133–151 Brauntuch, Troy, 1, 7–8, 12n12 Atget, Eugène, 19, 85 Britt, David, 72 Buchloh, Benjamin, 45–46, 77, 89 Barnum, P. T., 109 Buren, Daniel, 197 Barry, Robert, 2, 126 Burke, Edmund, 122 Barthes, Roland, 12n10, 20, 24, 31, 45, Burroughs, Louise, 83 76, 126, 199 Baskerville + Watson, 51, 56, 197 Campi, Bernardino, 216–217 Bataille, Georges, 140, 150n21, 150n27 Campus, Peter, 3 Baudelaire, Charles, 198 Carracci, Annibale, 215 Baudrillard, Jean, 50n27, 111 Carrouges, Michel, 60 Baxandall, Michael, 173 Caruthers-Montgomery, P. L., 128 Benjamin, Walter, 12n11, 15, 17–20, 35, Cavell, Stanley, 176, 180, 186–188, 191, 111, 133, 138, 176, 181, 188, 198 193, 198, 200n7 Bernard, Emile, 158–159 Celine, Louis Ferdinand, 165 222 Index of Names

Certeau, Michel de, 128 Foster, Hal, 96, 188–189, 199 Cervantes, Miguel de, 164–165, 170 Foucault, Michel, 33n1, 40, 46, 136–138 Cézanne, Paul, 175, 182–183 Franklin Furnace, 6 Chartres, Bernard de, 211–212 Franz, Erich, 67–73, 79–80 Chasnik, Ilya, 189–190, 196 Freud, Sigmund, 44, 46, 74–75, 90–92, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, 99, 133–135, 143 37 Fried, Michael, 2–3, 10, 97–98, 184–187 Cixous, Hélène, 90 Coleman, James, 199 Gallop, Jane, 44 Cornell, Joseph, 52 Gauguin, Paul, 156 Cox, Christopher, 82–83 Genette, Gérard, 176–179 Crimp, Douglas, 1–11, 15–26, 78–79, 206 Giglioli, Giovanni Tommaso, 215 Gijsbrecht, Cornelius, 145 Damisch, Hubert, 139, 150n29, 196–198 Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy, 125–127 David, Jacques-Louis, 67 Gilmore, Jonathan, 173–174, 188 Davis, Gene, 197 Glier, Mike, 45 Degas, Edgar, 175, 182–183, 189 Goldstein, Jack, 1, 3–5, 12nn6,8, 17, Deitcher, David, 95, 97 188 Deleuze, Gilles, 46, 59–60, 62, 193, 199, Goldstein, Kurt, 159 206 Goodman, Nelson, 175–176, 180, Derrida, Jacques, 46, 52, 56n1, 111, 200n7 123n4, 134–135, 142 Graham, Dan, 3 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 138, 150n20 Greenberg, Clement, 184–186, 190, 195, Doane, Mary Ann, 90–96 201n26, 206 Documenta, 37 Griffin, Susan, 37 Duchamp, Marcel, 35, 51–52, 55–56, Guattari, Félix, 46, 59–60, 62 60–65, 72, 76–77, 100, 107–108, Guggenheim, Peggy, 175 117–119, 121–122, 125, 129, 135, 137, 145, 175–180, 196, 209, 215 Haraway, Donna, 109 Duncan, Carol, 174 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 43, 118, 142, 193 Eames, Charles, 118–121 Heidegger, Martin, 41, 48n9, 49n10, 52, Eames, Ray, 118–121 56n1, 57n2, 89, 93, 157–159 Einstein, Carl, 150n21 Herriman, George, 131 Entenza, John, 121 Herron, Hank, 174 Ernst, Max, 70 Hesse, Eva, 60, 62, 90 Evans, Walker, 35, 47, 50n26, 68, 73–77, Hitchcock, Alfred, 26, 40 79–90, 93, 95, 98–101, 125, 148n1, Hitler, Adolf, 7–8 173, 175–177, 183, 215 Holzer, Jenny, 45 Horkheimer, Max, 49n10 Fanon, Frantz, 87–88, 104n58 Hugo, Victor, 153, 198 Fassbinder, Rainer, 7 Feininger, Andreas, 24, 35, 50n26 Ingraham, Catherine, 107–115 Feyrer, Gayle, 130 Irigaray, Luce, 43, 46, 88–91, 104n70 Flaubert, Gustave, 40, 108, 115n5, 136–139, 146, 149n15, 150n37, James, Henry, 3, 16–17 153–157, 161nn5,6 Jameson, Fredric, 40, 42 Fletcher, Angus, 48n8 Jastrow, Joseph, 215 Fonvielle, Lloyd, 81 Jenkins, Henry, 128 John of Salisbury, 212–213 L’Isle-Adams, Villier de, 60 Johns, Jasper, 71, 174, 193–198 Lissitzky, Lazar Markovich, 68 Joselit, David, 203–210 Loh, Maria H., 211–219 Joyce, James, 85, 165 Long, Richard, 2, 126 Judd, Donald, 12n4, 187–188, 193 Longo, Robert, 1, 6–7, 12n10, 17 Louvre, 18 Kafka, Franz, 60, 171, 172n7 Lyotard, Jean-François, 39–42, 49n12 Kandel, Susan, 125–132 Kandinsky, Wassily, 68, 71 Maillol, Aristide, 60, 62 Kant, Immanuel, 52, 55, 56n1, 138 Malevich, Kasimir, 189–190, 196, 209 Kawara, On, 126 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 10, 209 Kelly, Mary, 96, 99 Manet, Édouard, 40, 138–140, 150n27 Kennedy, John F., 8–9, 12n13 Man Ray, 72, 100, 189 Kentridge, William, 199 Marc, Franz, 36–37, 50n26, 172n2 Kierkegaard, Søren, 135, 146, 151n46 Marden, Brice, 55, 70, 188, 194, 197 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 175, 209 Margo Leavin Gallery, 127 Kirstein, Lincoln, 80–81, 84, 87 Marioni, Tom, 126 Kitchen, The, 9–10, 35 Martin, Agnes, 28 Klein, Yves, 175 Martin, Joan, 131 Kosuth, Joseph, 126 Marx, Karl, 41–42, 193 Kozloff, Max, 82–83 Mary Boone Gallery, 129 Kozlov, Christine, 126 Masheck, Joseph, 175–176, 200n5 Krauss, Rosalind, 12n5, 27–33, 59–66, Matisse, Henri, 68 78, 115n1, 127, 151n53, 172n4, 177, Mauritshuis, 146 181, 183–184, 187–188, 198–199, McCollum, Allan, 52, 189 201n29 McLaughlin, John, 197 Krims, Les, 25 McLuhan, Marshall, 62 Kruger, Barbara, 45, 87 Medici, Ferdinando dé, 140 Melville, Stephen W., 51–57, 184–185, Lacan, Jacques, 45–46, 49n22, 79, 91, 96, 188–191, 193, 199 101, 125, 134, 147–148 Menard, Pierre, 164–165, 170 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 198 Mendelsohn, John, 12n10 Lange, Dorothea, 77, 81–82, 84f Menil Collection, 129 Lavin, Sylvia, 117–123, 146 Mercer Street Store, 35 Lawler, Louise, 45 Merinoff, Dimitri, 35 Lawrence, D. H., 40 Metro Pictures, 35, 73 Le Corbusier, 110 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 145, 211 Léger, Fernand, 173–174 Metz and Co., 112 Levine, Sherrie, 1, 8, 12n13, 22–24, Michaels, Duane, 25 31–32, 35–37, 45, 47, 50n26, 51–56, Michelangelo, 213 59, 62–101, 102n17, 103n27, Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 108 107–114, 115n5, 117–123, 125–132, Millet, Jean-François, 157 135–147, 148n1, 150n21, 151n53, Miró, Joan, 127, 189 153–161, 163–172, 173–184, Mondrian, Piet, 28–31, 189, 204, 209 188–199, 203–209, 212–218 Monet, Camille, 181 Levitt, Helen, 77, 82, 84–86 Monet, Claude, 179–181, 189, 201n19, LeWitt, Sol, 126, 134 209 Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 12n13, 193 Montrelay, Michèle, 91 Lisbon, Laura, 184 Morandi, Giorgio, 175

Index of Names 223 224 Index of Names

Moravia, Alberto, 22, 100–101, 123n5, Rubin, William, 195 171n1 Ryman, Robert, 188 Morris, Robert, 2, 60 Moskowitz, Robert, 11 Salle, David, 35, 197 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 146 Salle Patino, 4 Mulvey, Laura, 92, 98 Sanchez, Maurice, 209 Museum of Modern Art, 80, 178 Sand, George, 154 Musset, Alfred de, 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 96 Schapiro, Meyer, 158–159 Nauman, Bruce, 3 Schiele, Egon, 37, 50n26, 51, 69, 122, Newhall, Beaumont, 81, 83 144, 189 Newman, Barnett, 190, 197 Schnabel, Julian, 197 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40, 59 Schoenberg, Arnold, 135 Schrader, Paul, 37 Oppenheim, Dennis, 126 Schwartz, Hillel, 179–180 Owens, Craig, 35–37, 39–50, 78, 87–89, Schwitters, Kurt, 27 93, 95, 99, 137 Scuola Grande di San Rocco, 215 Sélavy, Rrose, 136 Palermo, Blinky, 54–55, 69–70, 189–190, Sensier, Alfred, 157 197 Serra, Richard, 2 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 134 Seurat, Georges, 67, 71 Picasso, Pablo, 147, 175–177, 189, Sherman, Cindy, 6, 12n10, 25, 87 194–195 Silverman, Kaja, 78, 87, 102n, 104n70 Piper, Adrian, 126 Singerman, Howard, 73–106, 148, Pollock, Jackson, 173–177, 187 173–202, 216 Porter, Eliot, 24, 32, 35, 50n26 Smith, David, 59, 62 Poussin, Nicolas, 144, 211–212 Smith, Philip, 1, 12n10 Praxiteles, 22, 24, 78, 216 Smithson, Robert, 2 Prévert, Jacques, 147–148 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 77, 100, 102n17 Prince, Richard, 25–26, 45 Spaar, Jocelyn, 148 Proust, Marcel, 169 Speer, Albert, 7–8 Stam, Mart, 177 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 139–140 Steinberg, Leo, 196 Rainer, Yvonne, 2 Stella, Frank, 67, 174, 188 Raphael, 139–140, 149n1, 213–214 Stieglitz, Alfred, 129, 209 Rauschenberg, Robert, 19, 31, 196 Still, Clyfford, 190 Reinhardt, Ad, 28 Stoichita, Victor I., 142–145 Rembrandt, 18 Stravinsky, Igor, 40 Renoir, Jean, 40 Sturtevant, Elaine, 174 Rietveld, Gerrit Th., 107–114, 177 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 40 Tesauro, Emanuele, 216 Rodin, Auguste, 60, 62 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 215 Rose, Barbara, 20 Titian, 214 Rosenberg, Harold, 205 Rosler, Martha, 45, 87 Valéry, Paul, 198 Rothenberg, Susan, 11 Van Dyke, Willard, 82–83 Rothko, Mark, 190 Van Gogh, Vincent, 156–159, 170, 189 Roussel, Raymond, 60 Velázquez, Diego, 145 Rubens, Peter Paul, 140–143, 145 Vermeer, Jan, 67, 145, 146 Warhol, Andy, 19, 134, 174 Washington, George, 8, 12n13, 193 Weber, Samuel, 75–76, 87, 99 Weiner, Lawrence, 2 Weston, Edward, 22–24, 31, 35, 47, 50n26, 51, 78–80, 100–101, 103n27, 118, 122, 125, 139, 140, 148n1, 173–176, 183, 204, 206 Weston, Neil, 22, 31, 47, 50n26 Wexner Center, 184 Whitney Museum, 10–11 Willemen, Paul, 96–99 Wilson, Ian, 126 Witkin Gallery, 22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 215

Zavitzianos, George, 93 Zola, Émile, 155, 180

Index of Names 225