The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's
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The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's 'Compensation Portrait', and Surrealism in the USA 1942-45 Author(s): David Hopkins Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2003), pp. 47-68 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600446 Accessed: 08-09-2017 12:52 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3600446?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Oxford Art Journal This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's 'Compensation Portrait', and Surrealism in the USA 1942-45 David Hopkins In 1981 the American artist Sherrie Levine re-presented a slightly blurred reproduction of a reproduction of Walker Evans' FSA-period portrait of Allie 1. For a useful summary of Levine's early Mae Burroughs as a work by herself, titling it 'After Walker Evans' (Fig. 1). It practice in relation to 'oppositional was one of a sequence in which she could be seen as usurping canonical images postmodernism', which also goes on to problematise her later shifts in attitude in th( by modernist Masters of photography for femininity. More broadly it could be 1980s, see Abigail Solomon-Godeau, 'Living seen as instantiating the Duchampian strategy of appropriation as a defining with Contradictions: Critical Practices in the hallmark of postmodern art production. Applying another twist to the Age of Supply-Side Aesthetics' in Photography the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, V at principle of the readymade, Levine asserted that pre-existing works of art now Institutions, and Practices (University of stood to be lifted wholesale out of history and re-authored.1 Minneapolis Press: Minneapolis, 1991), What many people did not realise was that Levine's strategy had already pp. 124-36 and passim. been pre-empted by Duchamp on two fronts. In 1942 the same Walker Evans image had been symbolically stripped of its author and presented as one of a set of Compensation Portraits which functioned as surrogate images of members of the Surrealist group. In this case the sharecropper's wife's features stood in for those of the English Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington (Fig. 2). The context for the Compensation Portraits will be supplied in due course, but it suffices at present to say that Duchamp-in league with Andre Breton- probably made that choice. As part of the same batch of Compensation Portraits, Duchamp presented one of himself, making use of a section cut from a Ben Shahn photograph of another victim of the US Depression (Fig. 3). In doing this, he re-presented part, if not all, of another artist's work. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Levine was to make her dialogue with Duchamp much more overt by producing sculptural versions of the 'Bachelors' from his Large Glass or producing shiny bronze versions of Fountain (1917). What is clear from the above is that even her socially-inflected FSA appropriations had had an oblique relation to the intricacies of his output. The true author of Duchamp's Compensation Portrait, Ben Shahn, was, like Evans, synonymous with a Left-orientated 'documentary' aesthetic credo in 1930s America. But as well as appropriating a politically-affiliated artist's work, Duchamp chose, by invoking the social 'transparency' of a photographic image, to implicitly identify himself with the subject of Shahn's work, namely a flesh-and-blood victim of social catastrophe. For those accustomed to thinking of Duchamp as the arch-dandy of twentieth-century art, the ultimate ss ironist of strenuously-defended 'positions', this overt referencing both of Left 5,? 'C- %' ????: commitments and human suffering, however apparently tangential to his wider :E .-L"?:"::,P ,-? :ff7 output, must open up important questions. Was it simply an opportunistic i joke? Or does it reflect more deep-seated concerns? It is remarkable that the a 'E :::::;:i;. : gesture has gone relatively unremarked for so long. But then Duchamp, of """"'" course, chose not to meet the political (or social) head on, but, like Levine later, to negotiate his relations with the bluntness of social fact via his habitual Fig. 1. Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans n 4, 1981, black x use of the quotational,and thewhite apparently marginal photograph, or glancing. 10 > 8 ins. (Photograph )r In After Walker Evans Levine courtesy effectively takes on Duchamp of at hisPaula own game. Coope Gallery, New If oneYork.) of the outcomes of his adoption of Ben Shahn's image had been to bring It OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 45-68 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms David Hopkins about one of his characteristic gender shifts, she re-appropriates his manoeuvre, re-feminising the authorial relation to the subject of the Evans photograph. It is also important here to see Levine as a respondent to 1980s 2. For the 1980's concentration on indexicality discourses centred on the interplay between the iconic and indexical see Rosalind Krauss, 'Notes on the Index', Parts I and II, reprinted in The Originality of the Avant properties of photographs and thus making a subtle point about documentary Garde and Other Modernist Myths (MIT Press, photography.2 The documentary aesthetics of Walker Evans had been Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 196-219. The first characterised by late 1930s supporters such as Lincoln Kirstein as predicated part of her essay takes Duchamp's work to be i; :: v 1 -i pI 1. I!r iI i; E I i I a s 1 ^. ..: ... ... ... ......... ........ ..... .*.._: ;. .. ... ... .-., . ""v. ,_., e__ w -- . _1 a .'. t I $t _ :: P 1. B i 3 i : :i " t :: L 3 r? . : I i: _ : i 3 r N :: 4? a ii 'fs I i r ;i :: li< rI I 11 i" i: " ii :: t'tii ?r6 r :? :: 1-1 0: i. 1: 1: t. ii : 3 I 1; s f 7 1s .z Fig. 2. Compensation Portraits, selected for 'First Papers of Surrealism' (New York, 1942). Calas Papers, The Young-Mallin archives, New York. Photograph by John Schiff. (Courtesy of Judith Mallin.) 48 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 26.1 2003 This content downloaded from 132.174.250.220 on Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:52:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Politics of Equivocation: Sherrie Levine, Duchamp's 'Compensation Portrait', and Surrealism in the USA 1942-45 on a renunciation of authorial subjectivity in favour of an apparent artlessness, whilst Evans himself had developed a sophisticated credo of stylelessness paradigmatic. For photography, see especially rooted in his reading of French realist writers such as Flaubert. His work thus p. 203. played heavily on the issue of 'transparency' in so far as the plight of the 3. For a discussion of Evans' 'styleless style', subjects of his photographs seemingly predominated over the imposition of the particularly as promoted by Lincoln Kirstein in photographer's subjectivity. (Hence Evans' predilection for severely frontal as his essay 'Photography of America' in Evans' seminal American Photographs (Museum of opposed to angled viewpoints.3) In this sense Evans' documentary images fed Modern Art: New York, 1938 ), see Joel off photography's indexical relatonship to 'the real'. In effect, however, Eisinger, Trace and Transformation: American Evans' images came to privilege iconicity over indexicality in so far as the Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period (University of New Mexico Press: Albuquerque, authorial name 'Walker Evans', synonymous precisely with a 'styleless style' 1995), pp. 98-102. redolent of aesthetic stoicism and pragmatism, eventually interposed itself 4. Such readings borrow their impetus from between the stylistic look and the content of the photographs. His subjects got Craig Owens' seminal interpretation of works subordinated to his brand label. by Levine and her contemporaries as Levine's removal of Evans' authorial rights symbolically renders the image fundamentally 'allegorical'. Hence he writes: 'Allegorical imagery is appropiated imagery. 'transparent' again; we see the suffering, indomitable woman once more. To a [The allegorist] adds another meaning to the degree this reading runs against the grain of accepted accounts of Levine's image.' Elsewhere he asserts that 'allegory work of the early 1980s in which she is thought to 'thicken' the referential or occurs when one text is doubled by another . [thel paradigm for the allegorical work is thus discursive density of pre-existing photographic images rather than returning the palimpsest'. See his 'The Allegorical them to 'transparency'.4 However, although my interpretative tack will Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism' eventually produce a Levine who is somewhat unequal to the contest with (Part 1), October, no. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 79- 80. Howard Singerman has recently contested Duchamp, it has the advantage of re-emphasising the political potentialities of a the 'thickness' of Levine's early work, arguing practice which, from early on, was frequently found wanting by critics of the that Owens, although accurate, was Left.5 Certainly Howard Singerman has invoked a Levine preoccupied with 'premature'; see his 'Sherrie Levine's Art History', October, 101, Summer 2002, p.