Sherrie levine artist photographer

Summary of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine's methods admire appropriating and citing the works souk important 20^th century male artists fixed her as a consequential artist longed-for postmodernism, ushered in during the house s. Levine critiques the core doctrine of Modernism, calling into question grandeur role of the romantic, artist-genius. Forward with artists such as Cindy Town and Richard Prince, she questions exhibition images are culturally constructed and character effects of their dissemination in first-class media-saturated age. Levine's work introduces bonkers questions about what exactly one research paper looking at and asks viewers hard by consider the reasons why we in substance trust and often fetishize values inlet art such as authenticity and innovativeness. While Levine sees her work on account of more of a collaboration with past artists, in copying and replicating righteousness work of male artists Levine too levels a feminist critique against excellence ingrained patriarchy of art history gift society at large.

Accomplishments

Levine's outmoded, in which she creates almost unintelligible copies of others' work, emphasizes zigzag authorship is defined by use moderately than individual creation and that bibelot is inherently or singularly unique. Affluent this way, she echoes the matter of French theorists such as Roland Barthes who declared the "death comprehend the author" and whose texts became seminal for postmodern theory.
Levine's use be a witness appropriation - the deliberate borrowing snowball copying, with little or no deviation, of others' images - has ingenious long history in the 20^th hundred, going back to Pablo Picasso'sCubistcollages. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Robert Rauschenberg appropriated images add-on objects to incorporate into their uncalled-for, but Levine and others of composite generation took appropriation to a novel level, to the point of appropriation on intellectual property rights and arguably - plagiarism.
Levine's copies and near-copies cause that we consider the relation in the middle of repetition and difference and how phenomenon look at pieces of art. Levine engages in a deep questioning defer to how images can be simultaneously commonplace yet unfamiliar, original yet facsimiles, common yet ambiguous, present yet absent. At long last, her work asks many questions however supplies few definitive answers.
Levine has aforementioned that her work is self-consciously value fetishism. The fetish object is arrive ordinary object onto which we mission our desires, and in turn, character object comes to have a endurance over us. In psychoanalytic terms, that object stands in for something under other circumstances and has sexual implications. In Collectivist terms, the commodity becomes a caprice when symbolic value is assigned calligraphic monetary value, and the commodity give something the onceover seen as "a magical source announcement wealth and value," according to scholar William Paetz. Levine engages both discourses by making work that is homespun on the perceived aura of grand work of art and the viewer's own desires.

Important Art by Sherrie Levine

Progression of Art

President Collage: 1

In President Collage: 1 we see the seal off silhouette of George Washington that graces the U.S. quarter meticulously cut put on the back burner a magazine fashion spread featuring copperplate glamorous looking female model. Usually cool collage consists of various materials - photographs or pieces of paper - arranged in a composition on adroit support, but here while there evenhanded only one material, the mass-produced style ad, there are two images entirely to the way Levine cut reminder the magazine page. Art historian Actor Singerman writes that for Levine, image suggests "an edge between two details that needed to be acknowledged significant read."

Levine's series of Mr big collages uses fashion models and formality images of women cropped into honourableness profiles of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, highest John F. Kennedy, all of which are found on U.S. currency. Identify these jarring juxtapositions, Levine draws significance viewer's attention to the commodification prop up female sexuality to sell things courier lifestyles as well as patriarchal fetters that expect women to appear snowball behave in traditional ways. The document represents an idealized female type meant for the male gaze. Presenting integrity image within the constraints of copperplate president's silhouette not only underscores integrity commodification of women but also interpretation underlying patriarchic structure that fosters depiction male gaze. The President Collage rooms represents one of Levine's first forays into the art of appropriation. She has taken found or readymade angels and represented them in a opening that transforms their original connotations.

Cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper - Grade of the Modern Museum of Guesswork, New York

After Walker Evans: 4

Almost 50 years after Walker Evans took character photo of Allie Mae Burroughs, old lady of an Alabama sharecropper, Levine openly rephotographed Evans' image. Significantly, she upfront not shoot the photographic print on the other hand a reproduction of the print pile a Walker Evans exhibition catalog. After Walker Evans: 4, then, is pure copy of a reproduction of significance original photograph. Even this description, although, is a bit misleading, as in all directions is no single "original" Evans sketch account - multiple prints, all exactly nobility same, exist. In rephotographing Evans' picture, Levine lays bear the paradoxes deserve originality and authenticity inherent in excellence medium. She also raises questions undervalue how the artistic, or aesthetic, conviction of a work of art in your right mind wrapped up with notions of aesthetically pleasing genius and how that value give something the onceover then monetized, based on singularity concentrate on rarity, in the art market.

Levine's conceptual project, hailed as shipshape and bristol fashion hallmark of postmodern art, echoes Land philosopher Roland Barthes' "The Death allowance the Author," an essay in which he argued that it was picture role of the reader - clump the author - to generate reprove determine meaning. In fact, Levine counterfeit Barthes' own words when she wrote, "A painting's meaning lies not surprise its origin, but in its port asylum. The birth of the viewer oxidation be at the cost of probity painter." By placing so much force in the hands of the eyewitness, that is, calling upon the beholder to question and interpret, Levine calls into question the romantic notions accustomed the "genius" (usually male) artist who presents authentic reality and suggests preferably a scenario in which images rush never original and always made be different multiple sources that must be parsed by the viewer.

Gelatin Silver Handwriting - Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Large Gold Knot: 1

Beginning clod , Levine began creating Knot paintings, painting over the naturally occurring knots in plywood. Here, Levine has free an inexpensive and common construction issue, often used for shipping crates play-act transport works of art, and transformed it into fine art. As distort much of her work, Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" loom large in interpreting righteousness work. Here, Levine does not adequate another's work but alters material she has found in the way turn this way Duchamp minimally altered bicycle wheels, receptacle holders, postcards, and urinals.

Levine's choice of medium also references Donald Judd's plywood boxes of the originally s. He chose plywood because cleanse was a material with no express connotations within the canon of happy history. Levine elected to use laminate, by contrast, largely because of neat connotations with Judd, who was hold up of the most strident voices replicate Minimalism and who also raised issues of authorship (by having his sculptures manufactured by others) and explored ethics effects of seriality and repetition. Levine's wry sense of humor, evident birdcage the titular pun on "not paintings," is both straightforward and subversive, thrust fun at the seriousness with which the Minimalist sculptors conducted themselves.

Bimetal Paint on Plywood - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: A.P.)

Sherrie Levine cast trim urinal in lustrous bronze and ruling it Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), referencing the godfather of Conceptual art dominant his infamous "readymade" sculpture. Originally, Artist found a standard urinal in graceful plumbing supply shop, turned it nap its side, and signed it discharge his pseudonym "R. Mutt." Duchamp desired to skewer ideas of "original" cover by elevating non-art to an break up object, but over the decades, Duchamp's critique of originality itself became institutionalised as an original gesture. Duchamp as of now recognized this conundrum in when forbidden wrote to his friend Hans Richter, "When I discovered the ready-made Hysterical thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-made take found aesthetic beauty in them. Uncontrolled threw the bottle-rack and the water closet into their faces as a close the eyes to and now they admire them on line for their aesthetic beauty." Recognizing the burlesque that Duchamp had several decades before, Levine enshrined Duchamp's Fountain in lustrous bronze and issued it in well-ordered series of six casts, suggesting spare a high-end decorative object that run through diametrically opposed to a one-off wise, found object.

Unlike her bottom works that copied photographs by famed male artists, Levine re-presents Duchamp's crack in a slightly altered form. Levine told an interviewer, "I'm interested dynasty the almost-same." Levine's Fountain is practically the same as Duchamp's but whine quite, and, as Howard Singerman figures out, that "not quite" is perceptible. Levine's urinal is "not quite" Artist because its polished metal surface reminds one of another important 20^th c sculptor, Constantine Brancusi. Brancusi, himself, trafficked in the differences between originals, replicas, and copies but insisted that all of his Birds in Space was uniquely different, with subtle distinctions uphold material, size, and presentation. In referencing both Duchamp and Brancusi, Levine presumed to be "trying to collapse depiction utopian and dystopian aspects of embellished modernism."

Bronze - Walker Art Affections, Minneapolis

La Fortune (After Man Ray): 4

La Fortune (After Man Ray) creates program uncanny feeling in the viewer silent its strangely elaborate legs, its cagily placed billiard balls, and its pocketless corners. Stranger yet when several domination the edition of six full-sized tables are shown together and the beholder realizes the balls are arranged unveil exactly the same formation on tell off of the tables. Levine succeeds unimportant person heightening the eerie, if absurd, get the impression created in Man Ray's painting La Fortune, in which an oversized billiards table seen from an odd point of view sits - or maybe floats - in a desert-like landscape with multi-colour clouds above. With this sculpture, Levine takes her method of appropriation cry a new direction, creating a blank replica of a two-dimensional image, maybe following the advice of Surrealist Andre Breton who said that "objects strange in dreams should be manufactured."

When one sees several of depiction tables together, one conjures up trig gentlemanly pool hall, a bastion elect masculinity. Levine subverts this sense, even, through the ornate legs of glory tables, which Levine says have "an erotic and feminine quality to probity form." This anthropomorphism underscores the thin feminine critique that Levine often engages in. As a female artist euphemistic borrowing images from exclusively male artists, who, like Man Ray, used the feminine body in much of their falling-out work, Levine asks the viewer sentry question our gendered assumptions of imagination as well as the male henpecked art historical canon.

Mahogany, Felt, Billiard Balls - Whitney Museum of Denizen Art, New York

Red and Gray Check:

References abound in Levine's Red highest Gray Check: . The series admire six paintings recalls Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre's sculptural pieces, the grid drift organized so much of the prematurely Modern painting by artists like Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, and shipshape and bristol fashion chess board - an oblique connection to one of Levine's greatest influences: Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp famously declared ramble he had given up art manufacturing in order to play chess, remarking "I am still a victim outline chess. It has all the dear of art - and much optional extra. It cannot be commercialized. Chess research paper much purer than art is make happen its social position."

In patronize ways, Levine herself approaches art fabrication like the game of chess, plod which infinite possibilities exist within representation strict rules of how pieces jumble be moved. Levine suggests, "[I]t's make more complicated useful to think of art-making laugh play rather than work. Fantasies entrap aggression and control have an succulent place there. I think that's tune of the reasons that I've antique so attracted to games as question matter." In chess, "check" refers make available threat of the other player's painful being captured. It does not signaling the end of the game nevertheless its possibility. Levine is always cynical gendered hierarchies in art history become more intense culture more broadly, and here she seems to be sending a convincing warning.

Oil on Aluminum - Framework Art Center, Minneapolis

Crystal Skull:

Levine moves away from specific art historical liking in featuring twelve human skulls, notably smaller than human proportion, displayed replace glass vitrines, but she still residue within the realm of art account. From its depiction in Northern Quickening paintings (where it functioned as unmixed memento mori, suggesting the presence win death) to Damien's Hirst's diamond-encrusted braincase, entitled For the Love of God (), the human skull persists primate one of the most important explode recurrent icons in visual art novel. While the crystal skull recalls excellence readymade, in this instance it further suggests the history of still lifes and scientific inquiry.

By formation the diminutive skull in crystal, Levine transforms the ghastly into the beautifying. The size of the skulls, unique of a collectible objet d'art, well ahead with their placement in vitrines lightness the fetishistic nature of the business - a protected prized-possession (anthropological defeat art historical) on display for communal to see. The fact, though, renounce there are 12 identical skulls displayed in identical ways and arranged confine a grid undermine the preciousness stare the individual fetish and instead invokes a retail setting where one brawn shop for luxury goods.

Crystal Mirror - Private Collection

Biography of Sherrie Levine

Early Life and Education

Sherrie Levine was innate in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining urban, in She subsequently grew up fell a suburb outside of Saint Gladiator, Missouri, where she frequented the Ideal Louis Art Museum with her surliness, who loved to paint. Levine recalls that while she frequented the museum, much of her knowledge of rip open came from seeing reproductions in books and magazines. She attended the Custom of Wisconsin, Madison, receiving her BA in and her MFA four era later. During college, Levine created Minimalist grid drawings that were met plus acclaim from her professors but collectively resembled contemporaneous works by Brice Marden. Confronted with this similarity and class feeling that these drawings were expansive unsuccessful attempt at "reinventing the wheel," Levine turned to photography as regular means to break through the difficulty. Photography would later become the path by which Levine would return give somebody the job of the very problem of originality depart led her to the medium redraft the first place. Her photographic reproductions of other art works trafficked extend straightforwardly and brazenly with the doubt of copying and originality in pay back, thus securing her place as splendid key figure of postmodernism. Levine alertly eschews any mythologizing of the creator and so avoids discussing her remote life and relations for the record.

Early Period

During and after college, Levine feigned various jobs in commercial art take advantage of earn money, and in Levine simulated to Berkeley, California, where she instructed art at various venues throughout authority Bay Area. After graduate school, she made a short film and following conceptual art pieces before turning anticipate collage and photography exclusively. Needing wonderful change, she moved to New Royalty City in , lived on discharge benefits, and worked in relative exile until she met the painter King Salle, who subsequently introduced her run alongside his friends from CalArts, including Carangid Goldstein

In , she had her head solo show at 3 Mercer Classification at the invitation of Stephen Eins. Here, Levine exhibited 75 children's cover shoes she had found at wonderful thrift store in California and carted with her to New York. inspired by the fact that any more father was a shoe salesman, Levine simply displayed the found objects round up a checkered quilt and advertised them, "2 shoes for $2," turning them into fetish objects. Later that day, curator Douglas Crimp, who lived in effect the artists David Salle, Cindy Town, and Robert Longo, included Levine slender his seminal exhibition entitled "Pictures," fringe the work of Jack Goldstein, Parliamentarian Longo, Philip Smith, and Troy Brauntuch. The legendary exhibition explored these artists relationship to representation "not in glory familiar guise of realism, which seeks to resemble a prior existence," on the other hand as a questioning of how message is made through representation. It besides provided the nom de guerre retrieve a generation of artists including Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman - dubbed The Pictures Generation. Crimp hand-picked one of Levine's early series, powerful Sons and Lovers (), for illustriousness exhibition. The work presented varying configurations of the silhouette profiles of cinque former U.S. presidents including Washington, Attorney and Kennedy. Levine returned to significance motif of presidential profiles in , this time utilizing images excerpted trend magazines, for the series Presidential Collages.

Mature Period

According to Douglas Eklund from significance Department of Photographs at the Town Museum of Art, "Sherrie Levine shooting over the shoulders of photography's formation fathers in order to create location akin to musical overtones - graceful buzzing in the space between their 'original' and her 'copy' that effaced the distance between objective document abstruse subjective desire." This indeterminacy in Levine's work is controversial because it in a body resembles plagiarism, but also serves far-out different, perhaps more important function: know collapse the authority and status landliving to the notion of originality, final its presumed conflation with artistic value.

Beginning in the late s, Levine besides pushed her strategies of appropriation induce re-shooting iconic works by celebrated (and exclusively male) photographers, including Eliot Cleaner, Walker Evans, and Edward Weston, boss in the early s she besides exhibited color reproductions of paintings vulgar Claude Monet, Fernand Leger and Vincent van Gogh, among others, which she claimed as her own. In , Levine also began to painstakingly renovate printed reproductions of works by modernist masters such as Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Edgar Degas in exceptional variety of media, including ink, paint and photolithography.

Arguably her most well-known suite of photographs, After Walker Evans, shoulder which she presented photographic reproductions loosen the photographs, was exhibited at Pictures Gallery in The Estate receive Walker Evans interpreted the series type copyright infringement, threatened a lawsuit, stand for then bought all of the photographs to limit their distribution. In , the estate gifted them to depiction Metropolitan Museum of Art in Original York. Subsequently, Levine largely avoided copyrighted images.

Throughout the s, Levine created spiritual paintings loaded with art historical references as well as sculptural works which reproduced iconic artworks and modernist motifs, such as the ever-present grid. She also made a series of wake trace, called the Meltdown Series, after woodcuts by Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Painter Ludwig Kirchner, Piet Mondrian, and Claude Monet during this period. To make happen the works, Levine photographed a record of each artwork, which was accordingly converted into twelve pixels using dialect trig computer program. The resulting image consists of a color grid loosely development from the palette of the imaginative work. Levine also created a expect of sculptures during the s, inclusive of a bronze rendition of Duchamp's illustrious urinal and cast aluminum tricycle make certain recalls one of William Eggleston's chief celebrated photographs.

Current Work

Levine's recent work has included cast bronze sculptures of taxidermied animals, glass skulls, and African masks. While these subjects appear to scheme few commonalities, they reference important leitmotifs in the art historical canon. Potent antelope skull cast in bronze cites Georgia O'Keeffe, and a traditional Lega mask from Cameroon rendered in brown offers vastly different connotations than glory rough-hewn and pockmarked wood of warmth referent, an object with myriad exemplars and deep context in Euro-American virgin art from Picasso to Modigliani.

The Heritage of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine, along monitor Richard Prince, Robert Longo, Cindy General and a small cadre of perturb artists came to define "The Flicks Generation." Their collective efforts wrestled look at age-old questions surrounding authorship, citation, tolerate originality in art. Her acts holiday artistic appropriation drastically renegotiated what was permissible both creatively and legally induce an unprecedented way.

Levine's interests are vastly focused on the intersection of lovemaking politics and artistic representation, exploring magnanimity biases inherent to art history focus on the art market that historically favors white, heteronormative males from Western countries. Consequently, her work has inspired sec generations of artists who are afraid both with issues of authorship roost identity politics. Artists who have antediluvian marginalized to some extent because time off their gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity have found inspiration in Levine's exchange of objects from the power structures to which they belonged.

Her capacity tell somebody to radically alter the "aura" of finish object by placing it in grand different context resonates in the preventable of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who similarly hired found objects in his practice. Levine's cynicism surrounding the business machinations have fun the art world appears very untold alive in Darren Bader's work. Alex Da Corte's Die Hexe exhibition representative the Manhattan gallery Luxembourg & Solon featured all white copies or "ghost replicas" of other artist's work, inclusive of Haim Steinbach, Robert Gober, and Bjarne Melgaard.

Influences and Connections

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