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 October, 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 “Pictures,” 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, 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 Postmodernism” 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 October’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: Capitalism 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 publications, 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: 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, Germany. It is included here with the permission of the author.
Michel Assenmaker’s essay is also drawn from the Museum Morsbroich 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: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn 2004), a special issue entitled “Polemical Objects” and edited by Philip Armstrong, Stephen Melville, and Erika Naginski. RES is published by the President and Fellows of Harvard 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.