Sherrie Levine, After Wassily Kandinsky, 1983. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 14 × 11 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
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 American 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 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.
Sherrie Levine, After Wassily Kandinsky, 1983. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 14 × 11 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
Sherrie Levine, After Egon Schiele 1, 1985. Graphite on paper, 14 × 11 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.
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 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 impenetrability 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 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)