Seeing Sherrie Levine*

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, 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.

Why did I turn from the image? Why couldn’t I look at it comfortably, 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.

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.

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 qualifications 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 continuously 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 Duchamp’s words, “brings the work in contact with the external world.”

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.

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 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 Silverman 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 formulation, 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.”

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.

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 manifold 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 incarnated 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.

If the detached eye that detaches in its image is the leitmotif of Lincoln Kirstein’s Walker Evans, and if independence and uniqueness—the standard mythology of the male artist—are the themes of Evans’s Aperture 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 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 glowing 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 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 photography between Levitt’s “fluid,” “volatile” work and the “monumentally 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 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.

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. Otherness 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 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 exchangeable.”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 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 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 “activate 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 formulation 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, speculate 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 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

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 analyst 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.

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 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.

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, imagistic. … 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.

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 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 Willemen 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 parties 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.

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.”

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.¹²⁴

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 sacrificed 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 *

Notes