Last Laugh

David Joselit

I think this work is very funny. I’m always surprised when people apologize to me for thinking it’s funny. I want the work to be funny, but that doesn’t mean I’m not serious.

—Sherrie Levine, 1985¹

Mayhem

“Like a burlesque comedian,” Sherrie Levine stated in 2001, “I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement: Would you hit a woman with a child?—No, I’d hit her with a brick.”² The movement that carries this joke—the movement that rightly qualifies as “burlesque”—results from a modest change of a modest preposition. The word with shifts from modifying one noun, “a child,” to modifying another, “a brick,” and by doing so changes its connotation dramatically—from solicitous admonition (You wouldn’t hit a woman accompanied by a child, would you?) to aggressive bravado (No, I’d use a brick to bludgeon her!).³ Like the unconscious in overdrive, a simple word moves from innocent to aggressive, wheeling through countless positions in between. The resulting vertigo is what we call humor. It’s Sherrie Levine’s brand of mayhem.

Despite the prevailing critical attitude that Levine (along with others associated with the strategy of “appropriation”) is devoted to stealing pictures, theft requires a permanent and complete transfer of property inconsistent with the actual promiscuity of images. Indeed, as Levine shrewdly pointed out in 1985, it isn’t even clear that images can be property:

Originality was always something I was thinking about, but there’s also the idea of ownership and property. … It’s not that I’m trying to deny that people own things. That isn’t even the point. The point is that people want to own things, which is more interesting to me. What does it mean to own something, and, stranger still, what does it mean to own an image?⁴

What does it mean to own an image? In fact, it can’t be done (as I think Levine’s quizzical remarks imply). Owning an image is as impossible as owning the preposition with. The movement of images may be slowed down—even to a glacial pace that simulates stasis—but within our ubiquitous and user-friendly economies of mechanical and digital reproduction, images simply cannot be arrested. Copyright protection, prohibitions against photography or file sharing, litigious feints of every kind may impede, but will never stop, reproduction. And if an image cannot be wholly reduced to property, how can it be stolen?

The real question, as Levine has always clearly indicated both in her work and in her statements, is: How do images function as prepositions? Or, in other words, how do they produce meaning through “that [burlesque] precision which creates movement”? Levine feels free to transform images produced by others because she recognizes that content—what an image contains—is not identical to its meaning but rather a subset of it. On the contrary, meaning arises between, among, and after images. In short, images behave prepositionally—they modify one another and themselves (both in the sense of their former manifestations and their “identical” copies). It is in modification, for instance, that Levine’s famous titular preposition makes sense: After Claude Monet, or After Edward Weston, or After Piet Mondrian. What she says of her own oeuvre might well be applied to image economies tout court: “I orchestrate each series so that each series re-informs everything that came before.”⁵ Significance lies not in information but in re-information. Or, put differently, images function as qualifiers rather than nouns.

Before proposing a genealogy of Levine’s array of prepositional strategies, I need to make one further observation. In order for there to be movement, as in the precise dislocations of burlesque, there must be a space within which movement may take place. This is what Harold Rosenberg famously called “an arena in which to act,”⁶ with regard to Abstract Expressionist painting, and what Levine calls the “gap” between pictures. In 1985 she defined this gap as follows:

I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they’re both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work’s about for me—that space in the middle where there’s no picture.⁷

I will come back to the issue of putting “a picture on top of a picture,” but first, I wish to consider the phrase “that space in the middle where there’s no picture.” In a later interview, Levine defined this space as a gap: “I think a lot of people seem to get lost in the gap and think that there’s no picture there, when in fact there are two pictures there.”⁸ This gap that opens up between pictures and is alternately no picture and many pictures is Levine’s “arena in which to act.” Much more important than her use of readymade content (which, after all, has been a widespread practice throughout the twentieth century) is her evocation of a space of modification, a prepositional space in which images, rather than posing as singular (as property), display their plural nature (their properties) as dynamic entities.

Three Routines

Burlesque is a physical form of comedy characterized by sight gags, puns, and implied or actual violence. Levine’s image choreography has a similar acrobatic repertory. Three types of routines organize her work, each with its own set of assumptions about the space, placement, and movement of images.

1. Palimpsest. The palimpsest, a laminate of layered images, is Levine’s most famous routine.⁹ Early on, in cutouts where the profiles of American presidents served as frames or templates through which to view fashion models culled from women’s magazines, one image was seen through another (the absence of one marking the presence of the other). But with her discovery of rephotography, and in her drawings or watercolors after bookplate illustrations, it was no longer evident which image one looked at and which image one saw through, since the palimpsest had become virtual, and its expansions and contractions occurred around a single picture. As Douglas Crimp movingly wrote of a work from Levine’s After Edward Weston series (1979) that represents Weston’s nubile son in a nude classicizing pose, for certain intimate guests who might see the picture hanging in the critic’s bedroom, it connoted illicit homoeroticism, while for an art historian, its palimpsestic allusions could lead all the way back to Greek antiquity.¹⁰ Crimp’s recognition of the photograph’s eroticism is already implicit in Levine’s suggestive language: “I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they’re both manifest.” Sometimes it’s hard to determine which is the “top” and which is the “bottom.”

This layering routine is multivalent and complex, and it has many moods, some of which are related to identical copies and others not. As I’ve already argued, jokes can be seen as a kind of palimpsest where one meaning contradicts the other, and love, too, is a palimpsest where images, on the contrary, harmonize. Levine has frequently worked with dichotomous palimpsests, such as her pairs of images like the dual dwarves of Avant-Garde and Kitsch or Repetition and Difference (both 2002), phrases drawn from famous critical arguments (those of Clement Greenberg and Gilles Deleuze, respectively) that have greatly influenced art theory. But even her abstract paintings display the logic of the palimpsest. As Levine remarked in 1987:

That’s what I think is so amusing about the stripe paintings, that ostensibly they are non-referential, but on the other hand they have all these references. The idea was to make an abstract painting, a non-objective painting, that in fact had lots of references.¹¹

Sherrie Levine, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, 2002. Cast crystal, 7 × 2 × 1¾ inches, and cast bronze, 7½ × 2½ × 2 inches. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

2. Projection. Many accounts of modernist or Minimalist seriality emphasize the philosophical ramifications of repeating identical units. But in Levine’s practice of seriality, as in Postcard Collage #4, 1–24 (2000), for instance, which includes twenty-four of “the same” romantic postcard of a seascape, each framed individually and installed in an array, repetition produces a subtle experience of difference. If you slowly move from postcard to postcard and really look, something marvelous happens: Each picture is both the same as and different from the others. Within their population, the postcards function as both figure and ground, since revisiting the “same” image is never the same experience, and it occurs against the “ground” of every other occasion of looking. These sets of identical postcards function almost diagnostically as a tool for tracking a viewer’s thoughts and emotions. An attentive spectator—she who patiently looks at all twenty-four postcards rather than “grasping” a meaning right away (“Oh, it’s all about mechanical reproduction!”)—is paradoxically pulled in two directions at once: drawn in and pushed out of the individual postcard (in order to see the next and to gauge whether anything has changed). The viewer is thus confronted with two distinct, and even contradictory, perspectives: the image as an immersive virtual world, and the image as an array of reiterations, which forms a network. In this sense, Levine’s choice of a postcard—an image that is meant to circulate in order to convey a distant scene—is far from arbitrary.¹²

Sherrie Levine, detail of Postcard Collage #4, 1–24, 2000. Postcards and mat board, set of 24, 16 × 20 inches each. © Sherrie Levine. Courtesy the artist.

In routines like the postcard collages, the gap between pictures, which was virtual in Levine’s palimpsestic laminates, is externalized: It is the physical space between framed copies on the wall. But since each of the cards has the same content, the work causes its viewers to discount the repetitive motif per se in favor of noticing their own prepositional movement from picture to picture. I call this effect projection, because, like the widespread practice of video or film projection with which the postcard collages are contemporaneous, Levine’s ganged postcards—what she has sometimes called “posses”—transform, or project, flat pictures into an immersive space.

3. Meltdown. If Levine’s palimpsests create a virtual gap—a historical prepositional space of pictorial movement—by placing one picture on top of another, her projections literalize this space by placing one picture beside another for the viewer to move between and among. These routines are sight gags of the highest order, in which one situational connotation modifies another in time and/or in space. But a meltdown is something else altogether. Whether nuclear or emotional, a meltdown collapses boundaries and releases energy; it’s a physical form of humor that is usually as tragic as it is funny. The first Levine Meltdown was a 1989 series of woodblock prints made with Maurice Sanchez. Levine and Sanchez took four images, each derived from a digital reproduction of a painting by Marcel Duchamp, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Piet Mondrian, or Claude Monet, and pixelated them to form a grid four squares high and three across. Fission in these works was joined with fusion: The color of each square pixel (resulting from digital fission) was derived from the “average” of color within that segment of the “original” reproduction (i.e., digital fusion). Given the scale of the grids, the original motifs of the paintings were entirely lost in abstract blocks of color. More recently, in Levine’s Blue and Gray Monochromes After Stieglitz (2010), fusion is all there is: The monochromes are derived from the averaged surfaces of Alfred Stieglitz’s series of cloud pictures, the Equivalents.¹³ It is vertiginous to see something so beautiful suffused with such implied violence: Malevich meets meltdown in Levine’s reinvigoration of monochrome painting. Here the “gap” Levine had opened between pictures—through palimpsests and projections—is fused into a nuanced surface whose ostensible dryness is paradoxically sensual, manifested in the pigment’s absorption into a rich mahogany ground.

“I’d like the viewer to skid across the surface of my work,” Levine has said,¹⁴ employing a verb that implies a tragicomic form of movement—one that echoes the treachery of “skating on thin ice” as well as the burlesque shtick of slipping on a banana peel. Levine’s routines have always been emotionally charged despite their expert timing. She is one of the first and best to understand what it is to live in a world saturated with images—not to take up toy swords and tilt at The Spectacle (as though image worlds could ever be monolithic), but to experiment in how to be human when images speak louder than words. She is our Mallarmé in the age of Google.

Notes

1. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Jeanne Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” Arts Magazine 59, no. 10 (Summer 1985): 144.

2. Sherrie Levine, artist’s statement, 2001.

3. It may be more than coincidence that in the late 1960s Levine did a series in which the cartoon character Ignatz hits Krazy Kat with a brickbat.

4. Levine, quoted in Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” 143.

5. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Constance Lewallen, “Sherrie Levine,” Journal of Contemporary Art 6, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 71.

6. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” (1952), reprinted in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 569.

7. Levine, quoted in Siegel, “After Sherrie Levine,” 141.

8. Ibid., 144.

9. Is it fanciful to suggest in this regard that this is one of the reasons Levine was drawn to plywood—the industrial laminate par excellence—as a ground for her “Knot” paintings?

10. See Douglas Crimp, “The Boys in My Bedroom” (1990), reprinted in Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 156.

11. Sherrie Levine, quoted in Paul Taylor, “Sherrie Levine Plays with Paul Taylor,” Flash Art 135 (Summer 1987): 58.

12. For a related discussion of painting and networks, see my “Painting Beside Itself,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 125–134.

13. In 2010, these works were exhibited alongside Levine’s Equivalents: After Stieglitz (2006), the digital pixelations she made from Stieglitz’s Equivalents series, at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, November 6–December 15.

14. Sherrie Levine, artist’s statement, 1994.