Sherrie Levine

Summary of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine's methods of appropriating and citing the works of important 20^th century male artists established her as a consequential artist of postmodernism, ushered in during the late 1970s. Levine critiques the core tenets of Modernism, calling into question the role of the romantic, artist-genius. Along with artists such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, she questions how images are culturally constructed and the effects of their dissemination in a media-saturated age. Levine's work introduces perceptual questions about what exactly one is looking at and asks viewers to consider the reasons why we inherently trust and often fetishize values in art such as authenticity and originality. While Levine sees her work as more of a collaboration with previous artists, in copying and replicating the work of male artists Levine also levels a feminist critique against the ingrained patriarchy of art history and society at large.

Accomplishments

• Levine's work, in which she creates almost indistinguishable copies of others' work, emphasizes that authorship is defined by use rather than individual creation and that nothing is inherently or singularly unique. In this way, she echoes the ideas of French theorists such as Roland Barthes who declared the "death of the author" and whose texts became seminal for postmodern theory.
• Levine's use of appropriation - the deliberate borrowing and copying, with little or no alteration, of others' images - has a long history in the 20^th century, going back to Pablo Picasso's cubist collages. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Robert Rauschenberg appropriated images and objects to incorporate into their work, but Levine and others of her generation took appropriation to a new level, to the point of infringing on intellectual property rights and arguably - plagiarism.
• Levine's copies and near-copies demand that we consider the relation between repetition and difference and how we look at pieces of art. Levine engages in a deep questioning of how images can be simultaneously familiar yet unfamiliar, original yet facsimiles, recognizable yet ambiguous, present yet absent. Ultimately, her work asks many questions but supplies few definitive answers.
• Levine has said that her work is self-consciously about fetishism. The fetish object is an ordinary object onto which we project our desires, and in turn, the object comes to have a power over us. In psychoanalytic terms, this object stands in for something else and has sexual implications. In Marxist terms, the commodity becomes a fetish when symbolic value is assigned a monetary value, and the commodity is seen as "a magical source of wealth and value," according to historian William Paetz. Levine engages both discourses by making work that is based on the perceived aura of a work of art and the viewer's own desires.

Biography of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine was born in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town, in 1947. She subsequently grew up in a suburb outside of Saint Louis, Missouri, where she frequented the Saint Louis Art Museum with her mother, who loved to paint. Levine recalls that while she frequented the museum, much of her knowledge of art came from seeing reproductions in books and magazines. She attended the University of Wisconsin, Madison, receiving her BA in 1969 and her MFA four years later. During college, Levine created Minimalist grid drawings that were met with acclaim from her professors but closely resembled contemporaneous works by Brice Marden. Confronted with this similarity and the feeling that these drawings were an unsuccessful attempt at "reinventing the wheel," Levine turned to photography as a means to break through the impasse. Photography would later become the means by which Levine would return to the very problem of originality that led her to the medium in the first place. Her photographic reproductions of other art works trafficked more straightforwardly and brazenly with the question of copying and originality in art, thus securing her place as a key figure of postmodernism. Levine actively eschews any mythologizing of the artist and so avoids discussing her personal life and relations for the record.

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