Khmer Torso

Executed in 2009, Khmer Torso encapsulates Sherrie Levine’s shrewd selection of sculpture for appropriation, in a continued and celebrated public canon that celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year. Cast from bronze by a dedicated workshop of skilled specialists, Khmer Torso is a replica of a fragmented Buddhist, carved stone statue from twelfth-century Cambodia. Complementing Levine’s other selected biological and historical relics (such as horns from New Mexico and masks from Tanzania), Khmer Torso explores the fetishistic preservation of such sources, presented almost as dusty museum artefacts for examination, investigation and interpretation. Like her transformational appropriation of Duchamp’s Fountain (1991), in which the artist alchemised Duchamp’s porcelain urinal into a shiny, luxurious bronze, here Levine metamorphoses a beaten, crumbling stone figure of antiquity into a glowing, gilded cast, revitalising it with new life. For Levine, a successful appropriation will have its own character, its own personality. ‘I am interested’, Levine proposed in 1993, ‘in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the new work doesn’t really exist unless the new work has an artistic presence of its own. Otherwise, it just becomes a copy, which is not that interesting’ (S. Levine in Journal of Contemporary Art, Vol. 6, 1993, p. 62). Especially true of her recent work, this claim supports Levine’s removal of chosen artefacts from their art-historical sources, before reprocessing each object so that they radiate with a dazzling, uncanny energy, whilst faithfully preserving their solemn, antique dignity.

Forty years ago, in 1977, Sherrie Levine exhibited her photographic appropriations alongside other artists of the so-called ‘Pictures Generation’. Together with Robert Longo, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, and Philip Smith, Levine exhibited these images (in her instance, re-photographs of pictures by modernist photographers) at Artists Space in New York. Continuing this exploration through the succeeding decades, Levine has tackled complex issues concerning ownership and copyright infringement, gender politics and the fetishisation of the art-object. With Khmer Torso, Levine takes an artefact that, whilst having its origins in a socio-historical past, is not patented in its design. Whilst the antique statue may be distributed publicly – at auction, for example – it historicism propels its debatable negation of public or private ownership. Concurrently, Levine subverts the patriarchal masculinity of the statue by claiming authorship of it as her own, whilst fetishizing the relic by casting it in an opulent coat of bronze. Rather than channelling Barthian notions of authorial cessation, Levine progressively succeeds in conjuring something spectacularly new out of something austerely old.