After Van Gogh 1-7

"But should a sensation from a bygone year--like those recording instruments which preserve the sound and the manner of the various artists who have sung or played into them--enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular ring with which it then sounded in our ears, we feel once, though the name itself has apparently not changed, the distance that separates the dreams which at different times its same syllables have managed to us" Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, 1982, p. 5).


"Instead of taking photographs of trees or nudes, I take photographs of photographs. I choose pictures that manifest the desire that nature and culture provide us with a sense of order and meaning. I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of aloofness. I hope that in my photographs of photographs an uneasy peace will be made between my attraction to the ideals these pictures exemplify and my desire to have no ideals or fetters whatsoever. It is my aspiration that my photographs which contain their own contradiction would represent the best of both worlds" (Sherrie Levine as quoted in "Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary art, Artforum, September 1982, pp. 52-53).