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拍品专文
From her 1980s photographs that examined the strategies and codes of representation, to her multidisciplinary practice of the present day, Sherrie Levine has transfigured the nature of contemporary art like few others, with a practice simultaneously unprecedented and in close dialogue with cultural history. For Levine, imitation is a sincere form of artistic creation and the Lega Mask shows her proficiency for appropriation in full flourish. The Lega Mask stands on the fault lines between ethnological investigation and art object; it summons up the specter of such Modernist masterpieces as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 (Museum of Modern Art), which drew explicitly upon the African art. Whilst Picasso and his contemporaries weaved African influences into them into Western painting, however, Levine replicates the mask’s form entirely. Here, Central African aesthetics are freed from artistic distortion, and yet paradoxically, they are done so by a simulacrum.
The Lega Mask is named for the Lega peoples, resident in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. The Lega’s Bwami doctrine, which governs both individual development and group relationships, involves a panoply of wooden and ivory masks which are used in ritual plays and dances. Representing the spirits of ancestors, ethical authority and one’s position in society, they are passed down through the generations. As Bwami teachings see outward beauty as a sign of morality, the masks are often carved to an exquisite smoothness. They are also often marked with elaborate patterning: a contrast to the elemental asperity of Levine’s chosen model. The mouth and eyes are demarcated by three almost identically-sized apertures, while the protruding nose hints at a similar form and direction. The burnished bronze gives the appearance of antiquity, glowing as if through centuries of ritual use. It balances the radiance of bronze with a stately propriety. “I am interested,” Levine has stated, “in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the work doesn’t 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).
Along with Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Robert Longo, Levine emerged as part of a group of American artists known as the Pictures Generation, whose work unified the paths of Pop Art and Conceptualism into an exploration of mass media, stereotypes and familiar images. In 1981, Levine rose to fame with her series After Walker Evans, in which she ‘rephotographed’ images from a catalogue of the seminal mid-century documentary photographer and presented them as new artworks. While the appropriation of previously-existing objects has a long history in Modern art, from Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, Levine’s decision to make the appropriation itself the kernel of her practice represented a completely new approach. It marked the purest manifestation in art of Roland Barthes’ literary essay “The Death of the Author,” whereby the provenance of a creative work is extraneous to its power to communicate. Levine’s works use this idea to question the importance of authorship and authenticity. “Levine,” says Singerman, “is a connoisseur of the relation between the object and its substitute: its mirrors, its copies or representations” (H. Singerman, Art History after Sherrie Levine, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012, p. 2).
Since her early ‘rephotographs,’ Levine has expanded her practice to include examinations of painting and sculpture. These are largely drawn from the Modernist period, which enshrined the idea of the artist as an original, heroic genius, and remove the object from this loaded context. She has turned Henri Matisse’s cut-outs into watercolors, created glass sculptures from the mechanical forms in Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-23) and crafted three-dimensional installations from the billiard table in Man Ray’s surrealist painting La Fortune (1938). “A mask,” says Haymer, “is an instrument of deception, of mysteriousness. In focusing on African art and its ambivalent history of simultaneous exploration and innovation, Levine also addresses the discourse of Post-Colonialism” (K. Haymer, “Essay,” in African Masks After Walker Evans, exh. cat. Jablonka Galerie/Simon Lee Gallery/David Zwirner Gallery, Germany, 2016, p. xii). From Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), ideas of masking and camouflage have key to post-colonial thought. The Lega Mask acknowledges this in its very form. It is a gnomic commentary on the history of art, appropriation and post-colonial thought: a complex nexus of ideas embedded, in an object of surpassing beauty.
The Lega Mask is named for the Lega peoples, resident in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. The Lega’s Bwami doctrine, which governs both individual development and group relationships, involves a panoply of wooden and ivory masks which are used in ritual plays and dances. Representing the spirits of ancestors, ethical authority and one’s position in society, they are passed down through the generations. As Bwami teachings see outward beauty as a sign of morality, the masks are often carved to an exquisite smoothness. They are also often marked with elaborate patterning: a contrast to the elemental asperity of Levine’s chosen model. The mouth and eyes are demarcated by three almost identically-sized apertures, while the protruding nose hints at a similar form and direction. The burnished bronze gives the appearance of antiquity, glowing as if through centuries of ritual use. It balances the radiance of bronze with a stately propriety. “I am interested,” Levine has stated, “in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the work doesn’t 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).
Along with Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince and Robert Longo, Levine emerged as part of a group of American artists known as the Pictures Generation, whose work unified the paths of Pop Art and Conceptualism into an exploration of mass media, stereotypes and familiar images. In 1981, Levine rose to fame with her series After Walker Evans, in which she ‘rephotographed’ images from a catalogue of the seminal mid-century documentary photographer and presented them as new artworks. While the appropriation of previously-existing objects has a long history in Modern art, from Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades to Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, Levine’s decision to make the appropriation itself the kernel of her practice represented a completely new approach. It marked the purest manifestation in art of Roland Barthes’ literary essay “The Death of the Author,” whereby the provenance of a creative work is extraneous to its power to communicate. Levine’s works use this idea to question the importance of authorship and authenticity. “Levine,” says Singerman, “is a connoisseur of the relation between the object and its substitute: its mirrors, its copies or representations” (H. Singerman, Art History after Sherrie Levine, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2012, p. 2).
Since her early ‘rephotographs,’ Levine has expanded her practice to include examinations of painting and sculpture. These are largely drawn from the Modernist period, which enshrined the idea of the artist as an original, heroic genius, and remove the object from this loaded context. She has turned Henri Matisse’s cut-outs into watercolors, created glass sculptures from the mechanical forms in Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915-23) and crafted three-dimensional installations from the billiard table in Man Ray’s surrealist painting La Fortune (1938). “A mask,” says Haymer, “is an instrument of deception, of mysteriousness. In focusing on African art and its ambivalent history of simultaneous exploration and innovation, Levine also addresses the discourse of Post-Colonialism” (K. Haymer, “Essay,” in African Masks After Walker Evans, exh. cat. Jablonka Galerie/Simon Lee Gallery/David Zwirner Gallery, Germany, 2016, p. xii). From Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) to Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), ideas of masking and camouflage have key to post-colonial thought. The Lega Mask acknowledges this in its very form. It is a gnomic commentary on the history of art, appropriation and post-colonial thought: a complex nexus of ideas embedded, in an object of surpassing beauty.