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拍品专文
Sherrie Levine rose to prominence in the 1980’s as a leading member of the Pictures Generation, a loosely associated group of New York artists who used strategies of appropriation to re-contextualize and subtly critique late-Capitalist culture. In essence, artists such as Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince had borrowed Marcel Duchamp’s ever radical concept of the readymade and combined it with the coldest and most cynical aspects of Pop Art, creating a scathing, coded visual language not unlike collage. The strongest work by the Pictures Generation artists perform a beguilingly simple aesthetic sleight of hand, taking one thing and, with sometimes only the smallest intervention, turning it into something critical of itself. Where Kruger turned her eye on the contemporary politics of consumerism and greed, and Prince trained his on the cowboy, the quintessential American icon of rugged masculinity, Levine made a target of something even more sacred, at least to artists: the canon of Art History itself. Levine’s breakout series consisted of photographs of the work of Walker Evans, the American photographer who famously documented the Grapes of Wrath style poverty during the Great Depression. Importantly, Levine was not only photographing photographs, she was photographing some of the most famous photographs of the Twentieth Century, images that were not only iconic but ubiquitous. By doing so, she invited her audience to consider the images unmoored by their original context as emblems of American grit and determination. We begin to ask ourselves important questions, Who made this image? What does it signify, beyond what it shows?
After Walker Evans, Levine cast a wider net, ensnaring some of the masters of European Modernism. She began making diminutive watercolor copies of paintings by the likes of Max Beckmann and Joan Miró, reproducing but also reducing the proofs of their genius. It seemed as though Levine could be chipping away at the foundation of the myth of the heroic male artist, but any connotation of bitterness or resentment was completely repressed. These were earnest works, copied to the best of the artist’s ability and without obvious critical augmentation, such as Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa. Any worthwhile analysis of Levine can only be intelligently inferred at best, because her aesthetic is so illusory, witty and provocative. Considered collectively, Levine’s sculptures in polished bronze are her grandest and most direct assault on the complex mechanics of art as it relates to society. In 1991, Levine produced what could be called the ultimate readymade, a glittering facsimile of Duchamp’s Fountain. By transforming the notorious reclining urinal into a golden icon of itself, Levine calls into question its legacy as an invitation to iconoclasm. If Art History is an arms race, Duchamp’s sculpture was a bombshell that has since been deactivated and assimilated into visual culture. Levine turns it into a gaudy tombstone for its own grave.
False God, 2007, is a haunting vanitas icon for the twenty-first century. Rendered in bronze polished to resemble gold, the work depicts the skeleton of an abomination: a two-headed calf. This explicit reference to the golden calf of the Bible, a false idol worshipped by the Israelites, is complicated in two crucial ways. Firstly, Levine has chosen to strip the calf of its flesh, negating the innocence and vitality that a calf would otherwise represent, and replacing these qualities with the fearful connotations of death. Secondly, the calf has been made hideously deformed, its two skulls sprouting from a single neck. This deformity can elicit different emotional responses in the viewer, ranging from empathy to disgust. The two-headed calf is both a tragic and abject symbol, a potent metaphor for the seemingly random, cosmic cruelty that life entails. It is also possibly a foreboding symbol of duplicity and greed; a barb “aimed at the art market,” as Roberta Smith suggests in her New York Times review of Levine’s 2011 survey, Mayhem, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (R. Smith, “Flattery (Sincere?) Lightly Dusted With Irony,” The New York Times, 10 November 2011).
After Walker Evans, Levine cast a wider net, ensnaring some of the masters of European Modernism. She began making diminutive watercolor copies of paintings by the likes of Max Beckmann and Joan Miró, reproducing but also reducing the proofs of their genius. It seemed as though Levine could be chipping away at the foundation of the myth of the heroic male artist, but any connotation of bitterness or resentment was completely repressed. These were earnest works, copied to the best of the artist’s ability and without obvious critical augmentation, such as Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa. Any worthwhile analysis of Levine can only be intelligently inferred at best, because her aesthetic is so illusory, witty and provocative. Considered collectively, Levine’s sculptures in polished bronze are her grandest and most direct assault on the complex mechanics of art as it relates to society. In 1991, Levine produced what could be called the ultimate readymade, a glittering facsimile of Duchamp’s Fountain. By transforming the notorious reclining urinal into a golden icon of itself, Levine calls into question its legacy as an invitation to iconoclasm. If Art History is an arms race, Duchamp’s sculpture was a bombshell that has since been deactivated and assimilated into visual culture. Levine turns it into a gaudy tombstone for its own grave.
False God, 2007, is a haunting vanitas icon for the twenty-first century. Rendered in bronze polished to resemble gold, the work depicts the skeleton of an abomination: a two-headed calf. This explicit reference to the golden calf of the Bible, a false idol worshipped by the Israelites, is complicated in two crucial ways. Firstly, Levine has chosen to strip the calf of its flesh, negating the innocence and vitality that a calf would otherwise represent, and replacing these qualities with the fearful connotations of death. Secondly, the calf has been made hideously deformed, its two skulls sprouting from a single neck. This deformity can elicit different emotional responses in the viewer, ranging from empathy to disgust. The two-headed calf is both a tragic and abject symbol, a potent metaphor for the seemingly random, cosmic cruelty that life entails. It is also possibly a foreboding symbol of duplicity and greed; a barb “aimed at the art market,” as Roberta Smith suggests in her New York Times review of Levine’s 2011 survey, Mayhem, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (R. Smith, “Flattery (Sincere?) Lightly Dusted With Irony,” The New York Times, 10 November 2011).