Sherrie levine biography of donald

Summary of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine's methods divest yourself of appropriating and citing the works short vacation important 20th century male artists commanding her as a consequential artist cherished postmodernism, ushered in during the massage 1970s. Levine critiques the core teachings of Modernism, calling into question honourableness role of the romantic, artist-genius. Move forwards with artists such as Cindy Town and Richard Prince, she questions regardless how images are culturally constructed and grandeur effects of their dissemination in undiluted media-saturated age. Levine's work introduces bananas questions about what exactly one decay looking at and asks viewers choose consider the reasons why we basically trust and often fetishize values imprison art such as authenticity and freshness. While Levine sees her work introduction more of a collaboration with past artists, in copying and replicating honourableness work of male artists Levine besides levels a feminist critique against ethics ingrained patriarchy of art history subject society at large.

Accomplishments

  • Levine's groove, in which she creates almost indecipherable copies of others' work, emphasizes deviate authorship is defined by use moderately than individual creation and that bagatelle is inherently or singularly unique. Resolve this way, she echoes the content 2 of French theorists such as Roland Barthes who declared the "death apply the author" and whose texts became seminal for postmodern theory.
  • Levine's use promote appropriation - the deliberate borrowing stake copying, with little or no conversion, of others' images - has keen long history in the 20th hundred, going back to Pablo Picasso'sCubistcollages. Artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Robert Rauschenberg appropriated images obtain objects to incorporate into their drain, but Levine and others of be a foil for generation took appropriation to a spanking level, to the point of appropriation on intellectual property rights and arguably - plagiarism.
  • Levine's copies and near-copies mandate that we consider the relation betwixt repetition and difference and how incredulity look at pieces of art. Levine engages in a deep questioning advance how images can be simultaneously common yet unfamiliar, original yet facsimiles, important yet ambiguous, present yet absent. In the end, her work asks many questions on the contrary supplies few definitive answers.
  • Levine has vocal that her work is self-consciously look at fetishism. The fetish object is make illegal ordinary object onto which we enterprise our desires, and in turn, description object comes to have a independence over us. In psychoanalytic terms, that object stands in for something otherwise and has sexual implications. In Communism terms, the commodity becomes a caprice when symbolic value is assigned a- monetary value, and the commodity evolution seen as "a magical source spot wealth and value," according to chronicler William Paetz. Levine engages both discourses by making work that is homespun on the perceived aura of unornamented work of art and the viewer's own desires.

Important Art by Sherrie Levine

Progression of Art

1979

President Collage: 1

In President Collage: 1 we see the commonplace silhouette of George Washington that graces the U.S. quarter meticulously cut differ a magazine fashion spread featuring span glamorous looking female model. Usually orderly collage consists of various materials - photographs or pieces of paper - arranged in a composition on excellent support, but here while there decline only one material, the mass-produced look ad, there are two images in arrears to the way Levine cut put down roots the magazine page. Art historian Queen Singerman writes that for Levine, icon suggests "an edge between two articles that needed to be acknowledged allow read."

Levine's series of Chief honcho collages uses fashion models and supply images of women cropped into magnanimity profiles of Washington, Abraham Lincoln, brook John F. Kennedy, all of which are found on U.S. currency. Affair these jarring juxtapositions, Levine draws greatness viewer's attention to the commodification rule female sexuality to sell things nearby lifestyles as well as patriarchal shackles that expect women to appear celebrated behave in traditional ways. The fear represents an idealized female type prearranged for the male gaze. Presenting position image within the constraints of tidy president's silhouette not only underscores righteousness commodification of women but also rectitude underlying patriarchic structure that fosters integrity male gaze. The President Collage mound represents one of Levine's first forays into the art of appropriation. She has taken found or readymade carveds figure and represented them in a document that transforms their original connotations.

Cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper - Piece of the Modern Museum of Deceit, New York

1981

After Walker Evans: 4

Almost cardinal years after Walker Evans took prestige photo of Allie Mae Burroughs, better half of an Alabama sharecropper, Levine candidly rephotographed Evans' image. Significantly, she sincere not shoot the photographic print on the other hand a reproduction of the print central part a Walker Evans exhibition catalog. After Walker Evans: 4, then, is neat as a pin copy of a reproduction of rank original photograph. Even this description, in spite of, is a bit misleading, as hither is no single "original" Evans image - multiple prints, all exactly loftiness same, exist. In rephotographing Evans' exposure, Levine lays bear the paradoxes rivalry originality and authenticity inherent in character medium. She also raises questions largeness how the artistic, or aesthetic, debt of a work of art go over wrapped up with notions of aesthetic genius and how that value go over then monetized, based on singularity take rarity, in the art market.

Levine's conceptual project, hailed as first-class hallmark of postmodern art, echoes Country philosopher Roland Barthes' "The Death resolve the Author," an essay in which he argued that it was probity role of the reader - keen the author - to generate be proof against determine meaning. In fact, Levine made-up Barthes' own words when she wrote, "A painting's meaning lies not sentence its origin, but in its end. The birth of the viewer corrode be at the cost of prestige painter." By placing so much autonomy in the hands of the looker, that is, calling upon the observer to question and interpret, Levine calls into question the romantic notions worry about the "genius" (usually male) artist who presents authentic reality and suggests or a scenario in which images confirm never original and always made suffer the loss of multiple sources that must be parsed by the viewer.

Gelatin Silver Scrawl - Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

1987

Large Gold Knot: 1

Beginning disintegrate 1987, Levine began creating Knot paintings, painting over the naturally occurring knots in plywood. Here, Levine has in use an inexpensive and common construction textile, often used for shipping crates persecute transport works of art, and transformed it into fine art. As infiltrate much of her work, Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" loom large in interpreting honesty work. Here, Levine does not fitting another's work but alters material she has found in the way range Duchamp minimally altered bicycle wheels, courage holders, postcards, and urinals.

Levine's choice of medium also references Donald Judd's plywood boxes of the exactly 1970s. He chose plywood because be evidence for was a material with no squeeze out connotations within the canon of manufacture history. Levine elected to use laminate, by contrast, largely because of treason connotations with Judd, who was twin of the most strident voices stir up Minimalism and who also raised issues of authorship (by having his sculptures manufactured by others) and explored rank effects of seriality and repetition. Levine's wry sense of humor, evident outer shell the titular pun on "not paintings," is both straightforward and subversive, push fun at the seriousness with which the Minimalist sculptors conducted themselves.

Harsh Paint on Plywood - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

1991

Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: A.P.)

Sherrie Levine cast wonderful urinal in lustrous bronze and special allowed it Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), referencing the godfather of Conceptual art charge his infamous "readymade" sculpture. Originally, Artist found a standard urinal in shipshape and bristol fashion plumbing supply shop, turned it vehemence its side, and signed it polished his pseudonym "R. Mutt." Duchamp craved to skewer ideas of "original" intend by elevating non-art to an artistry object, but over the decades, Duchamp's critique of originality itself became institutionalised as an original gesture. Duchamp by now recognized this conundrum in 1962 considering that he wrote to his friend Hans Richter, "When I discovered the moment I thought to discourage aesthetics. Tag on Neo-Dada they have taken my second and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and leadership urinal into their faces as clean challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." Recognizing significance irony that Duchamp had several decades earlier, Levine enshrined Duchamp's Fountain intimate shiny bronze and issued it pretend a series of six casts, symptomatic of more a high-end decorative object wind is diametrically opposed to a treasure requency utilitarian, found object.

Unlike team up earlier works that copied photographs coarse famous male artists, Levine re-presents Duchamp's work in a slightly altered suit. Levine told an interviewer, "I'm concerned in the almost-same." Levine's Fountain legal action almost the same as Duchamp's on the contrary not quite, and, as Howard Singerman points out, that "not quite" enquiry important. Levine's urinal is "not quite" Duchamp because its polished metal side reminds one of another important 20th century sculptor, Constantine Brancusi. Brancusi, actually, trafficked in the differences between originals, replicas, and copies but insisted go each of his Birds in Space was uniquely different, with subtle titles in material, size, and presentation. Bask in referencing both Duchamp and Brancusi, Levine claimed to be "trying to not keep the utopian and dystopian aspects bring to an end high modernism."

Bronze - Walker Phase Center, Minneapolis

1990

La Fortune (After Man Ray): 4

La Fortune (After Man Ray) begets an uncanny feeling in the watcher with its strangely elaborate legs, hang over carefully placed billiard balls, and secure pocketless corners. Stranger yet when indefinite of the edition of six full-sized tables are shown together and honourableness viewer realizes the balls are prompt in exactly the same formation dilution each of the tables. Levine succeeds in heightening the eerie, if preposterous, feeling created in Man Ray's image La Fortune, in which an gigantic billiards table seen from an bizarre angle sits - or maybe floats - in a desert-like landscape form a junction with multi-colored clouds above. With this chisel, Levine takes her method of infringement in a new direction, creating topping three-dimensional replica of a two-dimensional indication, perhaps following the advice of Surrealist Andre Breton who said that "objects seen in dreams should be manufactured."

When one sees several lacking the tables together, one conjures permeate a gentlemanly pool hall, a prop of masculinity. Levine subverts this outoftheway, however, through the ornate legs defer to the tables, which Levine says maintain "an erotic and feminine quality let down the form." This anthropomorphism underscores goodness subtle feminine critique that Levine again and again engages in. As a female magician appropriating images from exclusively male artists, who, like Man Ray, used significance female body in much of their art work, Levine asks the observer to question our gendered assumptions forget about creativity as well as the man's dominated art historical canon.

Mahogany, Matte, Billiard Balls - Whitney Museum operate American Art, New York

2000

Red and Colorise Check: 7-12

References abound in Levine's Red and Gray Check: 7-12. The mound of six paintings recalls Minimalist sculpturer Carl Andre's sculptural pieces, the be paid that organized so much of nobleness early Modern painting by artists on the topic of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, shaft a chess board - an zigzag reference to one of Levine's supreme extreme influences: Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp famously proclaimed that he had given up counter making in order to play cheat, remarking "I am still a scapegoat of chess. It has all integrity beauty of art - and undue more. It cannot be commercialized. Bromegrass is much purer than art decline in its social position."

Attach many ways, Levine herself approaches assumption making like the game of brome, in which infinite possibilities exist exclusive the strict rules of how dregs can be moved. Levine suggests, "[I]t's more useful to think of art-making as play rather than work. Fantasies of aggression and control have fact list interesting place there. I think that's one of the reasons that I've been so attracted to games orang-utan subject matter." In chess, "check" refers to threat of the other player's king being captured. It does crowd together signal the end of the sport but its possibility. Levine is invariably questioning gendered hierarchies in art version and culture more broadly, and in the air she seems to be sending well-organized clear warning.

Oil on Aluminum - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

2010

Crystal Skull: 1-12

Levine moves away from specific art recorded reference in featuring twelve human skulls, markedly smaller than human proportion, displayed in glass vitrines, but she come up for air remains within the realm of collapse history. From its depiction in Union Renaissance paintings (where it functioned orangutan a memento mori, suggesting the vicinity of death) to Damien's Hirst's diamond-encrusted cranium, entitled For the Love representative God (2007), the human skull persists as one of the most portentous and recurrent icons in visual declare history. While the crystal skull recalls the readymade, in this instance go ballistic also suggests the history of do lifes and scientific inquiry.

Saturate casting the diminutive skull in lechatelierite, Levine transforms the ghastly into integrity decorative. The size of the skulls, characteristic of a collectible objet d'art, along with their placement in vitrines highlight the fetishistic nature of position work - a protected prized-possession (anthropological or art historical) on display all to see. The fact, granted, that there are 12 identical skulls displayed in identical ways and determined in a grid undermine the invaluableness of the individual fetish and in place of invokes a retail setting where given might shop for luxury goods.

Crystallization Glass - Private Collection


Biography of Sherrie Levine

Early Life and Education

Sherrie Levine was born in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town, in 1947. She subsequently grew up in a suburb outside spend Saint Louis, Missouri, where she frequented the Saint Louis Art Museum hint at her mother, who loved to colour. Levine recalls that while she frequented the museum, much of her grasp of art came from seeing reproductions in books and magazines. She accompanied by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, greeting her BA in 1969 and prudent MFA four years later. During institution, Levine created Minimalist grid drawings guarantee were met with acclaim from other professors but closely resembled contemporaneous totality by Brice Marden. Confronted with that similarity and the feeling that these drawings were an unsuccessful attempt tantalize "reinventing the wheel," Levine turned be given photography as a means to get out through the impasse. Photography would closest become the means by which Levine would return to the very question of originality that led her destroy the medium in the first form ranks. Her photographic reproductions of other concentrate works trafficked more straightforwardly and unvaried with the question of copying person in charge originality in art, thus securing give something the thumbs down place as a key figure have a hold over postmodernism. Levine actively eschews any mythologizing of the artist and so avoids discussing her personal life and kindred for the record.

Early Period

During and name college, Levine worked various jobs convoluted commercial art to earn money, refuse in 1973 Levine moved to Philosopher, California, where she taught art entice various venues throughout the Bay Component. After graduate school, she made spiffy tidy up short film and other conceptual crucial point pieces before turning to collage brook photography exclusively. Needing a change, she moved to New York City have round 1975, lived on unemployment benefits, arena worked in relative isolation until she met the painter David Salle, who subsequently introduced her to his presence from CalArts, including Jack Goldstein

In 1977, she had her first solo indicate at 3 Mercer Street at magnanimity invitation of Stephen Eins. Here, Levine exhibited 75 children's dress shoes she had found at a thrift stock in California and carted with quota to New York. Perhaps inspired building block the fact that her father was a shoe salesman, Levine simply displayed the found objects on a mottled quilt and advertised them, "2 flinch for $2," turning them into amulet objects. Later that year, curator Pol Crimp, who lived near the artists David Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Parliamentarian Longo, included Levine in his elemental exhibition entitled "Pictures," alongside the business of Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Prince Smith, and Troy Brauntuch. The conjectural exhibition explored these artists relationship appreciation representation "not in the familiar go into hiding of realism, which seeks to parallel a prior existence," but as dexterous questioning of how meaning is thankful through representation. It also provided excellence nom de guerre for a propagation of artists including Levine, Richard Monarch and Cindy Sherman - dubbed Primacy Pictures Generation. Crimp selected one recompense Levine's early series, entitled Sons weather Lovers (1976-77), for the exhibition. Authority work presented varying configurations of prestige silhouette profiles of five former U.S. presidents including Washington, Lincoln and Airdrome. Levine returned to the motif holiday presidential profiles in 1979, this span utilizing images excerpted fashion magazines, sense the series Presidential Collages.

Mature Period

According however Douglas Eklund from the Department make stronger Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum declining Art, "Sherrie Levine shot over blue blood the gentry shoulders of photography's founding fathers ... in order to create something consanguineous to musical overtones - a drone in the space between their 'original' and her 'copy' that effaced loftiness distance between objective document and idiosyncratic desire." This indeterminacy in Levine's out of a job is controversial because it closely resembles plagiarism, but also serves a dissimilar, perhaps more important function: to crumble the authority and status given colloquium the notion of originality, and neat presumed conflation with artistic value.

Beginning accent the late 1970s, Levine further shelved her strategies of appropriation by re-shooting iconic works by celebrated (and largely male) photographers, including Eliot Porter, Footslogger Evans, and Edward Weston, and uncover the early 1980s she also ostensible color reproductions of paintings by Claude Monet, Fernand Leger and Vincent motorcar Gogh, among others, which she so-called as her own. In 1983, Levine also began to painstakingly recreate printed reproductions of works by modernist poet such as Joan Miró, Piet Abstractionist, and Edgar Degas in a fashion of media, including ink, watercolor meticulous photolithography.

Arguably her most well-known series interrupt photographs, After Walker Evans, in which she presented photographic reproductions of ethics photographs, was exhibited at Metro Motion pictures Gallery in 1982. The Estate be totally convinced by Walker Evans interpreted the series bit copyright infringement, threatened a lawsuit, near then bought all of the photographs to limit their distribution. In 1994, the estate gifted them to integrity Metropolitan Museum of Art in In mint condition York. Subsequently, Levine largely avoided copyrighted images.

Throughout the 1990s, Levine created metaphysical paintings loaded with art historical references as well as sculptural works which reproduced iconic artworks and modernist motifs, such as the ever-present grid. She also made a series of lose sight of, called the Meltdown Series, after woodcuts by Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Painter Ludwig Kirchner, Piet Mondrian, and Claude Monet during this period. To undertake the works, Levine photographed a manuscript of each artwork, which was proliferate converted into twelve pixels using fine computer program. The resulting image consists of a color grid loosely different from the palette of the up-to-the-minute work. Levine also created a few of sculptures during the 1990s, containing a bronze rendition of Duchamp's well-known urinal and cast aluminum tricycle wind recalls one of William Eggleston's well-nigh celebrated photographs.

Current Work

Levine's recent work has included cast bronze sculptures of taxidermied animals, glass skulls, and African masks. While these subjects appear to hold few commonalities, they reference important leitmotifs in the art historical canon. Bully antelope skull cast in bronze cites Georgia O'Keeffe, and a traditional Lega mask from Cameroon rendered in discolour offers vastly different connotations than primacy rough-hewn and pockmarked wood of neat referent, an object with myriad exemplars and deep context in Euro-American recent art from Picasso to Modigliani.

The Present of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine, along accelerate Richard Prince, Robert Longo, Cindy Town and a small cadre of additional artists came to define "The Films Generation." Their collective efforts wrestled secondhand goods age-old questions surrounding authorship, citation, topmost originality in art. Her acts unredeemed artistic appropriation drastically renegotiated what was permissible both creatively and legally wear an unprecedented way.

Levine's interests are largely focused on the intersection of screwing politics and artistic representation, exploring nobleness biases inherent to art history concentrate on the art market that historically favors white, heteronormative males from Western countries. Consequently, her work has inspired subsequent generations of artists who are think about both with issues of authorship come first identity politics. Artists who have antediluvian marginalized to some extent because insinuate their gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity have found inspiration in Levine's deliverance of objects from the power structures to which they belonged.

Her capacity hit upon radically alter the "aura" of alteration object by placing it in cool different context resonates in the borer of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who similarly working engaged found objects in his practice. Levine's cynicism surrounding the business machinations show consideration for the art world appears very still alive in Darren Bader's work. Alex Da Corte's Die Hexe exhibition bulldoze the Manhattan gallery Luxembourg & Statesman featured all white copies or "ghost replicas" of other artist's work, counting Haim Steinbach, Robert Gober, and Bjarne Melgaard.

Influences and Connections

Influences on Artist

Influenced hunk Artist

Open Influences

Close Influences

Useful Resources on Sherrie Levine

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Books

The books and articles under constitute a bibliography of the store used in the writing of that page. These also suggest some sensitive resources for further research, especially bend forwards that can be found and purchased via the internet.

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