Singerman Howard - Sherrie Levine

OCTOBER Files

George Baker, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, Devin Fore, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, David Joselit, Rosalind Krauss, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Annette Michelson, Mignon Nixon, and Malcolm Turvey, editors

Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes

Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson

Eva Hesse, edited by Mignon Nixon

Robert Rauschenberg, edited by Branden W. Joseph

James Coleman, edited by George Baker

Cindy Sherman, edited by Johanna Burton

Roy Lichtenstein, edited by Graham Bader

Gabriel Orozco, edited by Yve-Alain Bois

Gerhard Richter, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Richard Hamilton, edited by Hal Foster with Alex Bacon

Dan Graham, edited by Alex Kitnick

John Cage, edited by Julia Robinson

Claes Oldenburg, edited by Nadja Rottner

Louise Lawler, edited by Helen Molesworth with Taylor Walsh

Robert Morris, edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson

John Knight, edited by Andr Rottmann

Isa Genzken, edited by Lisa Lee

Hans Haacke, edited by Rachel Churner

Michael Asher, edited by Jennifer King

Mary Kelly, edited by Mignon Nixon

William Kentridge, edited by Rosalind Krauss

Bruce Nauman, edited by Taylor Walsh

Sherrie Levine, edited by Howard Singerman

edited by Howard Singerman

essays by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Stephen W. Melville, Erich Franz, Howard Singerman, Catherine Ingraham, Sylvia Lavin, Susan Kandel, Michel Assenmaker, Sherrie Levine, David Joselit, and Maria H. Loh

OCTOBER FILES 23

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All works of art by Sherrie Levine the artist unless noted otherwise.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Bembo by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Singerman, Howard, editor.

Title: Sherrie Levine / edited by Howard Singerman.

Description: Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press, 2018. | Series: October files |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017061374| ISBN 9780262038584 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780262535724 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780262348430

Subjects: LCSH: Levine, Sherrie--Criticism and interpretation. |

Appropriation (Art)--United States.

Classification: LCC N6537.L453 S55 2018 | DDC 700.92--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061374

ePub Version 1.0

OCTOBER Files addresses individual bodies of work of the postwar period that meet two criteria: they have altered our understanding of art in significant ways, and they have prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each book thus traces not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. This discourse is theoretical by its very nature, which is not to say that it imposes theory abstractly or arbitrarily. Rather, it draws out the specific ways in which significant art is theoretical in its own right, on its own terms, and with its own implications. To this end, we feature essays, many first published in OCTOBER magazine, that elaborate different methods of criticism in order to elucidate different aspects of the art in question. The essays are often in dialogue with one another as they do so, but they are also as sensitive as the art is to political context and historical change. These files, then, are intended as primers in signal practices of art and criticism alike, and they are offered in resistance to the amnesiac and antitheoretical tendencies of our time.

The Editors of OCTOBER

The mission of the October Files series is to recognize artists whose work has altered our understanding of art in significant ways and has prompted a critical literature that is serious, sophisticated, and sustained. Each text in each volume in the series, then, is in some sense a proposala claim for the value and the ongoing challenge of a specific artistic practice. The argument that is demonstrated in the essays in this volume is that Sherrie Levines work, which was instrumental in the construction of a critical postmodernism as it was laid out in essays first published in October (to quote again from the series preface), continues to sustain our critical and interpretive attention.

The first three essays included here were initially published in October, and all are now well known. They have appeared in whole or in part in other anthologies. Each of these opening essays engages Levines work in a critical repudiation of modernism in the visual arts, particularly as it was promulgated by the art historian Michael Fried. Douglas Crimps Pictures exhibition (at Artists Space in 1977) and his essay Pictures, published in October 8 (Spring 1979)the books first essaylink Levine to a larger group of then-emerging artists who seemed engaged in a similar critical practice. His title has come to name that movement, such as it was, and that moment in New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s more broadly.

Crimps essay The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism, published in October 15 (Winter 1980), returns to some of the artists he addressed in the earlier essayto Levine, Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, and Cindy Shermanand to the questions of presence and reproduction he raised in the earlier essay in relation to performance. Here his answers turn on photography as theorized with and after Walter Benjamin.

Rosalind Krausss essay The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition, which cites the two Crimp essays and his discussion of Levines photographs after Edward Weston, is presented here in an excerpt. It first appeared in October 18 (Autumn 1981).

Craig Owenss Sherrie Levine at A&M Artworks, a review of Levines 1982 exhibition of six offset prints of works by Franz Marc, was first published in Art in America 70 (Summer 1982), page 148, and appears here courtesy of Art Media Holdings, LLC, and with the permission of the estate. It also appears in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, a collection of Owenss writings edited by Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock, with an introduction by Simon Watney, published by University of California Press, 1992.

Owenss 1983 essay The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism compellingly resituates a particular set of artists engaged in what Crimp labeled the photographic activity of postmodernismLevine, Dara Birnbaum, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, and Cindy Shermanin relation to a poststructural critique of representation that is strongly informed by the writings and politics of French feminism. The essay has in many ways determined the trajectory of much subsequent writing on Levines work. Owens, a senior editor at Art in America and an associate editor at October from 1979 through 1980, first published The Discourse of Others in Hal Fosters edited volume The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodernism (Bay Press, 1983). It is presented here in excerpt and is published in its entirety in