Sherrie levine biography of donald

Summary of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine's courses of appropriating and citing illustriousness works of important 20^th hundred male artists established her similarly a consequential artist of postmodernism, ushered in during the shameful 1970s. Levine critiques the essence tenets of Modernism, calling smash into question the role of honesty romantic, artist-genius.

Along with artists such as Cindy Sherman duct Richard Prince, she questions nonetheless images are culturally constructed come first the effects of their transmission in a media-saturated age. Levine's work introduces perceptual questions jump what exactly one is superior at and asks viewers happen next consider the reasons why astonishment inherently trust and often fetishize values in art such monkey authenticity and originality.

While Levine sees her work as a cut above of a collaboration with foregoing artists, in copying and replicating the work of male artists Levine also levels a meliorist critique against the ingrained patriarchate of art history and ballet company at large.

Accomplishments

Levine's groove, in which she creates nominal indistinguishable copies of others' go, emphasizes that authorship is delimited by use rather than single creation and that nothing laboratory analysis inherently or singularly unique.

Engage this way, she echoes honesty ideas of French theorists much as Roland Barthes who professed the "death of the author" and whose texts became creative for postmodern theory.
Levine's use reminiscent of appropriation - the deliberate infringement and copying, with little fend for no alteration, of others' carveds figure - has a long legend in the 20^th century, fire up back to Pablo Picasso'sCubistcollages.

Artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí, and Robert Rauschenberg taken for granted images and objects to include into their work, but Levine and others of her propagation took appropriation to a additional level, to the point slate infringing on intellectual property open and arguably - plagiarism.
Levine's copies and near-copies demand that amazement consider the relation between echo and difference and how amazement look at pieces of break out.

Levine engages in a concave questioning of how images pot be simultaneously familiar yet new, original yet facsimiles, recognizable so far ambiguous, present yet absent. At the end of the day, her work asks many questions but supplies few definitive answers.
Levine has said that her out of a job is self-consciously about fetishism.

Honesty fetish object is an noticeable object onto which we responsibilities our desires, and in twist, the object comes to imitate a power over us. Insert psychoanalytic terms, this object stands in for something else instruction has sexual implications. In Socialist terms, the commodity becomes excellent fetish when symbolic value run through assigned a monetary value, advocate the commodity is seen though "a magical source of money and value," according to annalist William Paetz.

Levine engages both discourses by making work meander is based on the supposed aura of a work corporeal art and the viewer's refuse desires.

Important Art by Sherrie Levine

Progression of Art

1979

President Collage: 1

In President Collage: 1 we shroud the familiar silhouette of Martyr Washington that graces the U.S.

quarter meticulously cut from well-ordered magazine fashion spread featuring top-hole glamorous looking female model. As is usual a collage consists of diversified materials - photographs or throw somebody into disarray of paper - arranged drain liquid from a composition on a occasion, but here while there commission only one material, the mass-produced fashion ad, there are duo images due to the drink Levine cut up the periodical page.

Art historian Howard Singerman writes that for Levine, montage suggests "an edge between several things that needed to suspect acknowledged and read."

Levine's series of President collages uses fashion models and stock carbons of women cropped into depiction profiles of Washington, Abraham Attorney, and John F. Kennedy, resistance of which are found pack together U.S.

currency. With these grating juxtapositions, Levine draws the viewer's attention to the commodification discount female sexuality to sell eccentric and lifestyles as well hoot patriarchal constraints that expect troop to appear and behave boring traditional ways. The model represents an idealized female type prearranged for the male gaze.

Demonstration the image within the shackles of a president's silhouette snivel only underscores the commodification confess women but also the original patriarchic structure that fosters significance male gaze. The President Collage series represents one of Levine's first forays into the course of appropriation. She has busy found or readymade images leading represented them in a method that transforms their original connotations.

Cut-and-pasted printed paper on exposition - Collection of the Fresh Museum of Art, New York

1981

After Walker Evans: 4

Almost fifty period after Walker Evans took rendering photo of Allie Mae Inventor, wife of an Alabama cropper, Levine audaciously rephotographed Evans' turning up.

Significantly, she did not sprig the photographic print but orderly reproduction of the print blot a Walker Evans exhibition sort. After Walker Evans: 4, spread, is a copy of unembellished reproduction of the original ikon. Even this description, though, appreciation a bit misleading, as close by is no single "original" Anatomist photograph - multiple prints, accomplish exactly the same, exist.

Eliminate rephotographing Evans' photograph, Levine lays bear the paradoxes of cleverness and authenticity inherent in distinction medium. She also raises questions about how the artistic, defect aesthetic, value of a office of art is wrapped fibre with notions of artistic maven and how that value in your right mind then monetized, based on uniqueness and rarity, in the occupy market.

Levine's conceptual proposal, hailed as a hallmark preceding postmodern art, echoes French thinker Roland Barthes' "The Death expend the Author," an essay bask in which he argued that note was the role of position reader - not the originator - to generate and prove meaning. In fact, Levine expropriated Barthes' own words when she wrote, "A painting's meaning newspeak not in its origin, however in its destination.

The opening of the viewer must have someone on at the cost of probity painter." By placing so ostentatious power in the hands show consideration for the viewer, that is, vocation upon the viewer to installment and interpret, Levine calls industrial action question the romantic notions wheedle the "genius" (usually male) virtuoso who presents authentic reality take up suggests instead a scenario condensation which images are never recent and always made from binary sources that must be parsed by the viewer.

Gelatin Sterling Print - Collection of righteousness Metropolitan Museum of Art

1987

Large Gilded Knot: 1

Beginning in 1987, Levine began creating Knot paintings, craft over the naturally occurring knots in plywood.

Here, Levine has taken an inexpensive and usual construction material, often used reawaken shipping crates to transport productions of art, and transformed pose into fine art. As have much of her work, Marcel Duchamp's "readymades" loom large play in interpreting the work. Here, Levine does not appropriate another's out of a job but alters material she has found in the way wind Duchamp minimally altered bicycle motor car, bottle holders, postcards, and urinals.

Levine's choice of mean also references Donald Judd's laminate boxes of the early Decade. He chose plywood because establish was a material with clumsy specific connotations within the maxim of art history. Levine determine to use plywood, by oppose, largely because of its connotations with Judd, who was see to of the most strident voices of Minimalism and who besides raised issues of authorship (by having his sculptures manufactured strong others) and explored the tool of seriality and repetition.

Levine's wry sense of humor, apparent in the titular pun look at "not paintings," is both effortless and subversive, poking fun attractive the seriousness with which prestige Minimalist sculptors conducted themselves.

Shoddy Paint on Plywood - Producer Museum of American Art, Novel York

1991

Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp: A.P.)

Sherrie Levine cast a urinal subtract lustrous bronze and entitled chock Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp), referencing the godfather of Conceptual cut up and his infamous "readymade" figurine.

Originally, Duchamp found a horrible urinal in a plumbing put out shop, turned it on cast down side, and signed it vacate his pseudonym "R. Mutt." Artist wanted to skewer ideas avail yourself of "original" art by elevating non-art to an art object, nevertheless over the decades, Duchamp's illustration of originality itself became institutional as an original gesture.

Artist already recognized this conundrum nucleus 1962 when he wrote apropos his friend Hans Richter, "When I discovered the ready-made Unrestrainable thought to discourage aesthetics. Renovate Neo-Dada they have taken nutty ready-made and found aesthetic attractiveness in them. I threw description bottle-rack and the urinal intent their faces as a dissent and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty." Watching the irony that Duchamp difficult to understand several decades earlier, Levine enshrined Duchamp's Fountain in shiny bay and issued it in unmixed series of six casts, suggestive of more a high-end decorative look forward to that is diametrically opposed secure a one-off utilitarian, found factor.

Unlike her earlier activity that copied photographs by famed male artists, Levine re-presents Duchamp's work in a slightly deviating form. Levine told an interrogator, "I'm interested in the almost-same." Levine's Fountain is almost primacy same as Duchamp's but quite, and, as Howard Singerman points out, that "not quite" is important.

Levine's urinal evenhanded "not quite" Duchamp because untruthfulness polished metal surface reminds singular of another important 20^th c sculptor, Constantine Brancusi. Brancusi, herself, trafficked in the differences in the middle of originals, replicas, and copies on the other hand insisted that each of cap Birds in Space was remarkably different, with subtle distinctions explain material, size, and presentation.

Incline referencing both Duchamp and Sculpturer, Levine claimed to be "trying to collapse the utopian captivated dystopian aspects of high modernism."

Bronze - Walker Art Affections, Minneapolis

1990

La Fortune (After Man Ray): 4

La Fortune (After Man Ray) creates an uncanny feeling break down the viewer with its importantly elaborate legs, its carefully located billiard balls, and its pocketless corners.

Stranger yet when distinct of the edition of tremor full-sized tables are shown packed in and the viewer realizes interpretation balls are arranged in shooting the same formation on scolding of the tables. Levine succeeds in heightening the eerie, supposing absurd, feeling created in Workman Ray's painting La Fortune, etch which an oversized billiards slab seen from an odd edge sits - or maybe floats - in a desert-like place with multi-colored clouds above.

Surpass this sculpture, Levine takes affiliate method of appropriation in graceful new direction, creating a persuasive replica of a two-dimensional sculpture, perhaps following the advice second Surrealist Andre Breton who supposed that "objects seen in dreams should be manufactured."

During the time that one sees several of decency tables together, one conjures count up a gentlemanly pool hall, unblended bastion of masculinity.

Levine subverts this sense, however, through nobleness ornate legs of the tables, which Levine says have "an erotic and feminine quality lowly the form." This anthropomorphism underscores the subtle feminine critique stray Levine often engages in. Chimpanzee a female artist appropriating angels from exclusively male artists, who, like Man Ray, used significance female body in much rot their art work, Levine asks the viewer to question tart gendered assumptions of creativity by reason of well as the male henpecked art historical canon.

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

2000

Red and Gray Check: 7-12

References be prolific in Levine's Red and Wear Check: 7-12.

The series show six paintings recalls Minimalist sculpturer Carl Andre's sculptural pieces, glory grid that organized so luxurious of the early Modern portrait by artists like Kazimir Painter and Piet Mondrian, and dinky chess board - an rangy reference to one of Levine's greatest influences: Marcel Duchamp. Artist famously declared that he abstruse given up art making deduce order to play chess, remarking "I am still a sacrifice of chess.

It has imprison the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is even purer than art is problem its social position."

Misrepresent many ways, Levine herself approaches art making like the enterprise of chess, in which limitless possibilities exist within the halted rules of how pieces gather together be moved.

Levine suggests, "[I]t's more useful to think love art-making as play rather get away from work. Fantasies of aggression trip control have an interesting at your house there. I think that's rob of the reasons that I've been so attracted to gaiety as subject matter." In bromegrass, "check" refers to threat be proper of the other player's king use captured.

It does not alarm the end of the project but its possibility. Levine task always questioning gendered hierarchies alter art history and culture solon broadly, and here she seems to be sending a unknown warning.

Oil on Aluminum - Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

2010

Crystal Skull: 1-12

Levine moves away from particular art historical reference in featuring twelve human skulls, markedly agree to than human proportion, displayed solution glass vitrines, but she pull off remains within the realm find time for art history.

From its portrayal in Northern Renaissance paintings (where it functioned as a memento mori, suggesting the presence have a high opinion of death) to Damien's Hirst's diamond-encrusted cranium, entitled For the Adore of God (2007), the possibly manlike skull persists as one receive the most important and present icons in visual art account.

While the crystal skull recalls the readymade, in this strange it also suggests the features of still lifes and controlled inquiry.

By casting significance diminutive skull in crystal, Levine transforms the ghastly into interpretation decorative. The size of rendering skulls, characteristic of a oddment objet d'art, along with their placement in vitrines highlight glory fetishistic nature of the go - a protected prized-possession (anthropological or art historical) on manifestation for all to see.

Picture fact, though, that there move to and fro 12 identical skulls displayed prosperous identical ways and arranged remit a grid undermine the dearness of the individual fetish jaunt instead invokes a retail ponder where one might shop possession luxury goods.

Crystal Glass - Private Collection

Biography of Sherrie Levine

Early Life and Education

Sherrie Levine was born in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, tidy coal-mining town, in 1947.

She subsequently grew up in undiluted suburb outside of Saint Gladiator, Missouri, where she frequented depiction Saint Louis Art Museum strike up a deal her mother, who loved feign paint. Levine recalls that determine she frequented the museum, unnecessary of her knowledge of order came from seeing reproductions make real books and magazines.

She double-dealing the University of Wisconsin, President, receiving her BA in 1969 and her MFA four epoch later. During college, Levine built Minimalist grid drawings that were met with acclaim from make up for professors but closely resembled synchronal works by Brice Marden. Confronted with this similarity and distinction feeling that these drawings were an unsuccessful attempt at "reinventing the wheel," Levine turned fit in photography as a means have got to break through the impasse.

Taking pictures would later become the secret by which Levine would repay to the very problem attack originality that led her command somebody to the medium in the crowning place. Her photographic reproductions ransack other art works trafficked make more complicated straightforwardly and brazenly with probity question of copying and ingenuity in art, thus securing attendant place as a key representation of postmodernism.

Levine actively eschews any mythologizing of the graphic designer and so avoids discussing an alternative personal life and relations expulsion the record.

Early Period

During and later college, Levine worked various jobs in commercial art to bright money, and in 1973 Levine moved to Berkeley, California, hoop she taught art at a variety of venues throughout the Bay Harmonize.

After graduate school, she indebted a short film and fear conceptual art pieces before uneasy to collage and photography solely. Needing a change, she niminy-piminy to New York City prize open 1975, lived on unemployment hand to mouth, and worked in relative wasteland until she met the artist David Salle, who subsequently not native bizarre her to his friends stay away from CalArts, including Jack Goldstein

In 1977, she had her first by oneself show at 3 Mercer Usage at the invitation of Writer Eins.

Here, Levine exhibited 75 children's dress shoes she difficult found at a thrift pile up in California and carted sustain her to New York. Most likely inspired by the fact go off at a tangent her father was a raise in addition salesman, Levine simply displayed grandeur found objects on a pied quilt and advertised them, "2 shoes for $2," turning them into fetish objects.

Later stroll year, curator Douglas Crimp, who lived near the artists Painter Salle, Cindy Sherman, and Parliamentarian Longo, included Levine in seminal exhibition entitled "Pictures," aligned the work of Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo, Philip Smith, nearby Troy Brauntuch. The legendary trade show explored these artists relationship hit upon representation "not in the blockade guise of realism, which seeks to resemble a prior existence," but as a questioning outline how meaning is made study representation.

It also provided excellence nom de guerre for simple generation of artists including Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Town - dubbed The Pictures Date. Crimp selected one of Levine's early series, entitled Sons lecture Lovers (1976-77), for the offering. The work presented varying configurations of the silhouette profiles fairhaired five former U.S.

presidents together with Washington, Lincoln and Kennedy. Levine returned to the motif disturb presidential profiles in 1979, that time utilizing images excerpted feature magazines, for the series Presidential Collages.

Mature Period

According to Douglas Eklund from the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum clone Art, "Sherrie Levine shot spin the shoulders of photography's foundation fathers ...

in order meet create something akin to melodious overtones - a buzzing give back the space between their 'original' and her 'copy' that effaced the distance between objective dossier and subjective desire." This indefiniteness in Levine's work is unsettled because it closely resembles misappropriation, but also serves a distinguishable, perhaps more important function: disturb collapse the authority and eminence given to the notion interrupt originality, and its presumed conflation with artistic value.

Beginning in magnanimity late 1970s, Levine further goad her strategies of appropriation unused re-shooting iconic works by famed (and exclusively male) photographers, with Eliot Porter, Walker Evans, shaft Edward Weston, and in character early 1980s she also avowed color reproductions of paintings unhelpful Claude Monet, Fernand Leger coupled with Vincent van Gogh, among plainness, which she claimed as tea break own.

In 1983, Levine as well began to painstakingly recreate printed reproductions of works by modernist masters such as Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and Edgar Degas in a variety of travel ormation technol, including ink, watercolor and photolithography.

Arguably her most well-known series admire photographs, After Walker Evans, subordinate which she presented photographic reproductions of the photographs, was plausible at Metro Pictures Gallery paddock 1982.

The Estate of Wayfarer Evans interpreted the series brand copyright infringement, threatened a causa, and then bought all invoke the photographs to limit their distribution. In 1994, the capital gifted them to the Urban Museum of Art in Novel York. Subsequently, Levine largely out in the cold copyrighted images.

Throughout the 1990s, Levine created abstract paintings loaded condemnation art historical references as spasm as sculptural works which reproduced iconic artworks and modernist motifs, such as the ever-present cookware.

She also made a array of prints, called the Meltdown Series, after woodcuts by Main part Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Piet Mondrian, and Claude Monet during this period. Assume create the works, Levine photographed a reproduction of each deletion, which was then converted tell somebody to twelve pixels using a pc program.

The resulting image consists of a color grid extravagant derived from the palette gaze at the original work. Levine as well created a number of sculptures during the 1990s, including on the rocks bronze rendition of Duchamp's renowned urinal and cast aluminum velocipede that recalls one of William Eggleston's most celebrated photographs.

Current Work

Levine's recent work has included sad bronze sculptures of taxidermied animals, glass skulls, and African masks.

While these subjects appear problem have few commonalities, they mention important leitmotifs in the lively historical canon. An antelope fever pitch cast in bronze cites Colony O'Keeffe, and a traditional Lega mask from Cameroon rendered compile bronze offers vastly different connotations than the rough-hewn and blemished wood of its referent, conclusion object with myriad exemplars obscure deep context in Euro-American pristine art from Picasso to Modigliani.

The Legacy of Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine, along with Richard Prince, Parliamentarian Longo, Cindy Sherman and a-one small cadre of other artists came to define "The Films Generation." Their collective efforts wrestled with age-old questions surrounding penning, citation, and originality in expose.

Her acts of artistic arrogation drastically renegotiated what was working both creatively and legally amplify an unprecedented way.

Levine's interests ring especially focused on the product of gender politics and tasteful representation, exploring the biases possible to art history and birth art market that historically favors white, heteronormative males from Narrative countries.

Consequently, her work has inspired newer generations of artists who are concerned both attain issues of authorship and lack of variety politics. Artists who have bent marginalized to some extent in that of their gender, sexual direction or ethnicity have found impact in Levine's reclamation of objects from the power structures give a lift which they belonged.

Her capacity acknowledge radically alter the "aura" infer an object by placing hire in a different context resonates in the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who similarly employed misunderstand objects in his practice.

Levine's cynicism surrounding the business machinations of the art world appears very much alive in Darren Bader's work. Alex Da Corte's Die Hexe exhibition at leadership Manhattan gallery Luxembourg & Solon featured all white copies burrow "ghost replicas" of other artist's work, including Haim Steinbach, Parliamentarian Gober, and Bjarne Melgaard.

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