OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

When last I was in New York, the artist Fia Backström and I had a conversation about Sherrie Levine, by way of both “The Pictures Generation, 1974-84″ — an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, of the early practice of Cindy Sherman,  Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth and others — and some thinking I’d done on some of Levine’s works. I planned to return to New York the following month, and we promised to re-engage our converstion then. But my plans changed. So around the date when I’d intended to be in New York, Fia wrote: “Since you are not here, I had to respond this way below. A very strange form of conversation.”  This “strange form” worked between the lines, arguing with,  questioning, and affirming aspects of the original text (in a way I read at times as mock-educational). The result, posted below, is maybe a better or more interesting text than the original: disrupted in an almost collage-like way, so that it creates a different, doubled picture.

Sherrie Levine, Fashion Collage 4, 1979, collage on paper 24in x 18 in.

But what if we read them instead as central, foundational? They might allow us to think of Sherrie Levine’s productions more generally in their relation to collage – to imagine that she works in and against collage’s formal-conceptual operations.

collage is of course the image smasher per se. whereas she figured out another way, not through violence, but in some kind of Annie Get Your Gun spirit – “I can do anything better than you can,” doing the same but upping it…

…think out my ideas first in pictures, experimentally moving reproductions into sequences and constellations, relationships of similarity or opposition. What follows, then, attempts to retain the experimental quality of images in stacks, rows and piles – even as I want to show what it is about collage that Levine aims to work against.

sequences carry meaning by order before after grouping, as my artforum series, to form and content… sequence as another form of destabilizing the meaning

The cacophony of the picture signifies, and dwells upon, the social disorder left in the wake of Germany’s failed left revolution in 1918-19.

Nice, I like this jump from formal breakdown into that political/economical breakdown of value

an appropriate figure for the dire circumstances Heartfield’s designs were meant to diagnose and attack.

sherrie levine in the prosperous 80s… not a collapse but a new kind of anti-ethic is emerging and a globalist world in total. William Turnbull – did he do the special effects for 2001?

(more…)

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Collage, dopey subjects, Edward Weston, exoticism, Fia Backström, multi-tasking, scopophilia, Sherrie Levine, value, Victor Segalen

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Sherrie Levine, Fashion Collage 6. 1979, collage on paper. 24 in x 18 in

Displaced and isolated by Levine, however, they become detailed anthropological studies of the scenes they depict – the attenuation of the models’ poses, the baroque architecture of the room, the half-distracted audience, the picture of class and luxury the outfits convey – even as blur, size, rasterization and faint scuffs defy our examination and mark these as mass-media reproductions, images of images. Works in Levine’s signature style – a “rigorously conceptual and coolly aesthetic practice,” as Bishop puts it, indebted to Marcel Duchamp and pictorial nominalism – are across the room. In the context of such rigorous and cool production, the Fashion Collages might seem anomalous: paths-not-taken, “early works.”

But what if we read them instead as central, foundational? They might allow us to think of Levine’s productions more generally in their relation to collage – to imagine that Levine works in and against collage’s formal-conceptual operations.

As an art historian I often think out my ideas first in pictures, experimentally moving reproductions into sequences and constellations, relationships of similarity or opposition. (A decade ago this happened on a slide-sorter or slide-table; now it happens, in numbing fashion, in presentation software.) What follows, then, attempts to retain the experimental quality of images in stacks, rows and piles – even as I want to show what it is about collage that Levine aims to work against.

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• Columnists

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Collage, Craig Owens, Hannah Höch, history of art, Independent Group, John Heartfield, John McHale, Magda Cordell, Marcel Duchamp, Sherrie Levine, Wieland Herzfelde, William Turnbull

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