Sherrie Levine, In and Against Collage Posted on June 23, 2009 by Julian Myers
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.
