Art History After Sherrie Levine
Text by Howard Singerman
This book examines the career of New York-based artist Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs “after Walker Evans”—taken not from life but from Evans’s famous depression-era documents of rural Alabama—became central examples in theorizing postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label “artist” and the idea of oeuvre—and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine’s work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice—material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.
Publisher: University of California Press
Artists: Sherrie Levine
Contributors: Howard Singerman
Printer: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Publication Date: 2011
Binding: Softcover
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in (15.2 x 22.9 cm)
Pages: 298
Reproductions: 8 color, 51 b&w
ISBN: 9780520267220
Retail: $34.95 | £24.95
Status: Available
Sherrie Levine
Sherrie Levine’s work epitomizes many of the core tenets of postmodern art, incisively challenging notions of originality, authenticity, and identity. Since the late 1970s, she has created a singular and complex oeuvre using a variety of media, including photography, painting, and sculpture. Many of her works are explicitly appropriated from artworks within the modernist canon, while others are more general in their references, assimilating art historical interests and concerns rather than specific objects. Some of Levine’s earliest work was included in Pictures, an important exhibition at Artists Space in New York in 1977 curated by Douglas Crimp that came to define The Pictures Generation—a group of artists examining the structures of signification underlying any image.
All Sherrie Levine books