In 1977, Sherrie Levine participated in ‘Pictures’, a group exhibition at Artists Space in New York organized by Douglas Crimp. Destabilizing the supposed authority of photography, the show examined the status of the image as the postmodern site of discourse. It set out a radical position that Levine would explore over the next two decades of her practice through the reproduction, remaking and pastiche of works that had shaped modern art. Currently on view at the Aspen Art Museum, the exhibition ‘Sherrie Levine: 1977–1988’ presents upwards of 150 of these early works. Many are executed on paper, though silver gelatin prints and c-prints also feature alongside paintings on lead, mahogany and plywood. Displacing the locus of the artwork beyond temporal boundaries, the works on view engage with meaning as a phenomenon that is deferred and constructed post facto: something ‘present or available – really, or in reproduction, or in memory’, as Michael Baxandall put it in Patterns of Intentions (1985).
The condition of the ‘After Walker Evans’ series (1981) – 22 reshootings of black and white photographs that Evans made in the rural US in the 1930s – testifies to a readymade-oriented system, which extends beyond the dimensional object towards a Duchampian transformative gesture. The ‘material substance of the object, of the time of looking and of the name of the artist’, as suggested by Howard Singerman in October in 2002, is here intimately bound to a methodology of art history: study, repetition, imitation. In 1982, in response to the presentation of the series at Metro Pictures in New York, Craig Owens argued that Levine had ‘assumed the functions of the dealer, the curator and the critic’, therefore taking on the particular perspectives required for the experience of the work: a knowledge of what once was embedded in the memory of the image and the medium-object, and of the reversal of its own discourse, by Levine, towards the symbolic death of its author. Denying the authority of the artist’s gaze, this inversion relocated autonomy to the subject, positioning the artwork within the space and time of the real. Caught within this referential, quotational system, the work, it seems, cannot escape its own theatricality – ‘staging a picture’, as Crimp argued.

In three charcoal drawings from ‘After Willem De Kooning’ (1981), a series recreating that artist’s gestural figures, Levine effectively denies the immediacy and expressive force associated with abstract expressionism. Through the meticulous, entirely hand-drawn reproductions of existing works, Levine creates within a deliberately slow, controlled temporality, consciously rejecting the artist’s experience of the accidental. She does something similar with Shoe Sale (1977), consisting of a pair of children’s shoes displayed in a vitrine: a reference to an actual sale of 75 identical pairs of shoes, bought from a wholesaler, that Levine ran one day in a store on Mercer Street in New York. Both projects deftly explore the notion of autonomous seriality so central to Levine’s framework.

The symbolism of the pictorial image, after Levine, is to be understood as a gesture of interpretation inherent to the artist’s experience as a spectator – and consequently to ours as well: a certain love for painting, and a particular disdain for its patriarchal authority. As such, Levine does not mechanically copy what precedes her, but rather makes it coincide with her own being – preserving it ‘against extinction, and [as] an assurance of immortality’, as she asserted in 1994, quoted in the exhibition brochure. This is the primary ambition of the work: its consequence belongs to her, as much as it does to us – intimately.
‘Sherrie Levine: 1977–1988’ is on view at the Aspen Art Museum until 29 September
Main image: Sherrie Levine, ‘After Walker Evans’, 1981, gelatin silver prints, dimensions variable. Courtesy: Aspen Art Museum; photograph: Daniel Pérez