Carmen Winant opens with four rhetorical questions surrounding the truth behind art and conceptualism as Sherrie Livine’s ‘Mayhem‘ retrospective opens in the Witney Museum of American Art. Visitors are bound to contemplate these thought-provoking questions:
What is “original” and “unoriginal” art?
Does an art object only qualify as authentic if it’s made by the human hand?
Does the context in which one sees an image change its meaning?
Why is a photograph of a photograph worth less on the market than its original?
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a collective group of artists including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine at the time where considered as ones who dubbed the “Pictures” generation. This cohort began using photography to examine the strategies and codes of representation. In reshooting Marlboro advertisements, B-movie stills, and even classics of Modernist photography, these artists adopted dual roles as director and spectator. In their manipulated appropriations, these artists were not only exposing and dissembling mass-media fictions, but enacting more complicated scenarios of desire, identification, and loss.
“After Walker Evans”
The show displays Levine’s earlier photographic work in addition to more recent sculptures, photos and collages that date back to the late 1970s. “After Walker Evans” is one of her series of photos on view. To make the works, Levine photographed Walker Evans’s famous pictures of poor Alabama sharecroppers in 1979. Evans took the photos in 1936 while he was working for the United States government.
Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper
Levine wasn’t using his images for source material, to document America’s Great Depression or the Borroughs family. Rather, her photographs of his photographs were the finished product. Appearing identical to their sources, only this time Levine had declared herself to be their author and the appropriation artist, the original ‘artist’ for that matter.
”The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts,”
– Levine said in an interview with Arts Magazine in 1985.
This series became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a “feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority“, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism. Far from a high-concept cheap shot, Levine’s works from this series tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past, and our own lost illusions.
“It is something artists do all the time unconsciously, working in the style of someone they consider a great master, I just wanted to make that relationship literal.”
WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART NOVEMBER 10, 2011 – JANUARY 29, 2012
“The Past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before?”
—Walter Benjamin
The term ‘mayhem‘ hasn’t always meant ‘disorder’. It comes from the word maim, and until the late 19th century was used to denote the “infliction of physical injury on a person, so as to impair or destroy that person’s capacity for self-defense.” The words usage changed around 1870 but it continued to refer to “violent behaviour, esp. physical assault” until quite recently; according to the Oxford English Dictionary its usage did not designate “rowdy confusion, chaos, disorder” until as late as 1976. When Levine began photographing photographs, the word mayhem was not so far removed from its association with bodily harm. And while photographing photographs means that actual bodies are nowhere in sight, the show has far more to do with destruction than may at first be evident.
In Levine’s ‘Mayhem‘ the motif of discourse has tended to focus on the problem of authorship and the subversion of the unique art object. Levine’s re-photography and her re-productions of Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades‘ have provided important critiques of artistic institutions and practices. However, by 2011, appropriation itself has became so vividly appropriated that it was difficult to view Levine’s work as critical, or even realistic. The ideas put forth by appropriation had been thoroughly diluted by time and repetition, the idea that appropriation subverts the author’s function was a questionable statement in itself.
The significance of Mayhem does not dwell on the alleged challenge to the categorised order provided by an author as well as the cultural or monetary value that the author or painter’s name can confer on or to an object. Neither is it a simple matter of order imposed on disorder—artists such as Duchamp, Evans, and Courbet are thoroughly circumscribed entities that do not need to be explained or contained by Levine. Mayhem’s function, therefore, is not so much critical as it is evidentiary: Levine’s construction whereby she uses the repetition of objects and images, – its sterile organization, provides proof of an illness particular to contemporary society—a society overwhelmed by images and reproductive technology and consequently obsessed with the preservation and organization of surrogate records.
Any retrospective is a sort of archive, but in Levine’s work the archival impulse, the “gathering together of signs” into a “single corpus…in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration” is particularly apparent. Mayhem is not simply organized, it is mentally deranging—evidence of a deep-seated cultural anxiety of which the copy, the archive, and the list are both symptom and cause.
“Repetition itself,”
writes Derrida,
“The logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains…indissociable from the death drive.”
Sherrie Levine, “Gottscho-Schleisner Orchids: 2,” 1964–1997.Levine’s exhibition at the Whitney offers 30 years of appropriation art by Sherrie Levine. On the wall are “Gottscho-Schleisner Orchids: 1 — 10” (1964-97).
My Further Interpretations
Following on from Levine’s ‘Mayhem‘ I have learnt the significance of repetition. In this project appropriation is a major motif – reproducing acts of love and manipulating peoples way of finding the emotion is immediately deemed debatable. The destruction of a natural path can definitely succumb to the way we live in modern society and alike Mayhem, the reader see how people change when opportunities to short-cut routes arise.
