January 18–May 4, 2008

 

S H E R R I E   L E V I N E   b. Hazelton, Pennsylvania, 1947

The issues surrounding postmodernist appropriation, and critiques of authorship and aura, are central to Sherrie Levine's daring, seminal deconstruction of the modernist myths of originality in many of her refabrications of well-known works by a gallery of male artistic eminences. Levine's After Walker Evans (1981) is controversial because its principal conceptual strategy goes beyond simple appropriation: it bluntly challenges the authenticity of a work of art, the nature of authorship itself, and the sanctity of copyrighted material. Levine's rephotographing of Walker Evans's Farm Security Administration images was a deliberate provocation, both in its straightforward archival referencing, confounding likeness and resemblance, and, more profoundly, in the silent power of its analysis of the somber fetishization of impoverishment. The reference works Levine examines are the iconic images—from portraits to architecture—produced by Evans in the American South among white rural tenant farmers during the Depression. In a single cut, one is able to go from Evans's documentary photographs, with implications of their ethnographic content writ large, to the very nature of their treatment by Levine as so much archival artifact. In other words, Evans may be the photographer of these works but not the singular author of the social and cultural phenomenon that engendered them. Looming over the field of representation in which the images of the tenant farmers and their families are contained is a cultural Weltanschauung, one which belongs to the archival memory of the American Depression of the 1930s. However, After Walker Evans deviates from this concern by slightly deframing the images within the landscape of modernist originality.

 

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