Sherrie Levine rose to prominence in the
1980’s as a leading member of the Pictures Generation, a loosely
associated group of New York artists who used strategies of
appropriation to re-contextualize and subtly critique late-Capitalist
culture. In essence, artists such as Barbara Kruger and Richard Prince
had borrowed Marcel Duchamp’s ever radical concept of the readymade and
combined it with the coldest and most cynical aspects of Pop Art,
creating a scathing, coded visual language not unlike collage. The
strongest work by the Pictures Generation artists perform a beguilingly
simple aesthetic sleight of hand, taking one thing and, with sometimes
only the smallest intervention, turning it into something critical of
itself. Where Kruger turned her eye on the contemporary politics of
consumerism and greed, and Prince trained his on the cowboy, the
quintessential American icon of rugged masculinity, Levine made a target
of something even more sacred, at least to artists: the canon of Art
History itself. Levine’s breakout series consisted of photographs of the
work of Walker Evans, the American photographer who famously documented
the Grapes of Wrath style poverty during the Great Depression.
Importantly, Levine was not only photographing photographs, she was
photographing some of the most famous photographs of the Twentieth
Century, images that were not only iconic but ubiquitous. By doing so,
she invited her audience to consider the images unmoored by their
original context as emblems of American grit and determination. We begin
to ask ourselves important questions, Who made this image? What does it
signify, beyond what it shows?

After Walker Evans, Levine cast a
wider net, ensnaring some of the masters of European Modernism. She
began making diminutive watercolor copies of paintings by the likes of
Max Beckmann and Joan Miró, reproducing but also reducing the proofs of
their genius. It seemed as though Levine could be chipping away at the
foundation of the myth of the heroic male artist, but any connotation of
bitterness or resentment was completely repressed. These were earnest
works, copied to the best of the artist’s ability and without obvious
critical augmentation, such as Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa. Any
worthwhile analysis of Levine can only be intelligently inferred at
best, because her aesthetic is so illusory, witty and provocative.
Considered collectively, Levine’s sculptures in polished bronze are her
grandest and most direct assault on the complex mechanics of art as it
relates to society. In 1991, Levine produced what could be called the
ultimate readymade, a glittering facsimile of Duchamp’s Fountain. By
transforming the notorious reclining urinal into a golden icon of
itself, Levine calls into question its legacy as an invitation to
iconoclasm. If Art History is an arms race, Duchamp’s sculpture was a
bombshell that has since been deactivated and assimilated into visual
culture. Levine turns it into a gaudy tombstone for its own grave.

False God,
2007, is a haunting vanitas icon for the twenty-first century. Rendered
in bronze polished to resemble gold, the work depicts the skeleton of
an abomination: a two-headed calf. This explicit reference to the golden
calf of the Bible, a false idol worshipped by the Israelites, is
complicated in two crucial ways. Firstly, Levine has chosen to strip the
calf of its flesh, negating the innocence and vitality that a calf
would otherwise represent, and replacing these qualities with the
fearful connotations of death. Secondly, the calf has been made
hideously deformed, its two skulls sprouting from a single neck. This
deformity can elicit different emotional responses in the viewer,
ranging from empathy to disgust. The two-headed calf is both a tragic
and abject symbol, a potent metaphor for the seemingly random, cosmic
cruelty that life entails. It is also possibly a foreboding symbol of
duplicity and greed; a barb “aimed at the art market,” as Roberta Smith
suggests in her New York Times review of Levine’s 2011 survey, Mayhem, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (R. Smith, “Flattery (Sincere?) Lightly Dusted With Irony,” The New York Times, 10 November 2011).