Forty-One False Starts (37 page)

I receive an acute sense of the newer bohemianism during two visits I pay to the artist Sherrie Levine—first to her studio, in Little Italy, and then to her apartment, a few blocks away. The studio, on the second floor of a small, run-down commercial building, is a twelve-by-seven-foot room that has nothing in it but a table, four chairs, and a fan. If you know Levine's work, the studio is not a surprise, but a kind of inevitability. She is a conceptual artist, and the conception for which she first became known, in the early eighties, is a series of twenty-one photographs entitled
After Walker Evans
. The photographs bear an uncanny likeness to the famous Farm Security Administration photographs that Evans took of tenant-farmer families in Hale County, Alabama; in fact, they
are
those photographs. Levine wrote away for copies of the Evans photographs to the Library of Congress, which owns the negatives; had them recopied at a commercial lab; and then—following Duchamp—made them her own work simply by signing them. If Duchamp's signed urinals and snow shovels and bicycle wheels redefined art as whatever somebody designates as art, Levine absurdly extended the world of objects that are potential ready-mades to include already designated works of art.
After Walker Evans
was succeeded by an
After J.M.W. Turner
series, which was exhibited in London in 1984; it consisted of twenty color reproductions of paintings by Turner that Levine had cut out of an art book, signed, and had matted and framed. When I visit Levine in her studio, she is engaged in a third technique of appropriation: she is tracing reproductions of drawings and paintings by Matisse, Schiele, Léger, and Morandi and then adding washes of watercolor.

Levine is a pleasant, unmannered woman in her late thirties, with dark, wavy hair, wearing a denim shirt and a gathered skirt, who delivers difficult explanations of her work with such an air of directness and naturalness as to almost cause one to feel that what she is saying is self-evident. Distinguishing between the rephotographed works and the cutout works, she says, “I used to think that the cutout things were the more extreme, but now I think that the rephotographed things are more transgressional. They're more mine. Ultimately, though, all my work is a feminist statement. It deals with the difficulty of being a woman who is trying to create images that are not a product of the expectations of male desire, in a culture that is primarily a celebration of male desire. What I do is to come at the problem through the back door; I appropriate images of male desire as a way of not being co-opted by that desire. I appropriate only the great modern male masters, and I choose only works that I love and value.”

We are talking in Levine's apartment, on the fifth floor of an untended tenement—a single long room of bare-boned plainness, where she lives alone, with her cat. There is a bathtub in the kitchen area, and the sparse furniture has a bleak, cast-off character. We sit at the far end of the room, near the windows, in an area of incongruous conventional decorativeness—at a pale wood table on which a vase of flowers and a spread of bread and cheese and Granny Smith apples has been pleasingly set out. The walls of the room are painted a dull gold. “When I moved in, I painted the walls this way, under the mistaken idea that it would make the place less depressing,” Levine says. “It looks more depressing.”

“I have heard your work described as melancholy, as a sort of depressed expression of the feeling that there is nothing left to do,” I say.

“I wouldn't deny that there is a sadness in the work,” Levine says, “though I don't think that's all there is.”

“Do you feel that at another time you might have been doing work of your own instead of appropriating the work of others?”

“Or not working at all. I might have been raising babies. I don't have any feeling of destiny about doing this, but it's a choice I've made. I've been an artist since I was a very young child. My mother gave me crayons to keep me quiet. It was an activity that has always emotionally sustained me. I enjoy the solitude of it. There was a period in which I considered becoming a filmmaker—I was very tempted because in some ways movies are my first love—but then I realized that the communal activity of filmmaking was very different from the solitary activity of making a painting.”

“With the tracing and painting you're doing now, you seem to be working your way back into conventional art making.”

“Well, I never thought that what I was doing was anything
but
that. That's the irony. I have always regarded my work as conventional art objects. They are always presented that way—matted and framed. I have never considered myself anything but a gallery artist. Several years ago, some friends of mine were in Holland, and they were really excited because they saw this show and thought it was my show, and then realized that it was a Walker Evans show. Or sometimes I'm looking through a magazine, and I think, Oh, great, they've reproduced an image of mine, only to see that it's a real Matisse, not one of my appropriations. When I first started doing the appropriative work, a lot of the criticism written about it—much of it in
October
—was based on ideas of the Frankfurt school of philosophy, but somehow I felt that these sociological explanations coming out of Marx were insufficient. I had the intuition that if I started reading psychoanalytic theory I might find more satisfying explanations. Appropriating art is not all that different from wanting to appropriate your father's wife or your mother's husband. It's the same psychological mechanism: the Freudian idea that desire is triangular—you desire what the other desires.”

“Are you able to support yourself from your work?”

“For the past few years, I have been. But it's been a long time coming. I'm thirty-nine years old. Previously, I did waitressing, commercial art, some teaching. At that time, my support systems were critical rather than financial.
October
was the earliest of these systems.” Levine goes to a ramshackle metal cabinet and brings out some xeroxes of writings about her work that appeared in
October
and elsewhere, along with some statements that she wrote herself to accompany exhibitions of her work. The statements are stiff and portentous. When, later in the conversation, Levine remarks that she is attracted to the painters of the sublime but can't conceive of herself doing such work, because “I just can't take myself that seriously,” I tell her of my sense of the discrepancy between herself and the forbidding writer of the statements, who seems able to take herself
very
seriously.

Levine says, “I know. Many people have said they were surprised when they met me—how different I was from the writer of those statements. The tone of those things isn't right. I guess I get intimidated when I'm faced with writing.”

One of Levine's early statements—quoted in part by Douglas Crimp in a 1980 article in
October
—has an arrestingly different character:

Since the door was only half closed, I got a jumbled view of my mother and father on the bed, one on top of the other. Mortified, hurt, horror-struck, I had the hateful sensation of having placed myself blindly and completely in unworthy hands. Instinctively and without effort, I divided myself, so to speak, into two persons, of whom one, the real, the genuine one, continued on her own account, while the other, a successful imitation of the first, was delegated to have relations with the world. My first self remains at a distance, impassive, ironical, and watching.

The surprise of this passage is followed by an even more astonishing revelation by Crimp: “Not only do we recognize this as a description of something we already know—the primal scene—but our recognition might extend even further, to the Moravia novel from which it has been lifted. For Levine's autobiographical statement is only a string of quotations pilfered from others.”

Sherrie Levine's bleak little conceits have stirred the imaginations of some of the art world's most advanced thinkers. Rosalind Krauss, at the end of the extraordinary title essay of her book
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
, in which she magisterially makes her way (with a few French litter-bearers) through the thicket of the discourse on originality set in motion by Walter Benjamin's essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” holds up Levine's purloined photographs as a kind of master trope of postmodernism. Another theorist—the critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh—in an
Artforum
article entitled “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” compliments Levine on being “the strongest negation within the gallery framework of the re-emergent dominance of the art commodity,” adding, “Her work, melancholic and complacent in defeat, threatens within its very structure, mode of operation, and status the current reaffirmation of individual expressive creativity and its implicit reaffirmation of private property and enterprise.” Buchloh goes on to say, “Baudelaire was wrong when he argued that the poetical was necessarily alien to female nature since melancholy was outside the female emotional experience. Enter the female dandy, whose disdain has been sharpened by the experience of phallocratic oppression, and whose sense of resistance to domination is therefore more acute than that of her male colleagues, if they still exist.”

Julian Schnabel is believed to be the richest artist working in New York today (there are waiting lists for his paintings), so I am not surprised to learn—when Sischy takes me on a visit to his studio on White Street—that this is only an auxiliary studio to the main one, on Twentieth Street. (There is a third studio at Schnabel's country place, on Long Island.) Schnabel is a large, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five, with a fresh, clear, ruddy face, a direct gaze, and a natural, simple, friendly manner that inclines toward good-natured kidding. A pretty blond assistant meets us at the door and ushers us into a vast two-story loft, where Schnabel, who is wearing dark baggy trousers and a dark turtleneck sweater, awaits us. He leads us to one of two enormous paintings that are hanging loosely from beams high up and explains that it is painted on a tarpaulin from a truck that he came across on a trip to Mexico the previous year; the truck had broken down on the highway, and Schnabel bought the tarp from the driver for seventy dollars. “That's all I had on me—I would have given him more if I'd had it. I want you to look at those creases and folds, and at those patches.” Schnabel adjusts lights to bring out the textures of the weatherworn brown tarp, on which he has painted, in broad strokes of white paint, a monstrous sort of primitive beast-man, with a leering face, an exposed rib cage, and a pair of clawlike extremities; at the top left, the letters “AZ” have been painted twice in red. In the late seventies, Schnabel began to attract notice with his “plate” paintings—he would affix a thick encrustation of crockery to the canvas before starting to paint—and the creased and patched tarpaulin is evidently another expression of his disinclination to start with a blank canvas (or, in Lawson's terms, to be original). An even more striking example of this refusal, which Schnabel shows us later at the main studio, is a series of paintings done on the stage sets of a Kabuki drama, which a friend sent him from Japan. These are six panels bearing delicately colored, stylized scenes of trees and flowers, over which, like a vandal, Schnabel has done brutish expressionist drawings in thick, dark strokes. If Sherrie Levine's reverent little thefts are “transgressional,” what are we to call Schnabel's rude violations? As Schnabel directs a strong young assistant to turn the heavy Kabuki sets this way and that, he keeps up a line of easy, agreeable, anecdotal patter about his work. What he says doesn't make too much sense; it isn't “hard,” it's just talk—one has to say something to people who come to one's studio. Schnabel shows us an enormous amount of work—his output of the year—with the modestly pleased air of a successful entrepreneur. His energy and enterprise seem boundless; he tries all kinds of things in all kinds of figurative and abstract styles, and everything has a look of bigness and boldness and confidence. One work has a discrepant look of insignificance: it is a white shag rug on which a black-and-brown cross has been painted. I ask him about it, and he says something cheerfully vague about how the rug had been in a summerhouse he had rented and had got stained, so he bought it from the owner.

I recall the first time I met Schnabel, at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art's show of international contemporary painting, to which I had gone with Sischy: she and I were standing before a Schnabel abstraction—done on cowhide, with a pair of antlers sticking out of it—when Schnabel himself appeared. Positioning himself behind Sischy, with his hands on her shoulders, he gazed fondly at his work and said, “I bet you're the only person at this opening who is having her back rubbed by the artist whose picture she is standing in front of.” Now, in the studio, he talks about the “objectness” of his work. I ask him if he is using the word in the sense in which Michael Fried used it in his famous essay “Art and Objecthood,” first published in
Artforum
in 1967. Fried's difficult, profound meditation on the threat to art posed by what he called literalism (more commonly called minimalism) is a sort of culminating aria, sung from the ground with the knife in the chest, of the enterprise known as formalist art criticism. It is an extraordinary performance—written in the driest, densest, most disdainful language, and yet permeated by an almost hysterical emotionality. As Fried's argument develops, it becomes a kind of allegory of good and evil—good being modernist painting and sculpture, which seek to transcend or “defeat” their “objecthood” (the canvas and paint, or the stone, metal, or wood they are made of) and thus achieve the “presentness” of true art; and evil being literalist painting and sculpture, which embrace their objecthood and thus degenerate into the inartistic condition of “theater.” Schnabel says he doesn't know Fried's essay and asks me what it is about. After I tell him, he nods, and says with devastating carelessness, “All that is the language of another generation. We don't use language like that today. We're a different generation. We're interested in different things.”