Art History, After Sherrie Levine examines the career, and the implications, of Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs “after Walker Evans”—taken not from life but from Evans’s famous depression–era documents of rural Alabama—became central examples for the claims of postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. Coinciding with her current survey at the Whitney Museum, this first book—length evaluation draws on a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label “artist” and the idea of oeuvre—and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine’s work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice—material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the object itself resists.
New York City, NY; NYC