Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, stop everything you are doing and contemplate for a moment the dizzying audacity of Sherrie Levine. This artist, born in 1947, this woman who had the magnificent audacity to appropriate canonical works from art history to remake them identically, unapologetically and without blinking. When Levine takes photographs of Walker Evans’s photos, when she remakes Egon Schiele’s nudes, or when she casts Duchamp’s urinal in bronze, she does not merely copy; she commits an act of intellectual bravery that shatters the very foundations of artistic originality.
Since her explosive entry onto the New York scene in the late 1970s, Levine has established herself as one of the most disturbing figures in contemporary art. Her first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1981, where she presented her now-famous photographs entitled “After Walker Evans,” was a real punch in the stomach to the art world [1]. By this simple yet definitive gesture, Levine placed herself in the lineage of great iconoclasts while staging a profound reflection on the notion of authorship.
But do not be mistaken, Levine’s art is not a mere cynical exercise in copying. It is rather a complex negotiation with the past, a way to invite herself to the table of the great male masters who have dominated art history. As she so rightly confided to Janet Malcolm: “As a woman, I felt there was no place for me. The whole artistic system was designed to celebrate these objects of male desire. Where, as a female artist, could I position myself?” [2]. This fundamentally feminist question underpins her entire work.
Levine’s power lies in her ability to create works that are both familiar and strangely new. Take “Fountain (Buddha)” (1996), her polished bronze version of Duchamp’s urinal. The original object, already a radical act of provocation in 1917, becomes under Levine’s hands something even more ambiguous, a precious sculpture that evokes not only Duchamp but also Brancusi, as the artist herself noticed with surprise [3]. It is no longer a simple readymade, but an object charged with a new sensuality, an aura that Duchamp precisely sought to eliminate.
To fully understand Levine’s approach, one must situate her within the broader context of French post-structuralism and literary theory. Her work is a perfect embodiment of what Michel Foucault called the “author-function,” the idea that the author is not a real person but a cultural construction that serves to organize and control the production of meaning [4]. By rephotographing Evans or reproducing Duchamp, Levine highlights the mechanism by which certain names become powerful cultural signifiers, sources of authority and value.
Foucault’s theory on the relationships between knowledge and power finds a perfect visual expression in Levine’s appropriative gestures. When she takes hold of iconic images from the history of art, she reveals the power structures that determine which works are canonized and which are marginalized. Her interest in photographers like Walker Evans is not innocent; it is about questioning how these images became cultural monuments, how they acquired their privileged status in our museums and history books.
Foucault taught us to see how discourse constructs its own objects, how it produces what it merely claims to describe. Levine’s work operates in exactly this way; it does not simply represent the world, it actively intervenes in the systems of representation that shape our perception of the world. When she reproduces Edward Weston’s photographs depicting his naked son, she not only appropriates these images, she also reveals how these photographs contribute to the construction of specific masculine ideals, how they are part of a long tradition of objectifying bodies [5].
Levine’s work also constitutes a profound meditation on the notion of time in art. By taking up works from the past, she creates what the philosopher Jacques Rancière would call a “deliberate anachronism,” a temporal collision that disrupts our perception of history as a linear and progressive flow [6]. Her appropriations function as time-exploring machines, creating temporal short circuits that question the very idea of artistic progress.
Rancière suggests that contemporary art is precisely characterized by this ability to rework forms from the past, to reactivate them in the present. For him, aesthetics is not a theory of art but a “configuration of the sensible,” a way of organizing what can be seen, said, and thought at a given time [7]. Levine’s work intervenes exactly at this level; she reorganizes the sensible by moving images from one context to another, disturbing established hierarchies of visibility.
Consider her series “After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner” (1982), where she takes up Kirchner’s expressionist figures but empties them of their original expressivity. This gesture is not a simple formal appropriation; it is a fundamental inquiry into the status of expression in modern art. Levine here tackles one of modernism’s founding myths, the idea that art is the authentic expression of a subjective interiority. By taking up expressionist forms but emptying them of their supposed emotional charge, she reveals the constructed nature of this notion of authentic expression [8].
This political dimension of Levine’s work is often underestimated in favor of a more formal or conceptual reading. Yet, as Craig Owens pointed out, her work fully participates in a feminist critique of dominant systems of representation [9]. By appropriating canonical works produced by men, Levine not only questions artistic originality, she also challenges the gendered distribution of symbolic power in the field of art.
Le genius of Levine is having understood that the best way to criticize the system was not to flee it but to inhabit it differently. Rather than seeking an “authentically feminine” artistic language outside established traditions, she chose to occupy those traditions from within, to parasitize them, to make them malfunction. This is a strategy that Rancière would call “dissensual,” not a simple frontal opposition but a subtle reconfiguration of the coordinates of the sensible [10].
Let’s take her “Melt Down” paintings (1990), these monochromes derived from a numerical average of the colors of famous paintings. By reducing complex works to a single uniform color, Levine operates a sort of abstraction squared, she abstracts what was already abstract. In doing so, she reveals the arbitrary nature of modernist abstraction, its status as a historically situated convention rather than a transcendent truth. These monochromes are like ghosts of paintings, spectral presences that haunt art history [11].
This spectral dimension is particularly evident in her “Knot Paintings” (1985), these plywood panels on which she painted the wood knots in bright colors. These works play with the idea of a nature that is always already coded, already marked by cultural meanings. The knots of the wood, these natural “accidents,” become under her brush deliberate signs, marks of a paradoxical artistic intentionality since she only emphasizes what was already there [12].
Levine’s work thus invites us to radically reconsider our relationship to art history. Not as a heritage to be revered or rejected, but as a field of active forces with which it is possible to maintain complex and ambivalent relations. Her work embodies what Rancière calls the “discomfort in aesthetics,” that keen awareness of the contradictions inherent in our contemporary experience of art [13].
For if Levine reworks modernist works, it is also because she maintains with them a relationship of critical love. As she herself has stated: “I try to collapse the utopian and dystopian aspects of high modernism” [14]. It is not a simple cynical deconstruction, but rather an ambiguous homage, a way to keep a tradition alive while exposing its limitations and blind spots.
This ambivalence is particularly visible in “The Fortune (After Man Ray)” (1990), these luxurious billiard tables inspired by a painting by Man Ray. By transforming a surrealist image into sumptuous physical objects, Levine blurs the boundary between representation and reality, between art as a critique of merchandise and art as luxury merchandise. These tables perfectly embody what the artist called “that curious zone where merchandise meets the sublime” [15].
Levine’s strength lies precisely in her ability to maintain these contradictions without seeking to resolve them. Rather than proposing a utopian alternative to modernist art, she chooses to inhabit its ruins, to explore them as an archaeologist explores a vanished civilization. In doing so, she invites us to a more complex relationship with our cultural heritage, neither blind veneration nor simplistic rejection, but a form of critical and creative appropriation.
In her photographs after Rodchenko, her “chevrons” after Mondrian, or her sculptures after Brancusi, Levine therefore practices a methodical anachronism, which is a way of making different artistic temporalities dialogue, of creating productive short circuits between past and present. Her work shows us that the history of art is not a linear progression towards ever more originality, but a field of forces in constant reconfiguration.
Sherrie Levine’s work invites us to fundamentally rethink our relationship to art and its history. Rather than desperately seeking novelty at any cost, she suggests that it may be more interesting to explore the still unexplored potentialities of the already seen, the already done. In a world saturated with images, where the injunction to originality has become an advertising cliché, Levine’s strategy appears surprisingly relevant. She reminds us that repetition is not necessarily sterile, that it can, on the contrary, be the site of a subtle but decisive difference.
So the next time you contemplate a work by Sherrie Levine, whether her photographs after Walker Evans, her bronze fountains, or her digital monochromes, remember that you are not simply facing a copy, but a profound questioning of what it means to make art today. A questioning that has lost none of its relevance nor its subversive strength.
- Douglas Crimp, “Pictures”, October, Vol. 8 (Spring, 1979).
- Janet Malcolm, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist”, The New Yorker, October 20, 1986, quoted in Howard Singerman, Art History, After Sherrie Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
- Sherrie Levine, interviewed by Martha Buskirk, October, Vol. 70 (Autumn, 1994).
- Michel Foucault, “What is an author?”, Bulletin of the French Society of Philosophy, 63rd year, no. 3, July-September 1969.
- Eleonora Milani, “Sherrie Levine: A Matter of Indiscernibility”, Flash Art, 2016.
- Jacques Rancière, “The concept of anachronism and the truth of the historian”, L’Inactuel, no. 6, 1996.
- Jacques Rancière, The Distribution of the Sensible: Aesthetics and Politics (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000).
- Howard Singerman, Art History, After Sherrie Levine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
- Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism”, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster (ed.) (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983).
- Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008).
- Roberta Smith, “Flattery (Sincere?) Lightly Dusted With Irony”, The New York Times, November 10, 2011.
- Hélène Trespeuch, “Sherrie Levine, from Appropriationism to Simulationism”, Marges, no. 17, 2013.
- Jacques Rancière, Malaise in Aesthetics (Paris: Galilée, 2004).
- Sherrie Levine, interviewed by Martha Buskirk, October, Vol. 70 (Autumn, 1994).
- Ibid.
