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Conceptual art
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Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation.
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Sherrie Levine,
After Alexander Rodchenko #1-12,
1987-98.
12 gelatin-silver prints, A.P. 1/1, edition of 5, 8 x 6 inches each.
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Purchased with funds contributed by the Photography Committee, the estate of Ruth Zierler, in memory of her dear departed son, William S. Zierler, and Pamela and Arthur Sanders.
2006.76.
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Sherrie Levine (b. 1947, Hazleton, Pennsylvania) emerged in the late 1970s as a member of a group of conceptual artists known as the “Pictures” generation, a name derived from the seminal exhibition organized by Douglas Crimp for Artist’s Space in 1977. Immersed in the prevailing currents of critical theory, these artists used appropriation-based techniques to interrogate the assumptions surrounding visual representation. Whereas many of her contemporaries drew from the image bank of everyday life and the mass media, Levine’s best-known work finds a more rarified source in the annals of 20th-century art, appropriating from such modernist luminaries as Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Gustav Klimt, Piet Mondrian, and Man Ray. After Alexander Rodchenko (1987–98) comprises 12 facsimiles of the work of the Russian Constructivist, whose celebrated photographs dating from the 1920s and ’30s reflect both his interest in graphic abstraction and a fiercely communist ideology. The performative nature of Levine’s practice, in which she assumes, or impersonates, the identity of an artistic predecessor, has been interpreted by feminist critics as a subversive intervention in the rigid (and overwhelmingly male) construction of the art-historical canon. Levine, however, prefers to view her work as a regenerative act of collaboration, transforming the singular masterpiece into something fluid and perpetually renewable. —Katherine Brinson
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