Sherrie Levine, After Walker Evans: 4 (1981)
So, Sherrie Levine photographed a bunch of Walker Evans photographs from a book, including this one, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, and called it her work. That's it. That's what she did.
I'm not a huge fan of conceptual art—here "appropriation art," I'm told, although that term could be used much more productively to cover so many other things, including AfuckingI—but I'm willing to see the point of photographing a famous photograph to put the viewer at a remove from the process of seeing the photo in a book, which is, itself, at a remove from the original. All very meta and reception theory blababla.
What I don't get is how museums torque this as somehow being "feminist":
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority…
Centre Pompidou: She questions the ideas of authorship, originality and authenticity, together with the under-representation of women in art history.
Whitney Museum: Appropriation…also subverted the authority of a patriarchal canon of art history and underscored the centrality of authorship and historical context in our understanding of artworks.
What the what now? Sooo...if a Black artist had done the exact same thing instead would that be a "subversion of the authority of a white canon" and "a Black hijacking of white authority"? And if an LGBTQ artist had done it, would that be a "subversion of the authority of a cishet canon"? And so on down the line?
Hmm...let's think on that for a bit. And on the inability of museum staff to write things that don't make one want to slap them.
