The Best of Both World
Sherrie Levine's After Walker Evans
David Deitcher
After Walker Evans, 1981
Mary and Leigh Block Gallery • Northwestern University
Who are you who will read these words and study these photographs, and through what cause, by what chance, and for what purpose, and by what right do you qualify to, and what will you do about it ... ?
—James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Sherrie Levine's 22 photographs, entitled After Walker Evans, are part of a long-term investigation that began in 1980 when she made a "collage" by cutting a photograph by Andreas Feininger out of a book and mounting it on board. She repeated this process with other Feiningers and with some of Eliot Porter’s works until, a year later, Levine expanded upon the significance of her initial decision to "take" other people's pictures by rephotographing photographs by Edward Weston and, finally, Walker Evans. To those who visited Levine's New York exhibition of this work in 1981, it seemed as if there was little to be gained from scrutinizing the imagery with a gallery-goer's customary attitude of critical appreciation. That seemed redundant because Levine herself had already assumed the attitude of critical spectator of Evans's photographs. To be sure, they were lovely to be in the room with, but it did seem embarrassing to be caught looking at these pictures too closely. You felt that the meaning of Levine's curiously covert art had to lie elsewhere, perhaps in the circumstances of its exhibition rather than in the images themselves.
After Walker Evans, 1981
Consistent with this experience, sympathetic and hostile critics alike described Levine’s project variously as a critique of or attack on modernist art and photography, modernism’s central ideological assumptions, and its supporting institutional framework. For example, they noted that Levine criticized the terms by which the contemporary audience for art discerned its favorite cultural icons; among these terms, "originality" was and still is preeminent. That this reading of After Walker Evans was rapidly consolidated into orthodoxy was largely due to the fact that it is difficult to describe this work gainfully in terms of the distinct objects that constitute it. It is a credit to Levine's project that traditional iconography remains an inadequate method of deciphering the meaning of After Walker Evans.
Instead of taking photographs of trees or nudes, I take photographs of photographs. I choose pictures that manifest the desire that nature and culture provide us with a sense of order and meaning. I appropriate these images to express my own simultaneous longing for the passion of engagement and the sublimity of aloofness. I hope that in my photographs of photographs an uneasy peace will be made between my attraction to the ideals these pictures exemplify and my desire to have no ideals or fetters whatsoever. It is my aspiration that my photographs, which contain their own contradiction, would represent the best of both worlds.
—Sherrie Levine, 1980, Typewritten artist’s statement
After Walker Evans, 1981
Why, out of the hundreds of photographs by Walker Evans, did Levine choose from among those he took while working between 1935 and 1937 for the Farm Security Administration? Surely not only because, as part of the FSA archive in the Library of Congress, these photographs are in the public domain and therefore outside the reach of legal threats for copyright infringement. Furthermore, why, among the hundreds of Evans's FSA photographs, did Levine select these 22? She chose images that together allow (if not encourage) a kind of narrative coherence. This, at any rate, is my response when looking at such a group of photographs, especially when, in the absence of prior knowledge—and captions—a figure reappears in more than one shot.
I see a family, a poor, scrupulously clean house, a corner of a room - I surmise it is in the same house - a handsome farmer, a woman with an enigmatic smile, a second family—not doing so well?—and is that the same farmer with them? Are they neighbors? A child's grave. Was it their child? Is there a story here? Becoming curious about so many things, I want to know more and turn to the Evans material.
This sort of curiosity seems precisely what Levine's project is about; she solicits desire on the part of the spectator, a desire shared by the artist herself. Desire, in this case, is a condition of subjective doubt, a sensation of one’s fundamental incompleteness in the world. According to psychoanalytic theory, such desire is a permanent byproduct of the process of objectification and psychic fragmentation through which, as children, we acquire language. As such, desire is at the source of imagination.
After Walker Evans, 1981
After Walker Evans, 1981
The overwhelming majority of the photographs Levine selected dates from Evans's collaboration with James Agee during July and August of 1936 on what turned out to be Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—a book intended both to alert Americans to the deplorable conditions of the rural poor and to pay tribute to them with a combination of lucid documentary photography and modernist prose and poetry. What we are considering here is the site of a once hopeful, now remote, attempt at the reconciliation of the polar limits of modernist aesthetics: the urge to abstraction and the urge to social responsiveness. To judge from Levine's other works, she has always shown a special curiosity—and desire—when it comes to the tension between action and meditation; between the modern belief in progress and the equally modern tendency to retreat to the studio in order to salvage a vestige of mythic humanism. These tendencies characterize the dialectical limits of historical avant-gardism and idealist modernism, respectively.
The fact that Evans and Agee sought to bear personal witness to human tragedy in rural America in an aesthetic collaboration between photographer and writer suggests that theirs was an attempt to respond to a situation of desire in the widest sense of that term. One characteristic of modernist art was that it also aimed to suspend desire, if not to remove us altogether from human misery at least while we contemplated its transcendental objects.
Modernist art with its emphasis on invention, harmonic relations, ideal self-containment and coherence, could temporarily offer artist and spectator alike the sensation of a subjective fullness and calm that will always elude us in life, notwithstanding myriad claims to the contrary that have become the stock and trade of our consumer culture. We find no such metaphysical shelter in After Walker Evans. Levine's project stimulates questions, among them: What do you see here? What do you know? Would you know, for example, that this child, blanched by the white summer light that passes over his right shoulder, sat in a miner's home in Morgantown, West Virginia, not in Hale County, Alabama, where Agee and Evans's subjects, the tenant cotton farmers, lived? Or would you know that in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Walker Evans chose to publish a version of the portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs where, unlike the one Levine rephotographed, she is without that strange half smile? The "after," in Levine’s After Walker Evans denotes more than the condition of indebtedness or derivation; it is also the temporal "after" as in: "Our world came after Walker Evans’s."
After Walker Evans, 1981
Levine approached Evans's photographs as a historian might approach documents: wading in the disorderly testimony of something that was and lending it coherence. Also typical of the historian's situation is the fact that Levine’s choices—the categories she established—tell us less about the "truth" of the past than about Levine’s—and our—perpetual desire. When she rephotographed these 22 images, Levine created a new category or series: After Walker Evans. Within it there exist subcategories: two children's graves, two groups of families, two interiors, two individual portraits, etc. Such a system of classification, as a means of creating order amidst disorder, contributes to the potential for the reward of narrative relations. As spectators we look for these narrative relations in the hope that we can suspend desire by knowing all about After Walker Evans.
Above all else: in God's name don't think of it as Art.
—James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Although we seem light years away from the anger and urgency of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it is well to remember that Agee expressed an extraordinary ambivalence in framing his and Evans's project. Not only did he say that they felt like spies among these families, he was convinced that their book—specifically its systems of representation—was wholly inadequate even to their limited goals. From Levine's profoundly disillusioned vantage-point in the 1980s, even Agee's degree of confidence in his ability to confront human tragedy head on is unthinkable. But we should be careful not to characterize her rejection of modernist belief as cynical. Ultimately such a rejection of modernist ideology has made it possible for artists Iike Levine to salvage for us a new kind of shelter in aesthetic experience, one that is better suited to our own time. Hers is a shelter from the false promises that, in our culture, have continued to serve as an imaginary collateral for those who hold the mortgage on our lives.
After Walker Evans, 1981
Acknowledgments
Picture Taking: Wedge, Walker Evans, Sherrie Levine, Robert Mapplethorpe is on view at the Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, November 1, 1985, through December 22, 1985.
The photographs by Sherrie Levine are courtesy of the artist and Baskerville+ Watson Gallery, New York City.
This publication, available to gallery visitors free of charge, is supported by a gift from the Hulda B. and Maurice L. Rothschild Foundation.
S. David Deitcher, author of this essay on Sherrie Levine, is an art historian and critic working in New York City.
©Copyright 1985, Northwestern University, Mary and Leigh Block Gallery
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