Sherrie Levine, After Russell Lee: 1-60

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0:00:05.4 Steven Zucker: We’re in the Peoria Riverfront Museum looking at some of the most important art of the late 20th and 21st centuries. Laid out on this dark gray wall is a work of art by Sherrie Levine, After Russell Lee: 1–60.

0:00:19.6 Bill Conger: We are greeted by photographs, perfectly gridded, 60 of these. I think the first impulse is to begin looking at each one of these very unique images, and you are aware that these are historic.

0:00:32.6 Steven Zucker: But we’re looking at a contemporary work of art. And this is Sherrie Levine’s strategy: to rephotograph and reproduce original works.

0:00:41.5 Bill Conger: What we have here is essentially a reproduction of an original WPA-era photographer who is documenting life in a very specific time. And decades later, Sherrie Levine is remaking these photographs and essentially claiming some ownership of them.

0:01:01.8 Steven Zucker: Right at eye level, we’re seeing a photograph of a rodeo in Pie Town, New Mexico. In fact, all of these photographs were taken at Pie Town, of people doing agricultural work, people enjoying themselves at a town fair, people going into schools, people going to church. This is rural life in America in 1940.

0:01:21.3 Bill Conger: You are surrounded by these rodeo participants and the starkness of the sky and the harsh, earthy quality of the lower portion of the frame. You can feel the dust and the dirt, and you are there.

0:01:34.5 Steven Zucker: Now, the Farm Security Administration was an attempt by the Roosevelt administration to get Americans back to work in the depths of the Depression, but this also included artists and photographers. And photographers were sent out on assignment to look at the conditions, especially in rural America. And some of the most famous photographs to come out of that project were by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange. I think we all know that iconic image of the Migrant Mother, and this is very much part of that project. Sherrie Levine chose 60 photographs that did not constitute a complete set, and so it’s her selection. And she chose these color photographs, these early slides that he had produced, as opposed to the black and white photography that we associate more readily with this era.

0:02:19.2 Bill Conger: Sherrie is part of a group of artists from the 1980s entitled the Pictures Generation. This is the first time that contemporary artists were products of early 20th-century media. And to me, I cannot help but think the tonality is so similar to early television.

0:02:38.1 Steven Zucker: So let’s turn then to what it means for a late 20th-century artist to appropriate another artist’s work and to then claim it as her own. Now, because this particular set of photographs was made for the Farm Security Administration, there is no copyright on this work. Nevertheless, Russell Lee is part of the title, and Russell Lee has a kind of moral ownership of this work, and yet she’s taking it.

0:03:03.1 Bill Conger: Making Russell Lee’s name primary, she is declaring that not only is this Russell Lee’s work, that it is also her work.

0:03:12.9 Steven Zucker: And yet we’re looking at Russell Lee’s work more closely than we would be otherwise.

0:03:18.5 Bill Conger: We have to understand Russell Lee, but then we, in a sense, have to put him aside.

0:03:22.9 Steven Zucker: She describes her strategy as one that is a kind of overlay of meaning. That is, when we look at one of these prints, we’re looking at two photographs. We’re looking at his original photograph, but we’re looking through her intervention. We’re looking through her work, the lens that she’s constructed. And as we look at this grid of photographs, it reminds me of so much of the Minimalism of the 1960s and 1970s, where the grid was paramount so that in some ways, she’s disempowering the individual photographs and empowering them more collectively.

0:03:58.5 Bill Conger: The viewer now becomes part of the work, and in a sense, the viewer is kind of the artist as well.

0:04:04.3 Steven Zucker: Well, if I walk up to this work, what am I to think? I want to heroize Russell Lee. He’s the photographer; he’s the one who made contact in this community, who captured these images, who made decisions about what his angle would be, what was the shutter speed, what was the aperture. All of that was his, but this is a work by Sherrie Levine. And what she is interested in is dislocating, rupturing, what we take for granted so much in the art world, which is the importance of authenticity, the importance of originality, of the original. And she’s turning the notion of what is original on its head.

0:04:37.4 Bill Conger: I tend to think of the act less hostile, more of releasing the image from the artist.

0:04:43.9 Steven Zucker: And so often when we approach a work of art, it is clouded by our knowledge of the artist’s biography. We want to know who this person was who made this thing, rather than being able to see the thing more purely and more directly. And Sherrie Levine’s work is often understood as responding to ideas that were developed in Europe, especially in France, by literary critics, most notably by Roland Barthes, and the idea of the Death of the Author, the empowering of the reader. And we can see that being played out here, that is to say, that the reader brings all of their knowledge, all of their experience, all of their viewing acuity to the work. And that is just as valid, if not more valid, than the original intent of the author.

0:05:25.9 Bill Conger: Ultimately, I think her love for images, her love for this particular time, her love for the artist, that she is appropriating fuels this piece. It’s not just Russell’s image anymore. It’s Russell and Sherrie’s combined. I think that’s why this particular work is such a favorite in this exhibition.

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