Art History, After Sherrie Levine

This book examines the career of New York-based artist Sherrie Levine, whose 1981 series of photographs "after Walker Evans"--taken not from life but from Evans's famous Depression-era documents of rural Alabama--became central examples in the theorizing of visual postmodernism in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a broad range of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to oppose the values of the art world in the 1980s--art as commodity--but who, by the end of the decade, was exhibiting in some of the most successful commercial galleries in New York. Singerman addresses Levine's work as an experimental art historical practice--material reenactments of the way the work of art history is structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.