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 theorizing postmodernism in the visual arts in the 1980s. For the first in-depth examination of Levine, Howard Singerman surveys a wide variety of sources, both historical and theoretical, to assess an artist whose work was understood from the outset to challenge both the label "artist" and the idea of oeuvre--and who has over the past three decades crafted a significant oeuvre of her own. Singerman addresses Levine's work after Evans, Brancusi, Malevich, and others as an experimental art historical practice--material reenactments of the way the work of art history is always doubled in and structured by language, and of the ways the art itself resists.