Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Rosalind Krauss - Post-Medium Condition
Krauss traces three "narratives," beginning with the rise of Conceptual art, in order to historically contextualize post-media. She cites the paradox of abstract art, which attempted to engage with a pure, separate, artistic realm, while actually conforming to the societal discourse of commercialism. Rather than denying commercialism, Conceptual artists engaged with this commodification, hoping to evade industrialism by working within its system (11). However, Krauss recognizes that Conceptual art's reliance on art theory insinuates the art into the commercial discourse of self-promotion (15). She examines these trends through artist Marcel Broodthaers, who she locates "at" and "for" the complex of the post-medium condition (45), citing his random assignations of "Fig. I," "Fig. 2," etc. to random objects as examples of the post-medium's conflation of art and modern life.
In her other two narratives, Krauss emphasizes the increased sense of media heterogeneity that disallows the previous conceptions of the wholeness and purity. The first of these narrative ends with television, a medium in which any notion of an artistic "core" diminishes with the medium's embrace of heterogeneous activity, ranging widely in space and time (31). The other narrative traces poststructuralist theory, citing Jacques Derrida's arguments for the individual's dependency on and constitution through external sources (32). Thus, poststructuralism presents a philosophical representation of Conceptual art in its recognition of interdependence and thus intermediation.
While Broodthaers engaged in the discourses of Derrida and Michel Foucault, he also predicted how the institutional critique posited by "art as theory" would dissipate with its eventual dependence on the support of the criticized institution, such that every artistic avant-garde becomes fodder for its enemy (33). Here, Krauss's reasons for focusing on Broodthaers become clear: his understanding of the post-media paradox allowed him to engage in a redemption of the art post-mediation seems to render indistinct. She cites Walter Benjamin's idea that a form's most positive potential, its most redemptive characteristics, chiefly prevail first with its moment of birth and finally with its obsolescence (41). Thus, Broodthaers's attraction to outmoded forms, such as the techniques of early cinema, became an engagement with this site of redemptive potential (43). In these cinematic origins, untainted by the theories of structuralism, he recognized the inherently "aggregative" nature of film (45). These discoveries led to Broodthaers's dependence on fiction as way of revealing that which reality hides (47), namely, its dependence on constitutive layers rather than a solid, unitary foundation.
Broodthaers enacts this revelation through fiction in his poetic revision Charles Baudelaire. Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes and in his film "A Voyage on the North Sea," both of which allow a journey through the manifold layers interacting within the media (52). Fiction narrates the "impossible attempt to transform succession into stasis, or a chain of parts into a whole" (53) as one attempts to reclaim the wholeness of the original source, the outmoded. The moment of obsolescence, of becoming outmoded, thus allows for a recognition of how these older practices interact with the newer practices of which they constitute a layer (53).
Krauss delineates the progression from the modernist drive toward pure art forms, realized in Greenberg's discussions of "specificity," toward the post-medium in a way that articulates the negative and positive ends of post-mediation (postmodernism and "differential specificity," respectively). She distinguishes between postmodernism (e.g. the video installation, intermedia) and what she calls "differential specificity," revealing the former as complete indulgence in capital enterprise and the latter as the potential for the salvation of an artistic realm. Locating its origins in Broodthaers, Krauss articulates the promise of engagement in "differential specificity," an idea that recognizes and articulates the complexities of the post-medium through a contemplation of the outmoded forms it combines (56). In this way, Krauss establishes a new artistic realm that allows for notions of art, art theory, and aestheticism involved with, but not indistinguishable from capitalistic society.
John Summers - Future Primitive
| JOHN SUMMERS
FUTURE PRIMITIVE
Mark Tanner Sculpture Award Winner 2006/7Solo show of new sculpture funded by the award Exhibition open 14 September - 14 October 2007 Gallery talk Sunday 14 October 3pm |
 |
Spirit Killer 2007
On first looking at John Summers’ sculptures
you might be bewildered, amused or even repelled by their hectic surface
noise – the glitter, the detritus, the seemingly randomly assembled
found objects. But looking deeper you see there is an order and control
as sophisticated as any traditional sculptor. The seriousness of these
playful works is in their precarious harmonies. Summers excels in the
metamorphosis of his materials - retaining the sense of flow and
becoming in the works while holding them at a point of minute
perfection.
Bachelor 2007
The immediacy of his work is arrived at by
continuous adjustment, as though a surgeon were working in
emergency/primitive conditions, improvising with materials and
instruments from a previous age. This forensic skill relates to the work
made for his MA show at the Royal College, which often resembled lumps
of prosthetic flesh. This almost Dr Frankenstein impulse has since
shifted from animating the merely human to the creation of forms
suggesting the birth of something quite unearthly.
Bustin' Bronco and Branded 2007
In certain recent works diamond and pearlised
carapaces crack open, about to spawn a second Liberace, or some other
star from the Las Vegas pantheon. There is a constant fluctuation
between the idea of undirected forces in the heavens and the deliberate
manufacture of glamour in Hollywood‘s own stellar system - created both
explosively and consciously.
Since graduating from the Slade in 1999, and
the Royal College of Art in 2002, John Summers has exhibited widely in
group shows both nationally and internationally, (including Studio 1.1,
London 2006, 2007; Hollow, London 2005; NY Armoury Fair 2004; Bloodshot
and Brighteyed, Berlin 2004, New Contemporaries 2002, 2003). His work
has generated high praise and interest, and has won him several
prestigious art awards, including the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award. The
exhibition funded by Mark Tanner Sculpture Award, which Summers won in
July 2006, will be his first solo show, and represents an important step
in his development as one of the brightest new talents in British
sculpture.
|
  |
Starman 2007 and detail
 
Private Party 2007 and detail
The Mark Tanner Sculpture Award is now the largest sculpture prize of its kind in the UK.
It is unique in its combination of offering both financial support
towards the production of new work and a solo exhibition to an
exceptional emerging sculptor. Standpoint will announce the winner of
this year’s award at the private view.
Originated in 2001, The Tanner
award increased to a total of £10,000 in 2005. £6,000 goes direct to the
receiving artist towards the production of new work, and £4,000 funds
and promotes the solo exhibition held at Standpoint Gallery the
following year. The Tanner award is a partnership project by Standpoint
Gallery and the charitable trust set up in memory of the sculptor Mark
Tanner, who trained at St Martins and was one of the first artists to
show at Standpoint. He died in 1998 after a long illness.
Down on the Upside 2006
|
Wade Guyton - Printing Simulated Painting II
Dots, Stripes, Scans
Wade Guyton at Whitney Museum of American Art
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: October 4, 2012
Like many artists Mr. Guyton, who is 40, is both a radical and a
traditionalist who breaks the mold but pieces it back together in a
different configuration. He is best known for austere, glamorous
paintings that have about them a quiet poetry even though devised using a
computer, scanner and printer. The show is titled “Wade Guyton: OS,”
referring to computer operating systems.
Uninterested in drawing by hand, much less in wielding a paintbrush, he
describes himself as someone who makes paintings but does not consider
himself a painter. His vocabulary of dots, stripes, bands and blocks, as
well as much enlarged X’s and U’s and occasional scanned images,
combines the abstract motifs of generic Modernism and the recycling
strategies of Andy Warhol and Pictures Generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine.
One of his principal themes, which he endlessly cites and parodies yet
reveres, is Modernism as an epochal style of art, design and
architecture that permeates our culture from the artist’s loft to the
corporate boardroom. Another is modernity as an inescapable current
condition, personified in his case by his adaptation, as just another
kind of paintbrush, of the digital technology that pervades our everyday
lives.
While clearly not made by hand, his works are noticeably imperfect. The
paintings in particular clearly tax the equipment that generates them;
they emerge with glitches and irregularities — skids, skips, smears or
stutters — that record the process of their own making, stress the
almost human fallibility of machines and provide a semblance of
pictorial incident and life.
The line between what the artist has chosen and what technology has
willed is constantly blurred. For one thing, to achieve paintings of
substantial width, Mr. Guyton must fold his canvas and run it through
the printer twice; this gives nearly every image halves that are rarely
in sync. You will notice this right off the elevator, where the
exhibition’s first wall features five paintings of oddly off-register
images of flames, each punctuated by large, often fragmented U’s. Even
more emphatic discrepancies are apparent in an extended eight-panel work
in which thick black horizontal bands alternating with white ones
skittishly slant every which way but level; their jangling patterns form
a rhythmic, slow-motion Op Art.
The Guyton show has been organized by Scott Rothkopf, a 36-year-old
Whitney curator who has also written a convincing if overlong catalog
essay illuminating this artist’s development, and he plotted, in
collaboration with Mr. Guyton, a brilliant installation. More than 80
works are on view, mostly paintings but also computer drawings and a few
sculptures. Dating primarily from the last decade, they are displayed
on and among a series of parallel walls, some quite narrow. As you move
around, works seem to slide in and out of view, like images in different
windows on a computer screen. The changing vistas reveal the artist’s
motifs migrating restlessly from one scale or medium to another. The U’s
from the fire images are extruded into three dimensions in a group of
17 sculptures of mirrored stainless steel in 10 different sizes. Placed
in a tight row they form the show’s one instance of physical perfection
and suggest an irregular sculpture by Donald Judd but are in fact
individual works, temporarily brought together.
Born in Hammond, Ind., Mr. Guyton absorbed the critical theory of the
1970s and ’80s as an art major at the University of Tennessee in
Knoxville before seeing much art. And according to Mr. Rothkopf’s essay
Mr. Guyton still enjoys looking at paintings in books as much as at the
real thing, intrigued by the ways photographs alter and distort them. He
came to New York in 1996 to attend graduate school at Hunter College,
and his first exhibited works here were sculptures that evoked an ersatz
Modernism, most effectively in pieces casually executed in smoked and
mirrored plexiglass.
In 2002 he began appropriating images by a method more direct than his
Pictures Generation elders. Instead of rephotographing photographs, he
simply tore illustrations from books or auction catalogs and ran them
through his printer, superimposing lines, X’s, thick bands or grids on
their images. In one drawing here two dark yellow X’s printed on an
image of a modern kitchen perfectly match a cabinet, suggesting that
color-coordinated abstract art is essential to a stylish home. In
another, a series of thick horizontal bars partly obscure an old
half-timbered building whose geometric patterns are structurally
necessary, not decorative.
By 2004 Mr. Guyton was enlarging these motifs and printing them on
canvas, making paintings that are rife with ghosts. His black
monochromes evoke Ad Reinhardt and the Black paintings of Frank Stella
(especially when the printer goes slightly awry and starts imposing
white pinstripes). His more diaphanous gray ones can summon Mark
Rothko’s veils of color, while paintings featuring the blunt, fragmented
X’s can summon more Stella Minimalist sculpture or eroding corporate
logos.
A field of red and green stripes scanned from the end papers of a book conjures the work of Color Field
abstractionists like Kenneth Noland and Gene Davis as well as Christmas
wrapping paper. They first appear in two vertical paintings exhibited
side by side, where they are printed in similar scales but with quite
different results in tone and texture. In both paintings two large black
dots in the wide white margin above the stripes lend a clownish air.
The same stripes appear again, in something close to their original
scale, in several computer drawings that are sandwiched between
plexiglass in a big four-square frame that mimics both a window and a
canvas stretcher. (They mask images of a Stella aluminum stripe painting
and sculptures by Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner.) And the stripes
culminate in one of the show’s grander moments, running horizontally and
much enlarged across two immense paintings — one 50 feet long, the
other nearly 30 — that cover most of the north wall of the gallery. Here
they seem extravagant and bold, yet they also resemble large bolts of
fabric, unrolled, with the starts and stops of the printer creating
trompe l’oeil folds. Up close you encounter another digital mystery. The
extreme magnification creates an illusion of two kinds of textile: the
green as a twill pattern, the red as tweed fuzzy with little orange
dots.
In what seems to be a typical Guyton touch the big-statement grandeur of
these works is played down. They seem to be deliberately crowded by
“Drawings for a Large Picture,” which consists of 85 unframed computer
drawings displayed in nine vitrines lined with eye-popping blue
linoleum. The drawings are casually arranged — laid out in rows, piled
in corners — suggesting the constant flux that is the natural condition
of images in our time.
Sherrie Levine - Meltdown
| Sherrie Levine |
| ARTS Magazine, April 1990 |
PRINTS AND EDITIONS REVIEW
by Susan Tallman
One of the most
common complaints about the art world—about museums, galleries, and
especially about contemporary artists—is that they have to depend too
much on specialized knowledge, knowledge out of the reach of the casual
observer. In this country in particular, with its faith in the
autodidactic, any works or exhibitions not immediately accessible or
self-explanatory are likely to inspire charges of elitism or,
conversely, lack of quality. While historically it is true that the
enjoyment of good art has always required some degree of cultivation,
the question remains open: how much background knowledge is (or should
be) necessary to appreciate a work of art?
Prints suffer from this problem particularly, and they have always proved a somewhat rarified taste. Because the method of their production is so indirect, often invisible in the final product, the viewer has little sympathetic sense of the artist at work. In place of the physical empathy inspired by van Gogh's isolated brush strokes, for example, lies the dull question, "How was it done?" It does not help that prints are often small, flat, and black-and-white. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, prints are very often derived from another body of work; paintings, drawings, sculptures—objects with which the print aficionado will be aware, and which will color his impression and understanding of the familiar image so that it appears to him as a much richer thing than it might to the observer for whom those connections don't exist. For those in the know, the print can be the eloquent distillation of an artist's grander statements—an image reduced in color, mass, and complexity, to the bare minimum of what was essential to the idea.
These issues are brought to mind by a group of woodblock prints called Meltdown1, by Sherrie Levine. The four images, each a pattern of twelve color rectangles, are computer-generated analytical reductions of paintings by four modern masters: Mondrian's Tableau No II, Kirchner's Potsdam Square Berlin, a Monet Rouen Cathedral, and L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa. They come in a pristine poplar box, with a colophon that reads: "The twelve-color woodblock prints in the portfolio Meltdown have been created by Sherrie Levine by entering images, after Duchamp, Monet, Kirchnec, and Mondrian into a computer scanner that spatially quantizes and transforms these images into the minimum number of pixels, thus determining each of the colors in the four prints."
If this explanation seems obscure, imagine a digital approximation of a picture in which the computer interprets a tiny area to be a particular grade of gray or shade of color; the difference between the texture of this digitized image and that of film is that in the former these areas are stiffly rectangular "pixels" rather than blobby chemical grains. Higher resolution is gained by increasing the number of pixels per square inch until, in computer typesetting for example, the individual pixels are invisible to the naked eye. What Levine did was to reduce the number of pixels to twelve, so that large areas of canvas—swatches housing multiple colors, complicated forms, occasionally elaborate brushwork—are approximated in a single chunk of color, a sort of average of all the chromatic events occurring within the swatch. Working from a computer printout, Levine and her printers, Maurice Sanchez and James Miller, replicated this in the form of inked wooden blocks, bound together in a matrix, and printed them with masterful delicacy onto Korean Kojo paper. There is something undeniably winsome (and perhaps suspiciously cute) in this wedding of state-of-the-art technology to the ancient woodblock, that most Luddite of print media. The prints themselves—serene, abstract, vaguely oriental in texture, harshly contemporary in design—do little to suggest either high tech or their borrowed patrimony, or, for that matter, Levine's other work.
Levine first became known, and is still probably best known, for her appropriation pieces of the early eighties. In the most straightforward of these, she would take photographs of photographs by great photographers, title them simply After Walker Evans, or After Elliot Porter, and present them as her own work. Since the "original" works were photographic, since they shared both image and material with Levine's "Afters," there was no immediately perceptible difference apart from the accompanying label. (For Meltdown, the computer worked not from the actual paintings but from four Levine photographs of 1983: After Marcel Duchamp, After Piet Mondrian, After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and After Claude Monet.} These works were heralded as the definitive attack on—or mockery of—the modernist cult of "originality." So definitive, so lucid did they seem on this point, that the issue of what constitutes originality and whether it is a necessary component of art seemed dead in the water.
Levine then moved on to paintings on plywood in which the plywood "eyes" would be fitted out with gold, and to paintings of gameboards—checkers and backgammon. Last fall she exhibited sculptural glass realizations of the "bachelors" from Duchamp's The Bride Snipped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
Meltdown could be seen as the elegant merger of these three modes; the appropriation of imagery from the canons of great art; the formal, gridded rigor of the gameboard; the homage to and reinterpretation of famous artworks in the form of attractive, independent objects. But Meltdown doesn't reproduce pre-existing images; rather, it creates new ones. It is a work not of appropriation but of interpretation, albeit by interpretation through automation. It is a distillation, accomplished by successive stages of removal—from the paintings to Levine's reproductions; from the reproductions to the computer; from the computer's output to the woodblock. Each stage is subject to error and variation, intentional and unintentional—color, scale, proportion: all may shift. It is very much like the traditional process that has produced prints for centuries; and interestingly, the only time that Levine has employed computerized, quantized reduction was when she created these prints. The idea that they are created from pre-existing images automatically, rather than by human interpretation, allows some of the confusion about "originality" to be maintained—but, of course, only if one has read the colophon.
There is nothing in the appearance of the prints themselves that suggest such an extraordinary etiology. Separated from the colophon and the press release, they are simply handsome, decorative geometric images— banal and unproblematic. Certainly some are more chromatically appealing than others (the Duchamp image features a central stripe the color of Band-Aids) but one would seem off-key in the tasteful corporate office or lounge. There is nothing about them to suggest Monet, or Kirchner, or Duchamp, or Mondrian. There is nothing about them to suggest great art. Which is, of course, the point.
One could argue that the only interest of the prints is circumstantial, or even" experimental"— a sort of spreadsheet of color balances in modern painting. And Levine's work has often been interpreted less for its visual presence than for its philosophical function as a sort of aesthetic "proof."
At face value, Levine's method is reminiscent of those old "how-to" reductions of great masterpieces into color formulas, spatial formulas, compositional formulas, and linear formulas. In the 15th and l6th centuries it was the debate between Vasari and Lodovico Dolce over whether form or color was the most significant element of painting. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the methods of Natural History—rigorous formal analyses of component parts—that were used (unsuccessfully) to determine what constituted great art. The history of art and aesthetics is studded with such fascinating failures to understand the mechanisms by which an art object moves us. In one sense, Levine's computer is just one more inappropriately applied analytical tool, and as with earlier, discarded systems of analysis, is of greatest interest where it fails.
Had her intent been a serious exploration of modernist form, the futility of the exercise could have been predicted from the outset. For one thing, the computer took only one item—color—into account, and Lodovico Dolce aside, there is usually more to art than that. For another, there is her very careful selection of paintings: these four were executed within 30 years of one another, but their respective purposes and intents, the nature the elements that contrive to give them meaning, are radically different; as different as the aims and interests of Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, and de Stijl. Each appealed to a different artistic vision, to a different part of the brain, one might say. Nonetless they were submitted to an identical procedure, a procedure bound to rob them of those differences, and to establish a false equivalence—a banality.
In the colophon, Levine describes twelve as the "minimum number of pixels" but it is unclear whether this limitation is a technical or an aesthetic one. Theoretically, one could reduce each of the paintings to one pixel, a single compound average of all the color values displayed on the canvas that would, as anyone who ever melted down their Crayolas knows, probably end up a dull brownish gray. It would be the logical extreme of Levine^ method, but it would have no
the quixotic, clever richness that Meltdown actually suggests. It is easy to see that if reduced far enough, most things come out to the same thing; the atomic particles that make up a great painting are about the same as that make up a bad one—it's not an evocative proof. Twelve, however, is a number just large enough, a situation just complex enough to encourage the idea that some telltale bit of character, some recognizable key, might remain.
What's compelling in Levine's work is her attempt to pin down just what's compelling about art. What is it, if anything, that remains when various, supposedly intirinsic elements are stripped away? In the case of the isolated prints of Meltdown, little but technically competent, moderately appealing abstractions. But a viewer who knew how the prints were produced would have a very different experience of the work- (A further experience would be available to the viewer familiar with the particular paintings in question, though, interestingly, these are not specified anywhere in the documentation surrounding the prints.) In their separation, the images are unspectacular, the idea more a pedantic note than an aesthetic pleasure. In the end, it is neither of these, but rather the rift between them that is the most poignant part of the piece, calling attention to the tenuousness of the links between the appearance of an object and the knowledge that gives it meaning, between what you see and what you get.
1. Sherrie Levine. Meltdown, 1989, a suite of four color woodblock prints, 36.5" x 25". edition of 35 Published by Peter Blum Editions.
Susan Tallman is an artist and writer. Her column on prints and editions appears regularly in Arts.
Prints suffer from this problem particularly, and they have always proved a somewhat rarified taste. Because the method of their production is so indirect, often invisible in the final product, the viewer has little sympathetic sense of the artist at work. In place of the physical empathy inspired by van Gogh's isolated brush strokes, for example, lies the dull question, "How was it done?" It does not help that prints are often small, flat, and black-and-white. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, prints are very often derived from another body of work; paintings, drawings, sculptures—objects with which the print aficionado will be aware, and which will color his impression and understanding of the familiar image so that it appears to him as a much richer thing than it might to the observer for whom those connections don't exist. For those in the know, the print can be the eloquent distillation of an artist's grander statements—an image reduced in color, mass, and complexity, to the bare minimum of what was essential to the idea.
These issues are brought to mind by a group of woodblock prints called Meltdown1, by Sherrie Levine. The four images, each a pattern of twelve color rectangles, are computer-generated analytical reductions of paintings by four modern masters: Mondrian's Tableau No II, Kirchner's Potsdam Square Berlin, a Monet Rouen Cathedral, and L.H.O.O.Q., Duchamp's mustachioed Mona Lisa. They come in a pristine poplar box, with a colophon that reads: "The twelve-color woodblock prints in the portfolio Meltdown have been created by Sherrie Levine by entering images, after Duchamp, Monet, Kirchnec, and Mondrian into a computer scanner that spatially quantizes and transforms these images into the minimum number of pixels, thus determining each of the colors in the four prints."
If this explanation seems obscure, imagine a digital approximation of a picture in which the computer interprets a tiny area to be a particular grade of gray or shade of color; the difference between the texture of this digitized image and that of film is that in the former these areas are stiffly rectangular "pixels" rather than blobby chemical grains. Higher resolution is gained by increasing the number of pixels per square inch until, in computer typesetting for example, the individual pixels are invisible to the naked eye. What Levine did was to reduce the number of pixels to twelve, so that large areas of canvas—swatches housing multiple colors, complicated forms, occasionally elaborate brushwork—are approximated in a single chunk of color, a sort of average of all the chromatic events occurring within the swatch. Working from a computer printout, Levine and her printers, Maurice Sanchez and James Miller, replicated this in the form of inked wooden blocks, bound together in a matrix, and printed them with masterful delicacy onto Korean Kojo paper. There is something undeniably winsome (and perhaps suspiciously cute) in this wedding of state-of-the-art technology to the ancient woodblock, that most Luddite of print media. The prints themselves—serene, abstract, vaguely oriental in texture, harshly contemporary in design—do little to suggest either high tech or their borrowed patrimony, or, for that matter, Levine's other work.
Levine first became known, and is still probably best known, for her appropriation pieces of the early eighties. In the most straightforward of these, she would take photographs of photographs by great photographers, title them simply After Walker Evans, or After Elliot Porter, and present them as her own work. Since the "original" works were photographic, since they shared both image and material with Levine's "Afters," there was no immediately perceptible difference apart from the accompanying label. (For Meltdown, the computer worked not from the actual paintings but from four Levine photographs of 1983: After Marcel Duchamp, After Piet Mondrian, After Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and After Claude Monet.} These works were heralded as the definitive attack on—or mockery of—the modernist cult of "originality." So definitive, so lucid did they seem on this point, that the issue of what constitutes originality and whether it is a necessary component of art seemed dead in the water.
Levine then moved on to paintings on plywood in which the plywood "eyes" would be fitted out with gold, and to paintings of gameboards—checkers and backgammon. Last fall she exhibited sculptural glass realizations of the "bachelors" from Duchamp's The Bride Snipped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
Meltdown could be seen as the elegant merger of these three modes; the appropriation of imagery from the canons of great art; the formal, gridded rigor of the gameboard; the homage to and reinterpretation of famous artworks in the form of attractive, independent objects. But Meltdown doesn't reproduce pre-existing images; rather, it creates new ones. It is a work not of appropriation but of interpretation, albeit by interpretation through automation. It is a distillation, accomplished by successive stages of removal—from the paintings to Levine's reproductions; from the reproductions to the computer; from the computer's output to the woodblock. Each stage is subject to error and variation, intentional and unintentional—color, scale, proportion: all may shift. It is very much like the traditional process that has produced prints for centuries; and interestingly, the only time that Levine has employed computerized, quantized reduction was when she created these prints. The idea that they are created from pre-existing images automatically, rather than by human interpretation, allows some of the confusion about "originality" to be maintained—but, of course, only if one has read the colophon.
There is nothing in the appearance of the prints themselves that suggest such an extraordinary etiology. Separated from the colophon and the press release, they are simply handsome, decorative geometric images— banal and unproblematic. Certainly some are more chromatically appealing than others (the Duchamp image features a central stripe the color of Band-Aids) but one would seem off-key in the tasteful corporate office or lounge. There is nothing about them to suggest Monet, or Kirchner, or Duchamp, or Mondrian. There is nothing about them to suggest great art. Which is, of course, the point.
One could argue that the only interest of the prints is circumstantial, or even" experimental"— a sort of spreadsheet of color balances in modern painting. And Levine's work has often been interpreted less for its visual presence than for its philosophical function as a sort of aesthetic "proof."
At face value, Levine's method is reminiscent of those old "how-to" reductions of great masterpieces into color formulas, spatial formulas, compositional formulas, and linear formulas. In the 15th and l6th centuries it was the debate between Vasari and Lodovico Dolce over whether form or color was the most significant element of painting. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was the methods of Natural History—rigorous formal analyses of component parts—that were used (unsuccessfully) to determine what constituted great art. The history of art and aesthetics is studded with such fascinating failures to understand the mechanisms by which an art object moves us. In one sense, Levine's computer is just one more inappropriately applied analytical tool, and as with earlier, discarded systems of analysis, is of greatest interest where it fails.
Had her intent been a serious exploration of modernist form, the futility of the exercise could have been predicted from the outset. For one thing, the computer took only one item—color—into account, and Lodovico Dolce aside, there is usually more to art than that. For another, there is her very careful selection of paintings: these four were executed within 30 years of one another, but their respective purposes and intents, the nature the elements that contrive to give them meaning, are radically different; as different as the aims and interests of Impressionism, Expressionism, Dada, and de Stijl. Each appealed to a different artistic vision, to a different part of the brain, one might say. Nonetless they were submitted to an identical procedure, a procedure bound to rob them of those differences, and to establish a false equivalence—a banality.
In the colophon, Levine describes twelve as the "minimum number of pixels" but it is unclear whether this limitation is a technical or an aesthetic one. Theoretically, one could reduce each of the paintings to one pixel, a single compound average of all the color values displayed on the canvas that would, as anyone who ever melted down their Crayolas knows, probably end up a dull brownish gray. It would be the logical extreme of Levine^ method, but it would have no
the quixotic, clever richness that Meltdown actually suggests. It is easy to see that if reduced far enough, most things come out to the same thing; the atomic particles that make up a great painting are about the same as that make up a bad one—it's not an evocative proof. Twelve, however, is a number just large enough, a situation just complex enough to encourage the idea that some telltale bit of character, some recognizable key, might remain.
What's compelling in Levine's work is her attempt to pin down just what's compelling about art. What is it, if anything, that remains when various, supposedly intirinsic elements are stripped away? In the case of the isolated prints of Meltdown, little but technically competent, moderately appealing abstractions. But a viewer who knew how the prints were produced would have a very different experience of the work- (A further experience would be available to the viewer familiar with the particular paintings in question, though, interestingly, these are not specified anywhere in the documentation surrounding the prints.) In their separation, the images are unspectacular, the idea more a pedantic note than an aesthetic pleasure. In the end, it is neither of these, but rather the rift between them that is the most poignant part of the piece, calling attention to the tenuousness of the links between the appearance of an object and the knowledge that gives it meaning, between what you see and what you get.
1. Sherrie Levine. Meltdown, 1989, a suite of four color woodblock prints, 36.5" x 25". edition of 35 Published by Peter Blum Editions.
Susan Tallman is an artist and writer. Her column on prints and editions appears regularly in Arts.
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