"What to put where? Sherrie Levine would put seventy-five pairs of small shoes, sized for a child but styled for a man, on sale at the Three Mercer Street Store. That she had found them at a California job-lot sale hardly mattered. Artists could work through any economy, the thrift economy too. The money economy proved more difficult. Levine made a series of silhouettes taken from the penny, the quarter, and the new half-dollar coins, painting the presidents so that they faced each other flatly fluorescent on small sheets of graph paper. Happily parodying D.H. Lawrence, she called them Sons and Lovers. Douglas Crimp included them in the group show he curated at Artists Space in the fall of 1977. He called it "Pictures." "Pictures" also announced a twenty-six-second film loop by Jack Goldstein called The Jump, in which he had altered some stock footage so that one saw only a human silhouette filled with a light effect repeatedly run, jump, and dive, piking stylishly off the end of an unseen board into perfect d arkness that, like a psychedelic reflex, swallowed it whole. Crimp highlighted it in his catalogue essay. In hindsight The Jump looks like a pure description of a professional situation."
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"Levine made another statement in 1980 in which she recounted, without citation, Alberto Moravia's first sight of the primal scene, telling how when "she" witnessed "her" parents in this way, "she" divided herself into two, an imitation self who entered the world and a first self who maintained a great distance, watching. She found a way to take this split and doubled (or tripled) self into the material of the photograph: She took her photographs from books and made the finished print from what is called an internegative, lifting the image into a thinner, lighter, less intensely toned second generation, less a copy than a shift. In this backstage step of transfers through a negative state, the figure emerges like a double leaving another double behind. To put the matter more concretely, her Annie Mae Gudger print has used Evans and Agee's effort to reset the poverty of the sharecropper, as Agee said, "to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its record ing, communication, analysis, and defense." She revived their "independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity." But Levine employed the most impersonal, least theatrical techniques of thrift to bring the divinity back. The trace of her own labor was confined to the zone of internegativity, as if there she could exist, a person only of shift, not swallowed by the darkness but not visible either, something like a person without walls."
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- bill 11-02-2004 8:36 pm
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"Levine made another statement in 1980 in which she recounted, without citation, Alberto Moravia's first sight of the primal scene, telling how when "she" witnessed "her" parents in this way, "she" divided herself into two, an imitation self who entered the world and a first self who maintained a great distance, watching. She found a way to take this split and doubled (or tripled) self into the material of the photograph: She took her photographs from books and made the finished print from what is called an internegative, lifting the image into a thinner, lighter, less intensely toned second generation, less a copy than a shift. In this backstage step of transfers through a negative state, the figure emerges like a double leaving another double behind. To put the matter more concretely, her Annie Mae Gudger print has used Evans and Agee's effort to reset the poverty of the sharecropper, as Agee said, "to recognize the stature of a portion of unimagined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its record ing, communication, analysis, and defense." She revived their "independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity." But Levine employed the most impersonal, least theatrical techniques of thrift to bring the divinity back. The trace of her own labor was confined to the zone of internegativity, as if there she could exist, a person only of shift, not swallowed by the darkness but not visible either, something like a person without walls."
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- bill 11-03-2004 12:56 am [add a comment]