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.

About the Author
Howard Singerman is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Virginia and is the author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (UC Press).

Reviews
"A critical examination of how the art world's singular characterization of Levine's work began." -- Nogin Chung Afterimage "A hugely ambitious text... Singerman masterfully retools art history in favor of deep, precisionist yet associative reading." -- Judith Rodenbeck X-TRA



Book Information
ISBN 9780520267220
Author Howard Singerman
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint University of California Press
Publisher University of California Press
Weight(grams) 590g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 20mm