After walker evans
After Walker Evans by Sheri Levine
Sheri Levine, part of the [Pictures generation], took photos of Walker Evans’s photos and presented them as new artworks. They look nearly identical to Evans’s photos, but we cannot look at them the same way. Could we be fooled if they were presented as Evans’s? Of course, but that’s no longer this artwork. This artwork is about looking at Walker Evans, about photography, about the gallery, and about looking.
This is a controversial series. If you demand that “making” art means “fabricating” art, Vik Muniz should certainly have the drawing chops to satisfy you. His <a class=’internal-link’ href=’/Art%20AI%20Can’t%20Make%20Yet/Best%20of%20Life’>Best of Life</a> series shares a lot of conceptual territory. And yet we see that his lead on the machines relies on his curation. Really, at all stages what he’s doing is choosing, but after the art has been conceived, fabricated, and hung we tend to give different names to the choosing that happens at each of those steps. If you are the sort of person that objects to the removal of fabrication from that step, this work may not hold up as an example of “art” for you. If that’s you, I encourage you to think – really think – of how you could actually separate the choices Muniz made while holding a pencil in his hand from the choices he made on either side of that step. Or whether Felix Gonzales Torres’s piece, <a class=’internal-link’ href=’/Art%20AI%20Can’t%20Make%20Yet/Untitled%20(Portrait%20of%20Ross%20in%20L.A.)’>Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)</a>, should have been hand-assembled by him before he died and left in the same place undisturbed like we leave the paint where it is on a Vermeer painting.
Peception is active, and images are still. When we look at Sheri Levine’s piece, we see it framed by the institution in which it sits, either on a website or on a wall. This is surpurfulous visual information that should not be included in the data of an image of this artwork. Yet without it, it’s not the artwork. This artwork cannot exist without Sheri Levine looking at Walker Evans.