Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner

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Images both are and aren't generic, even the most bland are still specific singular instances of a larger regime of similar images, like stock photography's multi-cultural workplace theme. Images become soft by their ubiquity, their dispersal, a continual re-staging erodes their specific edges to become some semi-solid substance of genericness. And any new instances are based on the patterns of the last one. Iconic photographs are often predicated on a tension of specificity given to a ubiquitous theme, a concerned mother, a puddle jump, a flag raising, each iconic image eventually returning to some blank marker of vague icon. Each remembrance is like an appropriation, a rephotographic theft of its specificity to soften it back to the soup of ubiquity, of theme, of trope, back to stock image.


See too: Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

(Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee)

Not to mention the infiltration of certain forms of cultural capital into emerging markets.

The opacity of Levine’s practice, what at first seemed political eventually dispersing to the desire clouding their surface, the first photo cancelling Levine’s second, leaving it as fetish, its surface, an erotic act of medium. Krauss writing it’s “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print” made it impossible to see hers, and others theorized the feeling of third sets of eyes, implying a form of moral stakes in which the viewer really was birthed in a consciousness that signaled the end of edenic ignorance. Levine eventually ditching the overt specificity of appropriation proper, and began rendering unplaceable genericisms and monochromes under the burnish of banal surface, a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning.