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拍品专文
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp forever altered the course of art history when he submitted an ordinary porcelain urinal, signed R. Mutt, to the inaugural Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York. Testing the limits of art, authorship, and judgment thereof, Duchamp’s now iconic Fountain ignited a controversy that continues to challenge artists and audiences today. Nearly seventy years after Duchamp’s groundbreaking submission, Sherrie Levine responded by casting Duchamp’s reclining urinal in highly polished bronze, reclaiming the icon for Contemporary art. The ultimate readymade, Levine’s Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) is a glittering facsimile that sets ablaze the boundaries between homage, sexuality and subversion.
The ultimate disciple of art history, Levine’s artistic output clings to survey textbooks and classroom lectures as she mines the subject’s reproduced images, theories, and disciplinary practices. And yet, Levine’s work is arguably not about art history, but rather — as so many of her titles suggest — after art. Rising to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Levine and her contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger, adopted the tools of mass media to critique it, questioning ideas of authorship, originality and identity. However, unlike her contemporaries, Levine pushed the boundaries of artistic appropriation even further, turning her lens back onto the very history from which her own artistic legacy derives.
Levine’s practice reminds us of how much and how little has changed since 1917, when Duchamp first exhibited his paradigm-shifting Fountain. While Fountain was not Duchamp’s first readymade, it was certainly his most impactful. Nearly four years before the famous porcelain urinal surfaced at the Society of Independent Artists, Duchamp had explored the idea of elevating everyday objects to the realm of fine art through works like Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914). However, it wasn’t until 1915 that the readymade came into full fruition when he inscribed the words, “In Advance of the Broken Arm, d’après Marcel Duchamp” on an ordinary shovel. In doing so, Duchamp put forth a radical new notion that an artist’s ideas or concepts outweighed the artwork itself. With Duchamp’s readymades, and the lasting legacy of appropriation thereafter, an artist’s creation took a back seat to their designation.
The readymade redefined what art could be in the twentieth century, opening the art world to an entirely new generation of artists. Before moving to sculpture, Levine’s artistic career began with a focus on photography, reinterpreting bookplate reproductions of images by some of the most esteemed photographers of the twentieth century, including Alexander Rodchenko, Eliot Porter, and Walker Evans. Her photographs, as with many of her appropriated works, are simply titled “after” the original artist. The “after” of her titles refers both to her artistic indebtedness and to the postmodern anxiety of having arrived too late, “after” the great artistic revolutions. Resultantly, her works have been both praised and attacked as feminist hijackings of the prevailing patriarchal authority, critiques of the commodification and mass reproduction of art, and elegies on the death of modernism.
Levine’s sculptures, however, are more than just “after” the particular artist they emulate. Each of them contains a secondary artistic reference superficially on the sculpture’s surface and in its medium. Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) wears a highly polished surface that belongs to Constantin Brancusi. Here, Levine grafts Brancusi’s signature surface onto Duchamp’s form. In this seamless fusion of Duchamp’s concept and Brancusi’s finish, Levine reimagines the readymade not just as an object of conceptual play but as a vessel for layered historical dialogue. She doesn’t simply recontextualize Duchamp’s Fountain; she complicates it, merging two seemingly opposing artistic legacies into a single, gleaming object. The new highly polished exterior remarkably transforms this previously masculine object into one that is decidedly feminine, sensual, even fetishistic. In doing so, Levine reveals that appropriation is not merely about repetition or homage — it is about transformation, about making art history itself a pliable, living medium that speaks to the artist’s time. As such, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) becomes both a reflection and a refraction, an artifact that invites us to consider not only what art was, but what it continues to become.
The ultimate disciple of art history, Levine’s artistic output clings to survey textbooks and classroom lectures as she mines the subject’s reproduced images, theories, and disciplinary practices. And yet, Levine’s work is arguably not about art history, but rather — as so many of her titles suggest — after art. Rising to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Levine and her contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Barbara Kruger, adopted the tools of mass media to critique it, questioning ideas of authorship, originality and identity. However, unlike her contemporaries, Levine pushed the boundaries of artistic appropriation even further, turning her lens back onto the very history from which her own artistic legacy derives.
Levine’s practice reminds us of how much and how little has changed since 1917, when Duchamp first exhibited his paradigm-shifting Fountain. While Fountain was not Duchamp’s first readymade, it was certainly his most impactful. Nearly four years before the famous porcelain urinal surfaced at the Society of Independent Artists, Duchamp had explored the idea of elevating everyday objects to the realm of fine art through works like Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Bottle Rack (1914). However, it wasn’t until 1915 that the readymade came into full fruition when he inscribed the words, “In Advance of the Broken Arm, d’après Marcel Duchamp” on an ordinary shovel. In doing so, Duchamp put forth a radical new notion that an artist’s ideas or concepts outweighed the artwork itself. With Duchamp’s readymades, and the lasting legacy of appropriation thereafter, an artist’s creation took a back seat to their designation.
The readymade redefined what art could be in the twentieth century, opening the art world to an entirely new generation of artists. Before moving to sculpture, Levine’s artistic career began with a focus on photography, reinterpreting bookplate reproductions of images by some of the most esteemed photographers of the twentieth century, including Alexander Rodchenko, Eliot Porter, and Walker Evans. Her photographs, as with many of her appropriated works, are simply titled “after” the original artist. The “after” of her titles refers both to her artistic indebtedness and to the postmodern anxiety of having arrived too late, “after” the great artistic revolutions. Resultantly, her works have been both praised and attacked as feminist hijackings of the prevailing patriarchal authority, critiques of the commodification and mass reproduction of art, and elegies on the death of modernism.
Levine’s sculptures, however, are more than just “after” the particular artist they emulate. Each of them contains a secondary artistic reference superficially on the sculpture’s surface and in its medium. Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) wears a highly polished surface that belongs to Constantin Brancusi. Here, Levine grafts Brancusi’s signature surface onto Duchamp’s form. In this seamless fusion of Duchamp’s concept and Brancusi’s finish, Levine reimagines the readymade not just as an object of conceptual play but as a vessel for layered historical dialogue. She doesn’t simply recontextualize Duchamp’s Fountain; she complicates it, merging two seemingly opposing artistic legacies into a single, gleaming object. The new highly polished exterior remarkably transforms this previously masculine object into one that is decidedly feminine, sensual, even fetishistic. In doing so, Levine reveals that appropriation is not merely about repetition or homage — it is about transformation, about making art history itself a pliable, living medium that speaks to the artist’s time. As such, Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) becomes both a reflection and a refraction, an artifact that invites us to consider not only what art was, but what it continues to become.