Sherrie Levine talks to Howard Singerman - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, April, 2003

HOWARD SINGERMAN: There is a caricature of the '80s: All you needed was a critic with a name to write about your work and cite some hot theorist, and you had a career. This strikes me as both historically and systemically wrong; it's my recollection that the theory and criticism arrived earlier and in different spheres than the '80s market did. Do you have any thoughts about a different sort of chronology of the decade?

SHERRIE LEVINE: I came to New York in the mid-'70s, at the same time as a lot of recent art school graduates from CalArts, RISD, Buffalo, and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and a good number of other like-minded artists and writers. We didn't make a big distinction between artmaking, writing, and curating. Many people were engaged in more than one of these activities, none of them very financially lucrative at this point. There were no commercial venues for the things we were interested in, which I now think made for, in many ways, a very wholesome atmosphere. However, at the time, I did my share of pissing and moaning. The economy was "recessed," and most of us had crappy day jobs. We lent each other money and lived in dumps.

We believed we were the only audience for one another's work. We were young, energetic, generous, and ambitious. I use the word "ambitious" in the best sense; we wanted to make a difference, to show some resistance to the status quo. With not much at stake yet, outside of group approbation, I experienced an exhilarating sense of community and purpose. We worked and partied hard. And I was fortunate enough to receive a good deal of very thoughtful critical attention.

Then, in 1980, several commercial galleries opened with the intention of exhibiting and marketing our work. By then, for me, the real party was over. Success is always crass. But so is failure. I still didn't have any money. I did pink-collar work--waited tables, pasted up magazines, revolving-door teaching--and lived in offices and tenements until I was forty, i.e., until 1987. On the plus side, a lot of wonderfully intelligent and engaged writing was being published. Ideas that were still formative in the '70s were being developed into very subtle and sophisticated arguments, even in the midst of the commercialism.

HS: Your comment that social and professional roles were fluid and often multiple at the end of the '70s is interesting to me. Maybe that was what made the moment feel open. By the mid-'80s, people's professional identities as artists or critics or curators had become increasingly set.

SL: I think it's a matter of growing up and deciding to focus. In New York, the track is fast.

HS: I've read about the work you did with Louise Lawier, A Picture Is No Substitute for Anything, In a few places, but with few details. What exactly was it, and where did the title come from?

SL: We had decided to work together, and Louise knew about a book that had recently been published by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 12 Dialogues was a series of conversations between Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre that they had done in New York in 1962-63, when they were quite young. Louise and I found them extremely articulate and charming. At one point Frampton said, "A photograph is no substitute for anything." So that inspired the name of our collaboration, and we continued it sporadically for a few years since this was a big concern of ours. Real life, that is. Our self-financed venture was a lot like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney putting on a show in the backyard. We made all the decisions--what to show, where, when, what the announcement should look like, who the invitees would be. We didn't have to ask anyone's permission.

We exhibited our own photographs in her loft and a friend's empty loft. And we did performances. We invited people to the ballet; they had to purchase their own tickets. One Sunday afternoon we invited people to join us for a glass of Dubonnet at a tiny painting studio on Union Square that had been owned by a Russian emigre named Dmitri Merinoff. His widow had kept this fifty-square-foot room exactly as he left it the day he died. I remember that it was a sunny day and the light was beautiful with many pink Tachiste paintings around. Once we mailed out a card that said, "His gesture moved us to tears "--our ode to neo-expressionism.

HS: Your invocation of "real life" might surprise people who've come to think of the '80s as all about textuality or theory. Real Life was the title, too, of Tom Lawson and Susan Morgan's magazine. You were on the cover of the first issue In 1979, and there was a beautiful piece on your collages by Valentin Tatransky. Could you comment on what that term meant for you, and maybe for Tom and others, and why it carries the weight or emotion it does?

SL: I think it was a way of distancing ourselves from the art world. In those days I didn't think the art world was the real world. Very naive, but attributable to our collective youth--a kind of Holden Caulfield hangover. Back then I often referred to Lawrence Weiner's statement about making art that directed us back to the real world. I'm often accused of making art about art, which to me is nor very interesting in itself. I like to think that the meaning of my work bleeds out toward the world and functions metaphorically.