1982

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The Plagiarist Succeeds the Painter

Sherrie Levine • 1982

ASherrie Levine, Statement, 1982

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CThe total organization of society through big business and its omnipresent technology has … taken unbroken [lückenlos] possession of the world and imagination…

— Theodor W. Adorno, "Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie", 1942

EThe Image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison, but from two realities, more or less distant, brought together. The more the relation between the two realities is distant and fitting, the stronger the image will be--the more it will posses emotional power and poetic reality. Two realities that have no relation whatever cannot be brought together effectively. No image is created. An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic--but because the association of ideas is distant and fitting. Pierre Reverdy, Nord-Sud, March 1918

IBouvard et Pécuchet by Flaubert details the adventures of two Parisian copy-clerks, François Bouvard and Juste Pécuchet, of the same age and nearly identical temperament. They meet one hot summer day in 1838 by the canal Saint-Martin and form an instant, symbiotic friendship. When Bouvard inherits a sizable fortune, the two decide to move to the countryside. They find a 94-acre (380,000 m2) property near the town of Chavignolles in Normandy, between Caen and Falaise, and 100 miles (160 km) west of Rouen. Their search for intellectual stimulation leads them, over the course of years, to flounder through almost every branch of knowledge.

LPlagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea.

— Comte de Lautréamont

NTo create history with the very detritus of history.

– Remy de Gourmont

PBasically, an event is what decides about a zone of encyclopedic* indiscernibility.

*I call ‘encyclopedia’ the general system of predicative knowledge internal to a situation: i.e. what everyone knows about politics, sexual difference, culture, art, technology, etc. There are certain things, statements, configurations or discursive fragments whose valence is not decidable in terms of the encyclopedia.

— Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings

SMy destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

— Proust

A The world is filled to suffocating. B Man has placed his token on every stone. Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. C D We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. E

FAby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, 1929

GLyubov Popova, 1919, from a Constructivist statement.

A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture. H Similar to those eternal copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, we indicate the profound ridiculousness that is precisely the truth of painting. We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. I J

KThe Plagiarist from The Art of Book-Making, Washington Irving, 1819

Succeeding the painter, the plagiarist L no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense encyclopedia from which he draws. M N O P The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed without any of them being lost. Q

RWunderblock, (Mystic Writing Pad)

Freud compared the unconscious mind to the wax substrate, which retained an impression of whatever was inscribed on its surface, while the conscious mind – like the celluloid – could be easily “refreshed” for new perceptions.

A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. S The birth of the viewer must be at the cost of the painter. T

BDavid Alfaro Siqueiros, Cosmos and Disaster, 1936

D... The spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects.

— Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1988

HWe know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

— Roland Barthes

JThe writer is a reader of texts...before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations, and influences of every kind.

— Michael Worton and Judith Still, Intertextuality, 1990

MCorbusier, Museum of Unlimited Growth, 1939

OLaboratorium Mundaneum, 1937

QThe culturally dominant objet d'art as the sole focus (the uncommon carrier of uncommon content) is replaced by the interface.

— Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace, 1990

TI like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and future, between my history and yours.

— Sherrie Levine