| The dissertation is a monograph on the prominent appropriation artist Sherrie Levine, a polarizing figure who, for the last three decades, has been at the center of debates about contemporary art and its challenges to authorship and originality. It evaluates the two most common theoretical approaches to Levine's work: the post-structuralist semiotic approach (inspired by Roland Barthes' "The Death of the Author") and the psychoanalytic method (following Freud's theory of fetishism). The discussion demonstrates that these two schemes are subtly incompatible, as the polysemic promise at the center of the critique of authorship is undercut by the interpretive reductivism of the psychoanalytic approach. Aspects of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze are introduced as a corrective to these models. Deleuze's philosophies both resonate with and reconcile the two approaches, and open Levine's work up through a new, comprehensive theoretical framework. The dissertation approaches Levine as a purveyor not of individual works, but of highly contingent interrelated series. Over the decades of her career, Levine has varied her appropriative strategies by making shifts in medium and scale; and through the juxtaposition of works in exhibition and print contexts. Two constants have guided her practice: she always appropriates the works of male modernists, and she always serializes these works in ways that impact how they must be read as historically received images and objects. This method amounts to a semiotics of seriality, in which the forms of modernism are reinvested by the repetitions of modernization, the industrial and commercial serialization which Levine's practice mimics. Deleuze provides an invaluable theoretical framework, as his version of poststructuralism takes the multiplicitous series (rather than the individual sign) as its starting point. Levine's semiotics of seriality demonstrates that seriality was all along a vital component within the practices of even seemingly quite disparate and unrelated modernisms. |
