I would like to begin by considering two powerful readings of the work of Sherrie Levine—the first an article by Stephen W. Melville entitled "Not Painting: The New Work of Sherrie Levine", which appeared in Arts Magazine, February, 1986; the second a catalogue essay by Rosalind Krauss written for Levine's exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in September 1989 and reprinted in October 52.
Melville's article takes up Levine's Gold Knots series of 1986. He begins with Levine's remark that we may see in the bare wood of these pieces an allusion to Arte Povera and its "impulse to find a margin in which art can still work". He then reminds us that "wood is the material of the frame as gilt [the gold plugs in the wood] is the stuff of ornament". "Both of them", he goes on, "are what Kant calls 'parerga', accompaniments to work, 'erga', rather than works themselves".
That is, Melville sees the Gold Knots as works about the frame, the parergon, in its most general sense. The Gold Knots attempt to speak of the frame, attempt to frame the frame, attempt to frame themselves framing.
And Melville would be quite right, after Jacques Derrida, in seeing Kant's discourse on the frame as lying at the centre of modernism. Greenbergian formalism, for example, was precisely as attempt to speak of the framing of art, of what was and what was not proper to painting. We can see Levine's Gold Knots as working within a whole tradition of modernist self-enframement: Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, Ad Reinhardt, Josef Albers, the targets, bull's-eyes and Chinese boxes of later Abstract Expressionism. But with this one... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline