Sep 7

Sep 7 Exhibition Review: The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900

Courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
© 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

Written by Audrey Yin
Copy Edited by Erin Pedigo
Photo Edited by Yanting Chen

On July 10, the National Gallery of Art premiered the first major exhibition of doubled images, The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900. Here, we ponder what it means to “see double” through works by conceptual artists like Sherrie Levine and Rashid Johnson to paintings by Sylvia Plath and Piet Mondrian. As outlined in the exhibition press release, more than 120 works help us explore the perceptual, conceptual, and psychological themes of doubled formats in art and inspire our human impulse to compare.

Curator James Meyer created a visual confrontation of our thoughts and an examination of our personal identities when we are forced to look for similarities and contradictions. The motif transforms into a tool of shifting power dynamics, discovering the subconscious and understanding identity. Many themes, including topics in race, gender, and sexuality, are evident in the works.

The idea of eradicating ownership comes through strongly in the featured piece, After Walker Evans: 4 by artist Sherrie Levine. When Levine presented this piece in 1981, she was met with criticisms from audiences and art historians alike. Her piece is an unaltered photo of Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, the famous portrait taken by Walker Evans in 1936. Superficially, Levine’s project appeared to violate copyright and creative property laws. However, as a creative work it marked the postmodernist era, while it called into question what exactly appropriation within art is.

The portrait’s subject was a woman named Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper. Evans’s work often revolved around people like her, whose lives were devastated by the Great Depression. Whether consciously or subconsciously, his work created archetypes, and appropriated identities for the sake of making art. “One gets the sense that Evans cared less about people and the intimate textures of their lives than about what they represented,” Rahel Aima, a writer for The Nation, notes. “… He isn’t taking a picture of Allie Mae Burroughs so much as he is recording a rural white woman, a poor tenant farmer, Alabama, and the South—and all of his subjects are synecdoches for America.”

© Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2021, © CNAC/MNAM, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY

Levine’s reproduction of the gelatin silver print, in turn, becomes a reclamation of truth, ownership and originality. When these identical images are placed side by side, viewers are forced to reckon with the invisible codes of art making, and the complexities of morality. When Allie Mae Burroughs’s face is commercialized and sold on merchandise, is the reality she once lived then violated? Viewers must ask not only how do artists navigate ownership and originality, but what roles do viewers also play in intellectualizing struggle? When we snap photos on our phones of the art in museums, for example, does ownership of images become arbitrary? As perfectly phrased by art critic Craig Owens, After Walker Evans: 4 is “an expropriation of appropriation.”

The Double: Identity and Difference in Art since 1900 will be on view at the National Gallery of Art through October 31, 2022.