24 plates on approx. 50 year old Agfa-Baryt in two 3 x 4 tableaus a 70 cm x 100 cm, 1/1, 2018.
Since the early 1980s, New York-based American conceptual artist Sherrie Levine (born 1947) has used techniques of repetition, duplication, and reformulation to question the meanings of concepts such as originality, authenticity, and authorship in contemporary art. In 1981 she began re–photographing a series of works by the legendary photographer Walker Evans (1903-75). More than thirty years later Levine photographed 24 pictures of African masks that Evans had originally taken in 1935 for the exhibition „African Negro Art” on behalf of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The object of her series African Masks After Walker Evans, which today can be perceived as provocative, is as central in art history for the beginning of Modernism as it is problematic for postcolonial postmodernism .
Jokeit’s work A.M.A. S.L.A.W.E. shows re-productions of the 24 copies of Walker Evans‘ photographs reproduced by Levine in book form. The conceptual break with Levine’s series takes place in the reproduction of the masked images in the historical archetype of photography, the iconized negative. Jokeit thus lets Levine’s process of reproduction and appropriation, conceived as limitless, fall back on the materiality of a singular object.
On Show until December 2d. at Kunstszene Zurich 18 / Kunstbulletin / Neufrankengasse 4 / 8004 Zurich
PRESS/MEDIA
hennric jokeit 