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April 8, 2010
Craig Owen in The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2 in October (Vol. 13. Summer, 1980 pp. 58-80) says that:
In postmodernist art, nature is treated as wholly domesticated by culture; the "natural" can be approached only through its cultural representation. While this does indeed suggest a shift from nature to culture, what it in fact demonstrates is the impossibility of accepting their opposition. This is the point of a recent allegorical project by Sherrie Levine, who has selected, mounted, and framed Andreas Feininger's photographs of natural subjects. When Levine wants an image of nature, she does not produce one herself but appropriates another image, and this she does in order to expose the degree to which "nature" is always already implicated in a system of cultural values which assigns it a specific, culturally determined position. In this way she reinflects Duchamp's readymade strategy, utilizing it as an unsettling deconstructive instrument.
This links to an allegory, whose traditional terms are a fragment, a quotation, and the,meaning it engenders is supplementary, excessive, "parodic and disseminatory." It exposes the literal level of the image to be a fiction.
My own work does not approach this level of visual sophistication. I wish that it did.
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we are our own worst critics Gary