by Sam Beard. 

Reviews of recent exhibitions by Sherrie Levine tend toward diagnosis: often preoccupied with reaffirming Levine’s “theoretical austerity”;[1] or attempting to rethink the great why behind her work in terms of mood or emotion, as in William J. Simmons’ ponderings on Levine’s work being “awash in melancholy.”[2] I find neither route particularly compelling: the former often reduces Levine’s work to its most strictly conceptual, concentrating on the clinical; while the latter often attends to the historical and biographical, relying on conjured “stories” crafted from the referential elements apparent in the work. These qualities, in isolation, also seem to abstract or warp what makes the best of Levine’s art so enjoyable.
        Matthew Brown’s presentation of Levine at his project space, Bill’s PC—which Dispatch readers will no doubt be familiar, having hosted works by artists like Joshua Abelow, Simon Denny, Nihaal Faizal, and Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo)—made me realise something that had escaped me when reading the more canonical texts dissecting Levine’s work: that it is, more often than not, very funny. For Press Release the gallery space is empty, beside which is a stool with a stack of the titular press releases. These originally accompanied Levine’s 2023 solo at David Zwirner Paris. It cracks me up. A simple but effective premise, I think: often (far too often) we begin to conceive of a work of art through such material (floor sheets, wall text, press releases) rather than through the work itself… so, naturally, what if the material was the artwork?
        Then again, at second glance, things turn more serious: no, really it’s classic post-Duchampian conceptual art, doing what such work does best—taking the apparatus around the artwork and making it the artwork. Downstream of After Walker Evans and After Edward Weston, Levine’s famed appropriations, Press Release adds a further turn: an appropriation of Levine, made with her blessing, presenting her own words/artworks in another format (the press release), which once belonged to a single exhibition but are now transformed into its own—appropriation squared. Thus, it is tempting for the critic to answer such a work, to determine the “square root”, and solve it.
        There sits the tension: the joke reveals itself as a genuine question about where the object ends and its framing begins. A recent review by Rex Butler in Memo Review raises a similar thought. In considering Chunxiao Qu’s Ten Descriptions for the Same Object, Butler revels in how Qu pulls at similar seams as Levine—Qu’s work being at once a humorous ribbing of and homage to the mechanisms of conceptual art.[3] Or, to quote Butler, ‘it’s a delicious parody of the way art writers read their own concerns into works of art’[4]—one that doubles as a cautionary tale.
        What is fraught about writing on work of this kind (for both artist and critic) is that, in its description, the work is often killed, or at least dealt a mighty disservice. Lean too hard into the humour and the work reads as pure satire, or worse, a simple piss-take. Lean more heavily into its seriousness obscures what makes it so appealing in the first instance. It is in this slight, stubborn antagonism that generates what Adorno might have called the work’s ‘crackle’: the friction that makes it worth thinking through, as opposed to simply “diagnosing” its referentiality in a search for meaning.
        It’s worth returning to Levine’s more formal historicisation, to her ‘reputation for formal and theoretical austerity that’s exacting even by the rigorous standards of her Pictures Generation cohort.’[5] That line is taken from Jeffrey Kastner’s review of Levine’s 2023 solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York, which was the counterpart to the Paris exhibition from which Brown’s show borrows. Such a reading sits comfortably enough on the shoulders of Rosalind Krauss’s seminal account of Levine’s critique of authorship and originality.[6] Kastner goes on to describe Levine’s “audacious deadpan appropriations,” and to credit her confrontations with authorship and authenticity with exposing the gender inequities built into art-world hierarchies.[7] True enough, all seriously meant, and not to be discredited. But, it seems arguable that what makes Levine’s work so incisive is the tension between the serious subjects and the semi-irritating humour that underpins the very conception of her work.
       Curious to see if I could corroborate my hunch, I found some reassurance in David Joselit’s essay “Last Laugh” in the Levine monograph Mayhem (2012). In it, Joselit examines Levine’s oeuvre in terms of ‘burlesque’, grouping her work into three ‘routines’: palimpsest (or the ‘layering routine’ as seen in After Edward Weston), projection (the repetition of images through which a greater, immersive space is formed or ‘projected’), and meltdown (work that takes ‘a physical form of humor that is usually as tragic as it is funny.’).[8] He cites a particularly instructive remark by Levine: ‘I’d like the viewer to skid across the surface of my work.’[9] He notes the ‘tragicomic’ form of movement the passage evokes:

One that echoes the treachery of “skating on thin ice” as well as the burlesque shtick of slipping on a banana peel. Levine’s routines have always been emotionally charged despite their expert timing.[10]

Perhaps where Joselit’s “three routines” and the burlesque/vaudeville comparison are unconvincing is that they utilise loud, audacious spectacle, razzle-dazzle, and fantastic over-the-top-ness that transforms what might be slight, inconvenient, or benign into the hilarious, erotic, and exaggerated. Levine’s routine, if one at all, moves in the opposite direction.
        The more revealing comparison isn’t to burlesque but to anti-comedy.[11] On this premise, Levine might be thought of alongside Ted Chippington, Neil Hamburger, or even the anti-comedy of the musician Jim E. Brown (who, at his recent show at the Buffalo Club in Fremantle, performed his song “Rat in Bin” five times consecutively in a masochistic attempt to irritate an elated audience eager to encourage the gag).[12]
        Anti-comedy shares a similar methodology to conceptual art: both work by pulling a gesture out of its expected context until it stops functioning as intended, so that the apparatus that is meant to disappear into the performance—the comedian’s routine of setup and payoff, the gallery’s routine of display and reception—is exposed and rattled rather than absorbed and ignored. With Dada as a  common ancestor, that both anti-comedy and conceptual art can be divisive is unsurprising: what one person finds exhilarating, another finds simply hostile, or finds nothing there at all.
        But both are driven by more than a wish to divide an audience: rather, there is a shared suspicion of catharsis itself, a mistrust of the communal pleasure comedy or art is usually built to produce.[13] Levine’s Press Release operates on comparable terms. It does not inflate the slight into the spectacular, as burlesque would; it withholds the exaggeration that would let an audience off the hook with a laugh, refusing the communal release usually promised by a joke or by art. And like anti-comedy, this carries its own risk of recuperation: a gesture built to refuse spectacle can just as easily be re-absorbed as spectacle of another kind, canonised and celebrated as “important” precisely because an insistence to have no part in the importance of the canon. Anti-humour and much of conceptual art share this vulnerability—the hostility meant to unsettle can calcify into a style, an alibi for hostility for its own sake.[14]
        More precisely, Press Release is built to irritate as much as to elate (i.e. there’s no documentation of the show—after all, it was just a press release). It is between these opposed responses from which is formed the friction that makes thinking through the work so enjoyable. The suggestion isn’t that Levine’s work is “jokey” or tongue-in-cheek, but rather that, through its antagonistic anti-humour, Levine visualises ideas that would otherwise emerge neutered, didactic, or rote. Through this antagonism—for which Press Release affirms Levine’s interest and penchant—her subjects intrigue, linger, and expand with each reinvention.

Sherrie Levine, Sherrie Levine: Press Release, Bill's PC, 24 May – 22 June, 2026.

---

1. Jeffrey Kastner, “Sherrie Levine,” Artforum, October 2023, https://www.artforum.com/events/jeffrey-kastner-sherrie-levine-512784/.

2. William J. Simmons, “History As Imitation of Life: Sherrie Levine, Awash in Melancholy,” BOMB Magazine, April 17, 2019, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2019/04/17/history-as-imitation-of-life-sherrie-levine/.

3. Rex Butler, “Are You Lonely Tonight? I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.; Poetry Goes No Further Than Language: A Historical Moment of Art Becoming Art Again,” Memo Review, July 11, 2026, https://www.memoreview.net/reviews/are-you-lonely-tonight-i-m-so-lonesome-i-could-cry-by-rex-butler.

4. Ibid.

5. Kastner, “Sherrie Levine.”

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. David Joselit, “Last Laugh,” in Sherrie Levine: Mayhem, ed. Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2012).

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. Which is a connection suggested by critic Francis Russell after scrutinising a draft of this review, and to which the following passages are heavily indebted.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid.

14. With thanks to Francis Russell.