Sarah Charlesworth never liked the label “appropriation artist,” despite the fact that her most important work involved images found in magazines and newspapers. The term entered the lexicon in the seventies, to describe New York’s Pictures Generation, which included Charlesworth and such peers as Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Richard Prince, but it couldn’t begin to acknowledge those artists’ subtlety, depth, or audacity. Charlesworth, who died of an aneurysm in 2013, at the age of sixty-six, proposed a more brazen description of her process: “I think of myself as a robber,” she told an interviewer. “I plunder and pillage on paper. . . . I possess these things and give them my own meaning.” In the New Museum’s concise and elegant exhibition “Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld,” the curators Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton wisely avoid trying to pin down anything as elusive as “meaning” in thirty-five years’ worth of work. Instead, they emphasize a through line of haunting ambiguity.
Charlesworth made her strongest impact in the eighties, in several series that arranged cutout, blown-up photographs on monochrome backgrounds. One of those series, “Objects of Desire” (1983-1988), has a room to itself at the museum. Quietly powerful, opulent but restrained, the big, glossy pictures in super-saturated colors are at once serene and disturbing. The subjects, all stripped of context, include an S & M harness, a lotus flower, a woman in a burka, and a rubber-sheathed bondage figure. They suggest rituals both sacred and sexual—an intricate web of free-floating associations that seems to connect everything else in the show, no matter how apparently unrelated.
Charlesworth had a gift for paring a picture down to its essence. In her sprawling, forty-part “Figure Drawings” (1988/2008), Shiva, Lenin, Elvis, Jesus Christ, and a high-stepping Avedon model appear as black-and-white silhouettes—it’s an encyclopedia of icons and attitudes. Several other series deconstruct the media, in one case removing everything except for the mastheads and photographs of solar eclipses from the front pages of twenty-nine newspapers published on February 26, 1979. “I’m trying to let the image reveal its own nature,” Charlesworth once said of her work. “In the process, it reveals mine.”
The show’s greatest revelation may be the little-seen 1980 series “Stills.” Fourteen grainy black-and-white photographs clipped from newspapers and enlarged to six and a half feet high portray bodies falling through space—suicides, slips, desperate leaps. They ring a room at the museum like windows on hell, echoing Andy Warhol’s “Death and Disasters” series and, far more uncannily, anticipating the indelible 2001 image of a man falling from the World Trade Center, in which one figure stood in for many. In their ambiguity, the “Stills” are at once horrifying and exhilarating, both plummeting and flying. Throughout her career, Charlesworth sought to strike a balance between what she described as “desire and alienation.” The New Museum exhibition succeeds by keeping viewers off balance and on guard. ♦
