The transformation of ready-made objects is a long-standing fascination of the artist Sherrie Levine – perhaps for the auratic quality which she sees as being built into these art objects. “There's a level of seduction in the work that keeps you,” she says. "It's a visceral, sensual seduction that always draws you back.”i
Sherrie Levine's The Cradle, 2009, explores one such object in particular, the cradle – and in doing so, makes a formal and conceptual reference to works such as Van Gogh’s La Berceuse from 1889. La Berceuse, a French word which can mean a lullaby, or woman who rocks a cradle, is indicated in Van Gogh’s composition by the rope held in the sitter’s hand, which is attached to the unseen cradle.ii Fascinatingly, Van Gogh only alludes to the cradle itself rather than depicting it, choosing instead to focus on the tender, maternal scene at hand. Levine subverts this canonical image by not only centering the cradle as her subject matter, but casting it in bronze, giving it visual and material weight. While there is a lack of physical human presence in The Cradle, the structure is still evocative of humanity; of the child who may have inhabited the cradle, and the figure who may have watched over it.
Divorced from their actual function, Levine’s bronze objects open themselves to a myriad of other readings.iii Levine first began casting bronze sculptures in 1991, beginning with Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp). Levine stated that when she first cast the urinal in bronze, she “really didn’t know what to expect. When I got the first one back, I was totally amazed at the reference to Brancusi and Arp.”iv This ability of her works to forge art historical connections across time and material is present in The Cradle as well, in the invocation of Van Gogh. At once melancholy and dazzling, The Cradle is, as Adam Weinberg writes of Levine’s work, a “visually and emotionally complex” work, evoking “a profound sense of pathos.”v