Sherrie Levine: I am interested in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the new work doesn’t really exist unless the new work has an auratic presence of its own. Otherwise, it just becomes a copy, which is not that interesting.
Constance Lewallen: “Aura” in the sense that Walter Benjamin used the term.
Levine: Yes.
Lewallen: Paradoxically, he said that work loses its aura because of duplication . . .
Levine: Right (laughter).
Lewallen: And what you’re doing is duplicating objects in a way that they will have an aura, not the same one as the referent, but their own, Sherrie Levine aura?
Levine: Right.
Lewallen: You’re turning Benjamin’s theory in on itself. A lot of your work has the effect of taking ideas one step further than one would expect.
I am not entirely sure about this. Back then in the 80’s and early 90’s it was a clever move, and the idea of a “second hand aura” is somehow interesting. Ewige Wiederkehr, as Nietzsche said, implies its own aura. Does that prove that critical rereading (ouch) generates an aura in itself or was it soleley the framing, the ading a very artworldly context that generated the aura in Levines case?
Interview found over here: Journal of Contemporary Art
Michael Laurent 