On Wanting to Write This as Rose Selavy: Reflections on

Sherrie Levine and Peircian Semiotic

Mary Magada-Ward

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Volume 23, Number 1,

2009, pp. 28-39 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jsp.0.0061

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/271231

[ Access provided at 1 Nov 2020 15:53 GMT from Carleton University Library ]
 J S P

On Wanting to Write This as Rose

Selavy: Reflections on Sherrie
Levine and Peircian Semiotic
MARY MAGADA-WARD
Middle Tennessee State University
Charles Sanders Peirce once proclaimed that “it is a primary rule of the ethics
of rhetoric that every prose composition should begin by informing the reader
what its aim is, with sufficient precision to enable him to decide whether to read
it or not. If the title can do this, all the better” (1978, 276). This essay, then, is an
attempt both to explore the work of contemporary artist Sherrie Levine in light of
Peirce’s claim that “men and [signs] reciprocally educate each other” (EP 1.54)
and to use Levine’s work to illuminate the contemporary significance of Peirce’s
claim. I appeal to Levine in particular because her art consists in the appropria-
tion, adaptation, and extension (see Cotter 1989) of the work of modernist male
artists—perhaps most successfully, that of Marcel Duchamp. I will argue that,
in so doing, it thereby emphasizes the roles of gender and sexuality in semiotic
comprehension and production and illustrates the necessity of addressing some
of the factors that shape how we understand ourselves and our world. That is,
because gender is performed and thus subject to praise and punishment, our
efforts to come to terms with our experience must involve exploring the mean-
ings of femininity and masculinity.1 Certainly, this is an immensely complicated
endeavor, not least because the kind of gender education that we receive also
depends upon our region, our race, our ethnicity, and our class. Nonetheless, it
is my conviction that both successful art and Peircian semiotic are indispensable
tools in this attempt.
To be sure, any treatment of gender and sexuality is, at best, only implicit
in the latter. I take direction, however, from Vincent Colapietro’s insistence that
“if there is any value to what Peirce has written, it resides in the power of these
writings to open fields of inquiry and, once having opened these fields, to offer
assistance on how to cultivate these areas” (1989, xvii). My hope is that, in this
way, my feminist appropriation of Peirce will parallel Levine’s invocation of
Duchamp, an effort that, like hers (see Lewallen 1993), draws inspiration from
Duchamp’s playful adoption of his female alter ego, Rose Selavy. As he remarked
to Pierre Cabanne, “I wanted to change my identity and first I had the idea of

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 23, No. 1, 2009.

Copyright © 2009 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

28

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 ON WANTING TO WRITE THIS AS ROSE SELAVY 29

taking on a Jewish name. I was Catholic and this switch of religion already meant
a change. But I didn’t find any Jewish name that I liked or that caught my fancy,
and suddenly I had the idea: why not change my sex? That was much easier!”
(quoted in Mink 2004, 71).2
Perhaps the best way of exploring what Peirce means by “man,” by “sign,”
and by “the reciprocal education” that takes place between the two is to connect
it with his opposition to nominalism. “Nominalism,” for Peirce, is the episte-
mological position that “the real” is categorically opposed to “the represented.”
Consequently, because thought as thought is symbolic and therefore general, “the
real” must be solely composed of particulars and thus forever beyond our complete
comprehension.3 With specific respect to the understanding of art, a nominalistic
perspective entails that there is a categorical distinction between the original
(in its individuality or particularity) and its imitations.4 As we will see, Peircian
semiotic—both as a comprehensive epistemology and in specific application to
artistic production—will undermine these dichotomies. In particular, a semiotic
approach to artistic production and comprehension will transform our conception
of “originality” into what Joel Weinsheimer has christened originativity: “the
power by which the original [itself ‘an interpretant of prior works’] gives rise
to further works” (1983, 257). To anticipate further, I will argue that Levine’s
“appropriationist” art, concerned as it is with issues arising from what she has
characterized as “the difficulties of situating myself in the artworld as a woman”
(Seigel 1985, 6), illustrates in a masterly fashion this notion of originativity.5 It
does so because, as Peirce teaches us, all attempts at comprehension—including
self-comprehension—demand that we understand that everything that persists
and develops, including ourselves, is a sign.6
Peirce will make this identification between “man” and “sign” for the
following two, interlocking reasons. First, if human life is, as he claims, “a train of
thought” (EP 1.54), then our essence is to be, in Arthur Danto’s words, “systems of
representations, ways of seeing the world, representations incarnate” (1981, 204).
Second, Peirce will show that thought itself must be “an interpretation of signs of
some kind” (EP 2.4). The scope of this insight applies not only to our assessments
that others are capable of thought, which must, of necessity, be based upon such
appearances or “signs” of thought as their speaking coherently. Most important, it
applies equally to my individual discovery, spurred by the “testimony” of others,
that I am a mindful creature, that is, a creature capable of drawing inferences and
thus, however fallibly, capable of distinguishing between how things seem to me
and how they are (cf. EP 1.18–21).
Peirce’s key philosophical-semiotic assertion is that a sign is “anything which
on the one hand is so determined by an Object and on the other so determines an
idea in a person’s mind, that this latter determination, which I term the Interpretant
of the Sign, is thereby mediately determined by that Object” (EP 2.482).7 With
respect to human cognition, these signs are “some feeling, image, conception, or

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 30 MARY MAGADA-WARD

other representation” (EP 1.38).8 In this way, these feelings, images, and so on
are both signs of external objects—that is, they are how these objects appear to
us—and, equally important, “a phenomenal manifestation of ourselves” (EP 1.38).
This is because “every sensation is partly determined by internal conditions”
(EP 1.22). For example, my perception of the redness of an apple not only tells
me something about the object that I am interacting with but also tells me some-
thing about the kind of creature that I am, namely, that by virtue of the cones in
my eyes, I can experience the apple as red.9 As Colapietro explains, “Appearance
comes to be seen not only in reference to something for which it stands but also
to someone to whom it stands” (1989, 75). It is for this reason, moreover, that
Peirce can rightly insist that “just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that
motion is in a body we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts
are in us” (EP 1.42). On Robert Innis’s gloss, “The semiotic subject is . . . neither
the source nor the result of semiosis, but rather its place (topos)” (1994, 22).
Consequently, on Peircian principles, which have scholastic antecedents,
how things appear to us is a reflection of this location. The scholastics formulated
this in the adage “Quidquid recipitur, reciptur secundum modum recipientis,” that
is, “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.”10
As will become strikingly evident in considering Levine’s work, part of what
informs this location, and its corresponding mode of receiving (and produc-
ing), is how we are “placed” in terms of our gender, race, and other markers of
difference. For now, though, allow me to give another, perhaps simpler, illustration
of the role of gender in semiotic comprehension. In discussing this issue with
my daughter, Jade, I reminded her of her friend Chelsea’s ability to convince her
when she first started driving that stop signs with a white edging—that is, all stop
signs!—were “optional.” My suspicion—and it is one that Jade endorsed—was
that her automatic trust in her girlfriends was a result of feminine socialization.
Before turning to a fuller consideration of the role of gender, however,
there are three other properties of signs pertinent to our later discussion that
need to be noted in Peirce’s account of semiosis. The first is what he calls “the
material qualities of the sign,” or “those characters which belong to it in itself,
and have nothing to do with its representative function” (EP 1.40). These material
qualities are, of course, especially emphatic in artistic production.11 For Levine
specifically, the goal is “making a work that has as much aura as its reference”
(Lewallen 1993).12 As we will see shortly, she most fully realizes this goal, to my
mind, in her works Bachelors and Buddha.
Second, because these “material qualities” render it impossible for the
sign to be identical with its object, to attain, in other words, a kind of semiotic
transparency or identity with it;13 the sign can represent its object “only in some
respect or quality, which brings it into connection with its object” (EP 1.38). This
means that semiosis—and thus thought itself—is inescapably partial and selective.
In Colapietro’s words, “What is missing—what goes missing—is accordingly a
constitutive feature of human consciousness” (2007, 6).

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 ON WANTING TO WRITE THIS AS ROSE SELAVY 31

Following Peirce, however, we must always keep in mind that what is

essential to a sign is its ability to determine an interpretant: “From the proposi-
tion that every thought is a sign, it follows that every thought must address itself
to some other, must determine some other, since that is the essence of a sign”
(EP 1.24).14 As a consequence, the meaning of a thought is always in the process
of development or “altogether something virtual” (EP 1.42). As Peirce summarizes
so eloquently, “The existence of thought now, depends on what it is to be hereafter,
so that it has only a potential existence, dependent on the future thought of the
community” (EP 1.54).15
Peirce thus gives us an account of semiosis and thereby of cognition that
emphasizes its materiality, its historically located and essentially communal
nature, and its selectivity. All three of these features will figure in an analysis of
Levine’s artistic project. This is because reflection upon this “train of thought”—in
particular, our recognition of its partiality and situatedness—requires some
means of making our particular perspective manifest. This, according to Danto,
is the function of the artist: “What, then, is interesting and essential in art is the
spontaneous ability the artist has of enabling us to see his way of seeing the
world—not just the world as if the painting were like a window, but the world as
given by him” (1981, 207).
What makes Levine’s work particularly poignant in this regard is that her
subject matter is itself these “ways of seeing.”16 As such, it exemplifies what Innis
identifies as “the mark of human life in signs”; this is the effort “to bring more
and more of the operative signs that control conduct into awareness” (2002, 34).
For Levine, this means coming to terms with what Danto christens the “master
narrative” (1997, 47) of the modernist tradition, an endeavor that, as mentioned,
she herself sees as mandated by “the difficulties of situating myself in the artworld
as a woman.” As a result, her work will deliberately engage with questions of
authenticity, with the nature of desire, and with art’s promise of being “antidotal”
(Levine 1987, 114) to inchoate or frustrated experience.
Levine’s first well-known works were After Walker Evans and After Edward
Weston. These are photographs of famous modernist photographs that Levine
(re)presents as her own. They are, in her thick formulation, “ghosts of ghosts”
(Seigel 1985, 4). As she explains, “I wanted to make a picture which contradicted
itself. . . . Any thoughtful person could understand that a picture of a picture
was a strange object” (Seigel 1985, 4, 9). While these works clearly deal with
the possibility and meaning of originality (cf. Levine 1987, 114; Owens 1990,
190–91), they also, and equally, address the value and inescapability of member-
ship in a tradition: “It is something artists do all the time, unconsciously, working
in the style of someone they consider a great master. I just wanted to make that
relationship literal” (Lewallen 1993). In this way, After Walker Evans and After
Edward Weston illustrate the meaning of critique or what Colapietro calls “that
form of memory in which we struggle to own our complicities, to acknowledge our
indebtedness, and to derive our inspiration” (1998, 128). In the words of art critic

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Virginia Rutledge, “All of [Levine’s] works . . . [are] variants of [her] meditation

on our need to retain a sense of connection with our objects of past cultural pro-
duction” (1988, 106). As such, her work exemplifies Weinsheimer’s definition of
artistic truth: “The very fecundity of [art], its continuing to generate interpretations
of the same objects, is the sole measure of its truth” (1983, 259).
Perhaps what is most central to Levine’s art making, however, is her
exploration of what she labels the “triangular” nature of desire.17 This is not simply
because, for Levine, “the desire comes first.” (Indeed, she is adamant that “I’m not
making the art to make a point or to illustrate a theory. I’m making the [work] I want
to look at.”18) Most important, the urgency of this exploration is fueled by Levine’s
recognition that “desire is always mediated through someone else’s desire.” At least
initially, we can understand this recognition as made possible by her awareness that,
in Noelle McAfee’s words, “subjectivity and its concomitant desires are formed
socially and experientially in a world with others” (2005, 143).19
More expansively, we can understand Levine’s remarks about the
heteronomy of desire as rendered acute by her position as a female artist in an
art world that is, in her characterization, “so much an arena for the celebration of
male desire” (Seigel 1985, 6). To be sure, Levine’s cognizance of the masculin-
ity of the art world is neither a unique perspective nor (now) a controversial one.
As many scholars have noted, past practices of exclusion (including both restricted
access to professional training and the neglect of women’s work), the denigration
of domestic creative activities to “craft,” and the traditional status of woman as
“object” rather than “subject” (with its consequent elevation of “the male gaze
[as] normative” [Hein 1998, 26]) have contributed to the art world’s subordination
of women.20 With the recognition of these factors comes the realization that, in
Carolyn Korsmeyer’s words, “the traditional concept of art [does not] describe
some basic human activity but a historically specific role for (male) professionals”
(1993, 202). Indeed, Korsmeyer will identify the need to engage with this tradition
as the chief impetus to feminist art making: “Tradition remains the overarching
point of reference for feminist artists, who refer continually to the past, whether
ironically, parodically, or confrontationally” (2007, 298).
What is unique and a source of fascination about Levine in particular
is the work that she generated in response to her awareness of the art world’s
“celebration of male desire.” In her words, “[As an artist], I’m always trying to
bridge that large gap between the elusiveness of my desires and the bluntness of my
physical reality” (1987, 114; emphasis added). In so doing, she exemplifies what
John J. Stuhr has called “the pragmatic value” of reflection. That is, “thinking and
living critically has pragmatic value because life itself does not automatically and
endlessly satisfy our desires or conform itself to our values” (Stuhr 1998, 256).
To my mind, nowhere does Levine do this more successfully than in her works
“after” Duchamp, Bachelors and Buddha.
Bachelors is indebted to Duchamp’s most important work, The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, more commonly known as the Large Glass.

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 ON WANTING TO WRITE THIS AS ROSE SELAVY 33

Consistent with Peircian semiotic principles, the Large Glass inspires multiple and
competing interpretations. For our purposes, however, we can follow the lead of
art historian Janis Mink and consider it to be a diagram for a machine of suffering.
That is, we can “locate” Duchamp’s vision by acknowledging his defining con-
cern with the sexual alienation attendant upon the increasing mechanization of
twentieth-century life. The justification for perceiving the Large Glass in this
way is twofold. First, the “bride” and the “bachelors” have no contact with each
other. Instead, the bachelors are condemned to what Mink describes as “churn-
ing, agonized masturbation” (2004, 77). Second, the figures in the work are only
vaguely anthropomorphic and instead most resemble mechanical elements. (To my
eye, searching for affinities, the bachelors look like misshapen pistons.) Following
a suggestion made by Duchamp, Levine’s appropriation and extension of the Large
Glass consist in making the bachelors into three-dimensional objects. Further
underscoring their isolation and, indeed, what Mink identifies as “the atmosphere
of waiting and stillness” that characterizes the Large Glass as a whole (2004, 81),
Levine exhibits each of the bachelors, or what Duchamp himself also called “the
malic molds” (Mink 2004, 36), in his own separate glass vitrine.21
What makes Bachelors so intriguing, I believe, is not just that it is visually
arresting or possessed of what art critic Ken Johnson hails as “such material
allure [and] compelling theatricality” (1991, 146). Nor is its fascination simply
due to what another critic celebrates as “its neat reversal of art’s traditional
sexual politics” (Cotter 1989, 187). Instead, much of its interest derives from
what Rutledge describes as its “not-quite-sameness” (1988, 106). As Levine has
claimed more generally about her later work as a whole, “I am interested in the
tension between the original and my work. When it is close, but not the same,
as the original, in my mind, there’s a different kind of tension” (Lewallen 1993).
With specific respect to Bachelors, this is manifested in her decision to have the
malic molds cast in milky glass. Here, especially, the materiality of the sign image
is essential because it allows Levine not only to make the obvious sexual joke
but to render what were originally disturbing and slightly threatening figures into
objects of vulnerability and fragility. As she freely admits, Bachelors is “very self
consciously about fetishism” (Lewallen 1993).22
I take it that Levine intends Bachelors to be a “fetish” in both senses of
the term, the more narrowly psychoanalytic sense of an object that excites erotic
feelings and the older, more general sense of a representative or habitation of
a deity (in this case, Marcel Duchamp). In both senses, Bachelors works by
exemplifying what Peirce labels “the law of mental association” (EP 1.39) in which
“a judgment occasions another judgment of which it is the sign” (EP 1.50). That
is, it exemplifies, without referring to, the essential virtuality of meaning and of
semiosis in general, one of Peirce’s central insights. As a result, Bachelors shows
that a successful artwork is, in Colapietro’s terms, “far from an insular item or
isolated datum; it is rather part of a field of connections it helps to generate and
expand” (2003a, 75). And because Bachelors not only is itself a perceptually

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seductive piece by reason of its complex, even arch, materiality but also makes
direct reference to one of the most important works of art of the twentieth century, it
addresses the issue of value. In so doing, part of its point, I believe, is to emphasize
the need to expose what we customarily find valuable to critical scrutiny. As Stuhr
reminds us, “[Artistic] illumination of values can have no critical dimension unless
those values illuminated in turn are subjected to inquiry—unless what is found
to be valued can be and is shown to be valuable” (1998, 260).
Buddha is equally, if differently, compelling. Its debt is to Duchamp’s
infamous Fountain.23 Levine’s adaptation and, indeed, beautification of Fountain
consist in three miniaturized urinals made of polished brass, each displayed on its
own pedestal. It, too, is a visually arresting work of art. Recalling his introduction to
Buddha at the Mary Boone Gallery, Johnson states, “Despite the satiric conceptual
thrust, there was an almost mystical feeling in this place” (1991, 146).
What I find particularly interesting about Buddha, however, is its sly
dependence on a century’s worth of misguided analyses of Fountain. Contrary
to what some philosophers have thought, the point of Fountain—as well as the
other ready-mades—was not to celebrate the aesthetic value of the ordinary.
Instead, the ready-mades were objects about which it was believed impossible
to take any aesthetic appreciation, in the traditional sense of this term as “[an
appreciation that] carries a person who is capable of [it] out of life [and] into
ecstasy” (Bell 1977, 45). In this way, Duchamp thought that the ready-mades
could liberate us from the universality and, thus, the tyranny of taste. (As he said
to Pierre Cabanne, “But to talk about truth and real, absolute judgment—I don’t
believe it in at all” [1977, 541].) As Danto puts this so wittily, “What would have
provoked Duchamp to madness or murder, I should think, would be the sight of
aesthetes mooning over the gleaming surfaces of the porcelain object he had
manhandled into exhibition space: ‘How like Kilamanjaro! How like the white
radiance of Eternity! How Arctically sublime!’” (1981, 94). Yet, as both Danto
and Levine know perfectly well, intellectuals have (at least attempted to) “moon
over these gleaming surfaces” in the ensuing years. It is thus part of the conceit of
Buddha that it, in contrast to Fountain, does intend to provide genuine aesthetic
pleasure. More expansively, Buddha exemplifies Peirce’s thesis that “each increase
of a man’s information involves and is involved by a corresponding increase of a
[sign’s] information” (EP 1.54). That is, it is now part of the meaning of Fountain
that it launched a discussion of what role aesthetic appreciation should play in the
making of art. By making beautiful urinals, Levine brings this aspect of its mean-
ing forcefully to light. In this way, Buddha gives concrete illumination to Peirce’s
recognition that “[because] the thought is determined by a previous thought of
the same object, it only refers to the thing through denoting the previous thought”
(EP 1.39). As a result, Buddha illustrates Innis’s claim that “art is not duplication
of experience, but formulation of it, a way of making it appear” (2007, 13).24
Levine’s work as a whole is also shaped by her commitment to the feminist
insight that creative advance requires, in her words, “establishing . . . the possibility

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of a plurality of voices and gazes” (Seigel 1985, 12). Making his work a powerful
ally in our efforts to understand what is at stake in art as self-conscious as Levine’s,
Peirce not only anticipates this insight but examines it in depth. To recall, his
insistence that an exploration of semiosis reveals that “we are in thought, and
not that thoughts are in us” demands that we take our location in thought into
account when we analyze how objects appear to us. And because these appear-
ances (or signs) encompass, or have as their “proper significate effects,” emotional
reactions, our “place” inflects (and sometimes deflects) our desires. (As Peirce
points out, “Any emotion is a predicate concerning some object” [EP 1.23].25)
Because it is, arguably, one of the chief virtues of art to reveal the specificity of
our location to us—especially when we have habitually accepted that location
as neutral or unmarked (cf. Innis 2001, 28)—the Peircian lesson to be learned
from Levine, therefore, is that what we find beautiful or worthy is informed by
our semiotic location.
This location, moreover, cannot be understood by simplistic analogy to a
flat map or two-dimensional graph, since it is, minimally, by virtue of Levine’s
position both as a female artist and as a beneficiary of contemporary art historical
thought that she can make art “after” Duchamp that enacts, as she puts it, “the ways
in which the artworld reflects culture and, at times, epitomizes it” (1987, 114).
It is for this reason that, as I have tried to indicate, Bachelors and Buddha not
only concern or comment upon certain aspects of that culture—that is, of our life
in signs—but exemplify those very aspects.26 Specifically, the beauty of Buddha
and the fragility (or preciousness) of Bachelors are not incidental to but, rather,
an essential part of the very meaning of these works. Both features—the beauty
and the fragility—are wedded to the materiality, or material quality, of the sign
complex that is the artwork itself. It is thus in this way that Levine’s particular
manner of appropriating and extending Duchamp’s work illuminates how the
meanings we assign to the notions of authenticity, desire, and tradition are colored
by our “placement” in culture as gendered and historical beings. In its widest
import, therefore, her art reveals the value of Peircian semiotic to reside in its
insistence that, in Keith Moxey’s words, “signs engender other signs ad infinitum,
and in doing so, they are involved in bringing about the kind of cultural change
we know as history” (1994, 33).
In sum, by virtue of its self-conscious and critical engagement with the
modernist tradition—a tradition crystallized in the work of Marcel Duchamp—the
art of Sherrie Levine can be seen as a concrete illumination of the contemporary
relevance of Peirce’s claim that “men and signs reciprocally educate each other.”
That Levine’s engagement is mandated by “the difficulties of situating myself in the
artworld as a woman” also entails, I believe, that future employments of Peircian
semiosis must explicitly acknowledge the role of gender (and other markers of
difference) in semiotic comprehension and production. Perhaps in this way, they
will fulfill what Innis envisions as the twin tasks of philosophy after Peirce: “[to
undertake] a formal study of signs and sign systems and . . . [to produce] a concrete

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 36 MARY MAGADA-WARD

cultural hermeneutics” (1994, 129). Even more significantly, the enlarged vision
of culture made possible by cutting-edge art and the analytical rigor bequeathed
to us by Peircian semiotic shows that both are indispensable tools for the perennial
human project of comprehending ourselves and our world.

Notes
For their encouragement and their very helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article, I am
indebted to John J. Stuhr, Jonathan Neufeld, Robert E. Innis, Vincent Colapietro, and, as always,
Steven Ward.
1. In Noelle McAfee’s words, “Feminist practice calls for rethinking how meanings and identities
are created in discursive and communicative processes and matrices” (2005, 140).
2. Duchamp’s creation of “Rose Selavy” also evinces his love of wordplay (cf. 1977, 546),
exemplified perhaps most famously in L.H.O.O.Q. (Written across a mustached copy of the Mona
Lisa, the letters, when pronounced in French, sound like the French sentence that, translated, means
“She’s got a hot ass.”) With respect to Rose Selavy, Rose is an anagram for “eros,” and Selavy is a
homonym for “C’est la vie.”
Recalling Duchamp’s love of what he called “poetic” words, feminist video and performance
artist Carolee Schneemann writes, “Duchamp liked to ask me to recite a litany of place names from
Illinois. We would sit down with a drink or be driving in a car and he would say in his charming French
accent, ‘Carolee, could you please name me those towns.’ I would start: ‘Mayview, Tolono, Monticello,
Broadview, Sidney, Philo, Matoon, Rantoul, Mahomet, Saborus, Homer’” (2002, 113).
3. “A ‘symbol’ . . . is any device by means of which we can make an abstraction” (Innis 2007, 6).
4. Correlatively, a nominalistic perspective also assumes a categorical distinction between the
role of the artist and the role of the critic. In contrast, a semiotic approach to the understanding of art,
with its conception of the artwork as fundamentally an ongoing process of generating interpretants
(cf. Ransdell 2003, 35), will conceive this distinction not as a fixed opposition but as a functional
distinction to be made only in light of particular contexts and purposes. In Joseph Ransdell’s words,
“The process in which the artwork is constructed and the process of interpretation of it are aspects
of the same process as regarded from two different points of view” (2003, 22). Indeed, “we are to
understand [the role of the artist or the role of the critic/appreciator], then, in terms of his or her par-
ticipation in a process which is to be understood exclusively in terms of its own inherent ‘dynamics’”
(Ransdell 2003, 29).
5. Levine herself rejects the “appropriationist” label, regarding it as dismissive and reductive.
Even though I will continue to use this term for ease of exposition, I believe that she is right to do
so. This is especially the case if we follow Ransdell’s lead and realize that “the artist has no power of
closure over something which is essentially of the nature of a process and is driven from within by
the actions of the signs of it which are the manifestations of the process across time” (2003, 37).
6. Peirce insists that, just like persons, a sign may “have a rudimentary life, so that it can have a
history, may be affected by associations with other signs, and gradually may undergo a great change
of meaning, while preserving a certain self-identity” (quoted in Colapietro 1989, 81).
7. “Now a sign has, as such, three references: 1st, it is a sign to some thought which interprets it;
2d, it is a sign for some object to which in that thought it is equivalent; 3d, it is a sign in some respect
or quality which brings it into connection with its object” (EP 1.38).
8. It should be noted that, for Peirce, semiosis is not unique to human cognition and thus does not
necessarily require “a modification of consciousness.” However, he admits that “our lack of experience
of any semiosis in which this is not the case leaves us no alternative to beginning our inquiry into
its general nature [but] with a provisional assumption that the interpretant is, at least, in all cases, a
sufficiently close analogue of a modification of consciousness to keep our conclusion pretty near to
the general truth” (EP 2.411).

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 ON WANTING TO WRITE THIS AS ROSE SELAVY 37

9. This, then, is an example of why self-knowledge must be based upon how I appear to myself
(i.e., how I am a sign to myself).
10. I owe this insight—as well as many others—to Robert Innis.
11. As Barbara Bolt insists, “Pictures mean, but also they are; they are both signs and a
materialisation of matter” (2004, 173).
12. As introduced by critical theorist Walter Benjamin, aura refers, at least in part, to the authenticity
or uniqueness of the work of art: “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging
from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (1989, 574).
Aura is what allows art to manifest “a unique phenomenon of distance however close it may be”
(Benjamin 1989, 575n7) or, in Susanne Langer’s terms, its “‘otherness’ from reality . . . [its] detachment
from actuality” (1977, 159–60).
Benjamin himself predicted that the predominance of photography and film—“mechanical
reproduction”—would result in the disappearance of aura. Larry Hickman reads Benjamin as unhesi-
tatingly celebrating this loss because it would “democratize life by severing the bond between beauty
and scarcity” (2001, 166). In contrast, I read Benjamin as ambivalent about the “withering away”
of aura. I also think that he was wrong. As Steven Ward has convinced me, “aura hasn’t gone away”
(personal communication, 2007), as made evident by the unprecedented success of the auction of
the Warhol estate.
13. In fact, such an identity would nullify the sign’s essential function of representation: “[A sign]
which should have a unique embodiment, incapable of repetition, would not be a [sign], but a part of
the very fact represented” (EP 2.203).
Nonetheless, Peirce is adamant that the object necessarily informs its possible representations
(cf. EP 2.160ff.). With specific respect to the interpretation of artworks, this means that, under a Peircian
perspective, an interpretation that neglected either the art object itself or the context in which it was
made would be inadequate (cf. Danto 1981, 115–35).
14. The “real connection” of a sign with another sign of the same object or the object itself is what
Peirce calls “the pure demonstrative application of the sign” (EP 1.40) and is what serves as the neces-
sary precondition for the determination of an interpretant. This aspect of the sign, moreover, is essential
to our efforts at critical understanding. As Ransdell explains, “Criticism requires . . . that the incessant
flow of production and interpretation include a repeated return to some representation and something
represented in it that is in some sense unchanging in spite of being incessant” (2003, 23).
15. Indeed, Peirce will characterize the process of thinking as itself “dialogic” in form: “the arguer
of any moment appealing to the reasonableness of the ego of the succeeding moment for his critical
assent” (EP 2.402).
16. As Mieke Bal emphasizes, “The act of looking is profoundly ‘impure’ . . . sense-directed as
it may be, hence, grounded in biology (but no more than all acts performed by humans), looking is
inherently framed, framing, interpreting, affect-laden, cognitive and intellectual” (2003, 9).
17. All direct quotations in this paragraph come from Seigel 1985, 6.
18. On Colapietro’s gloss, an aesthetic sign is such because it “is an instance of self-presentation
wherein the power of the sign is nowhere more evident than in its capacity to sustain an intense
interrogation of its own qualitative features” (2003b, 3).
19. As is well known, this is an insight anticipated by Peirce. See, in particular, EP 1.20.
20. Schneemann’s 1975 Interior Scroll directly addresses the neglect of women’s work. Consider,
for example, these lines from Scroll 2: “I met a happy man, a structuralist filmmaker, . . . he said we
can be friends, equally though we are not artists, equally I said we cannot, be friends equally and we,
cannot be artists equally, he told me he had lived with, a ‘sculptress’ I asked does, that make me a
‘filmmaker-ess’?, ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We think of you, as a dancer’” (2002, 159–60).
21. As I understand it, Duchamp’s point here is to underscore that masculinity is a “surface”
phenomenon that leads to an internal emptiness.
22. It is for this reason that art historian Rosalind Krauss will divine the aim of Bachelors to be
that of showing “the locus of desire as an endless play of substitutions” (1999, 190).

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 38 MARY MAGADA-WARD

23. As is well known, Fountain was an actual urinal that he attempted, under the pseudonym
R. Mutt, to enter in a 1917 show sponsored by the Society for Independent Artists (of which he was
a board member). Part of Duchamp’s motivation was to challenge the society’s boast that it would
accept every submission. (Fountain was, in fact, hidden during the exhibition.)
24. Indeed, Levine’s choice of title adds yet another level of richness (or fecundity) to her work.
Arthur Danto tells me (personal communication, 2008) that “Buddha” alludes to Alfred’s Steiglitz’s
reaction to photographing Fountain when Duchamp, Beatrice Wood, and Carl van Vechten took it to
his Gallery 281. In particular, Steiglitz was intrigued by the fact that the shadow cast in the bowl of
the urinal had the shape of Buddha.
25. “It must be admitted that if a man is angry, his anger implies, in general, no determinate and
constant character in its object. But, on the other hand, it can hardly be questioned that there is some
relative character in the outward thing which makes him angry, and a little reflection will serve to
show that his anger consists in his saying to himself, ‘this thing is vile, abominable, etc,’ and that it
is rather a mark of returning reason to say, ‘I am angry’” (EP 1.23).
26. I appeal here to Nelson Goodman’s well-known 1988 work on (literal) exemplification as a
way to explain what Levine means by art’s “epitomization” of culture.

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