FINAL Sarah Charlesworth Press Highlights Report

PRESS COVERAGE HIGHLIGHTS REPORT
“SARAH CHARLESWORTH: DOUBLEWORLD”
June 24th
– September 20th
, 2015

Recalling Sarah Charlesworth’s Photographs
From left, Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman and Sarah Charlesworth in
Ms. Simmons’s home, 1991. Credit Jay Gorney
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Sarah Charlesworth did not like being called a photographer. She preferred to
speak of herself as “someone who makes art with photographs,” alluding to her
practice of sitting at a table and sifting through images from her extensive source
files. She would mix and match pictures and rephotograph them in new
configurations. Unlike earlier photographers, who spoke of the pursuit and
capture of trophy images as if they were hunting big game, Ms. Charlesworth
favored the grand indoors.
“Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld,” which opened on Wednesday at the New
Museum, is her first museum survey in New York — and a bittersweet
remembrance. It has been two years since Ms. Charlesworth died abruptly of an
aneurysm, at 66.
“What’s really emotional for me about this show is that Sarah expressed a desire
to have a show at the New Museum,” recalled Laurie Simmons, in a conversation
last week with her fellow photographer Cindy Sherman, reflecting on their friend
June 26, 2015

and her work. Although long recognized for her influence on artists, Ms.
Charlesworth failed to receive major attention, perhaps because her large-scale
photographs, more often than not, are pristine, cerebral and devoid of the easy
irony afflicting so much new art.
Ms. Charlesworth in 1984 in her studio. Credit Peter Sumner Walton Bellamy
Officially, Ms. Charlesworth was a member of the Pictures Generation, a
nebulous label referring to various photo-based artists who culled their imagery
from the media. The main concept was appropriation, and its partisans included
Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine. It was,
incredibly, the first major art movement in this country to be dominated by
women, a development fed by a convergence of isms, including feminism,
Conceptualism and what might be called Julian Schnabelism, a fatigue with the
macho theatrics of expressionist painting.
Ms. Charlesworth’s first major series of photographs is titled “Modern History”
(1977-79). Conducting herself like a one-person department of media studies, she

rephotographed the front pages of old newspapers and deleted the text, leaving
the news pictures floating in white space. A second series contrived from grainy
newspaper photographs — titled, with excessive understatement, “Stills” (1980)
— consists of blown-up images of people falling through space, presumably to
their deaths.
What followed was surprising and radiant. In her “Objects of Desire” series
(1983-1988), she embraced jazzy colors and optical pleasure as fully as her early
work renounced them. The photographs typically show a cutout picture of a
single object — a gold bowl, say, or a statue of a Buddha — isolated and seeming
to levitate against a monochromatic, high-gloss background. Although they use
the sleek style of advertising and commercial design, the photographs feel
enigmatic and meditative. They’re like advertisements for inwardness.
In her last years, Ms. Charlesworth taught photography at Princeton. A striking,
articulate woman with apple cheeks and blond hair, she could be “maddeningly
opinionated,” as Betsy Sussler, the editor of Bomb Magazine once wrote. But her
daily schedule somehow accommodated no end of long, searching conversations
with freshmen and prominent art-world people alike. “Sarah was a kind of big
sister to many of us,” Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum, notes in the
exhibition catalog.
Big sister? The phrase seems nearly heretical, an incursion of fuzzy warmth into
the normally arctic realm of museum prose. But then Ms. Charlesworth’s gifts
included a talent for friendship. Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons recalled
meeting her in the fall of 1982, in SoHo, which they thought of as the epicenter of
the planet.
Ms. Sherman had already completed her now-classic “Film Stills,” dressing up in
actressy guises and musing on the malleability of female identity. Both she and
Ms. Simmons, who was training her lens on an ominous doll cosmos, were doing
new things with photographs, namely, lending them the dramatic scale and color-
rich palette traditionally associated with painting. Ms. Charlesworth, perhaps
inspired by her new friends, was just making the leap from her grayed-over
Conceptualist past into resplendent color.
What follows are excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Sherman and Ms.
Simmons conducted in a conference call last week.
Q. Sarah was older than both of you. Did the age difference matter?
A. Cindy Sherman Not at all. I think I was surprised when I found out that she
was seven years older than me.
How did you meet her?

Sherman It was Joseph [Kosuth, the Conceptual artist] who said, “You have to
call her because you guys just have to be friends.” I had met Joseph in Italy, and
he said, “When you get back to the States, you have to get in touch with her.”
Laurie Simmons I met Sarah through Cindy. On Broadway between —
“April 19, 20, 21, 1978.” CreditEstate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York
Sherman Oh my God! You remember the exact spot?
Simmons I remember. On Broadway between Prince and Houston. I used to see
Sarah and Joseph walking down the street, and they were dressed in head-to-toe
black. They were so formidable looking.
Sherman Yes, I would see her around at openings, and she was definitely
intimidating.
Simmons Sarah was a Marxist. Neither Cindy nor myself would call ourselves
Marxists.
In the mid-’70s, when she and Kosuth were living together, they
founded an art journal called The Fox, which was not exactly an easy
read.
Sherman Not being the intellectual type myself, I wasn’t aware of her
background until much later. I didn’t really read the art magazines. I would look
at the pictures.

Simmons The surprise was how much she wanted to become friendly with us.
Maybe she was looking for a female peer group.
Sherman I bet you’re right.
How do you explain why so many women were then working in
photography as opposed to painting?
Simmons I think it was more open terrain for experimenting. I became less and
less interested in painting as time went by. Now I am super-interested in painting
again.
You’re painting?
Simmons No! Hell no!
“Carnival Ball,” from the “Available Light” series. Credit Estate of Sarah Charlesworth
and Maccarone Gallery, New York

Sherman Photography seemed like new territory. I think in retrospect, it was
because we were all women, and it was a field we could work with and not feel in
competition with the guy artists.
But photography has its own male-dominated history, as exemplified
by artists like Robert Frank and the tradition of street photography.
Were you aware that you were doing something different?
Sherman Yeah, totally aware. I mean, I failed my first photography course.
How does one fail a photography course?
Sherman All these rules and technological aspects — I just couldn’t handle the
techno-perfection that was required. So then I had to retake the course, and I had
this teacher who was just wonderful because she was stressing the image. I didn’t
care at all how the quality of the print was. It wasn’t about the quality of this
object. It was just about the idea.
Simmons I, too, walked out of a photography class. I took it off my schedule at
art school because I said: This isn’t art. Then I got to New York and I picked up a
camera. I went to MoMA during the Szarkowski era. [John Szarkowski was the
Museum of Modern Art’s director of photography from 1962 to 1991.] I thought,
everything in this room is 8 by 10 and black and white. It’s all made by men. And
then, in 1976, there was an Eggleston show —
You’re referring to William Eggleston’s much-derided show at MoMA,
which was seen as vulgar because he used color instead of arty black
and white?
Simmons Everyone thought it was so radical. These small color photographs.
Yes, they were beautiful and I came to appreciate them later, but I thought, This
is like so un-radical. I liked the pictures, but I remember thinking: This is such a
snooze.
Is it fair to say that Sarah helped pioneer a different kind of color
photography, driven by the slickness of magazine layouts?
Simmons Yeah, but we were a little competitive about that. We both thought we
were “colorists.”
Cindy, do you see any similarities between your work and Sarah’s?
Sherman I just remember thinking how differently we worked, because she
really put so much thought into her choice of these perfect images.

From left, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons and Sarah Charlesworth at Ms. Sherman’s
46th birthday party in 2003. Credit Estate of Sarah Charlesworth
Because she was such a perfectionist?
Simmons Decisions were really tough for her in her life as well as her work. We
spent two years on which grill she should get for her back patio, to the point
where she wanted me to go to the hardware store and look at it with her. I said:
We have to stop now.
How did you feel about her “Objects of Desire” when you first saw
them?
Simmons I was surprised that she was veering so dangerously close to making
pictures that just seemed to be about beauty. I was surprised that some of the
pictures were so feminine and so soft. They didn’t feel like they connected to the
person I first met.
You thought: Where’s the Conceptual underpinnings? Where’s the
Marxism?

Simmons I knew they were there. What I know now is that Sarah’s obsession
with objects — she was the kind of person who would hold something in her
hands and tell you about the properties and what she felt. Something made of
pewter was really alive to her. A cup made of copper could take over her whole
consciousness.
She was less well-known than you guys, and had a smaller career. Do
you think that bothered her?
Simmons That didn’t bother her at all.
Because she was able to support herself teaching art?
Simmons Yes, and because she never complained. She felt grateful for
everything she had.
Sherman That’s true. Even when she had no gallery, it freaked her out a little
bit, but she didn’t seem upset — she continued making the work.
Simmons She appreciated her life tremendously. In that way, her appreciation
of the fact that we could actually live a life as artists — I think that influenced me
a lot.
Ms. Charlesworth's work “Buddha of Immeasurable Light.”
Credit Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York
What can you tell me about her childhood? She started high school in
Buffalo and graduated in Oklahoma City.

Simmons I think I eventually figured out that she moved from place to place,
and she was super-pretty and super-popular.
It’s unusual for someone popular in high school to become an artist.
Simmons Exactly. That’s not a typical profile for any artist I know.
Cindy, were you popular in high school?
Sherman No, no, I wasn’t. I was really shy and just had, like, five friends.
Laurie, were you popular?
Simmons No, I had my posse of friends, but we definitely were on the dark side.
How did Sarah end up leaving New York City and settling in Falls
Village, Conn., after separating from the father of her two children?
Sherman Her dream was to get a country house. She just fantasized about it for
so long. She was just dying to have a garden and a place in the country.
Simmons The thing that I have to say here, that was so sad about going to her
studio right after she died — you could see that there was a kind of lightness and
freedom in the new work.
You’re referring to her “Available Light” series, with their crystal
balls and airy, pale-blue spaces.
Simmons It looked like she was starting to have a really good time.
Correction: June 28, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Connecticut town
where Sarah Charlesworth lived. It was Falls Village, not Falls River.

Review: ‘Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld’ Studies Perceptions
Shaped by Photography
By ROBERTA SMITH
JUNE 25, 2015
In 1990, when Sarah Charlesworth characterized her interest in photography as “an
engagement with a problem rather than a medium,” she spoke for many photo-based
artists. Called the Pictures Generation, they were born around 1950 and emerged in the
late 1970s and early ’80s, standing on the shoulders of the Conceptualists, and for them,
photography was very much a “problem.” It sold products, objectified women, glorified
men, mythologized nations and rarely told the truth. The Pictures artists were less
focused on taking photographs than on making them — through appropriation,
distortion and rephotography — to expose the medium’s many manipulations, fictions
and tricks.
By the time Ms. Charlesworth died 23 years later — of an aneurysm at 66 — her 1990
summation wasn’t quite so accurate. Of all the Pictures artists, many of whom were
women, few remained as staunchly loyal to photography as she. No one explored its
history, formal possibilities and very mechanisms with such a determined, even
obsessive, drive, nor did anyone make color so abstract and implacable.
A kind of investigatory passion for all aspects of photography suffuses “Sarah
Charlesworth: Doubleworld,” the trim, handsome survey that glides through five
galleries at the New Museum. Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic
director, and Margot Norton, its associate curator, it traces a transformative exploration
of a medium, covering 10 series of images made between 1978 and 2012, albeit some
with only a few. You can almost feel the forthright Ms. Charlesworth moving briskly
from one series to the next, formulating for each a distinct subject, scale, printing
method, frame and, usually, a big, ambitious title.
Her “Modern History” series includes “Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979,” which is
emblematic of a 22-year-old artist living in New York who already knew the leading
Conceptualists through Douglas Huebler, her college art professor and also a
Conceptualist. The series consists of actual-size photo-based prints of the front pages of
29 American and Canadian newspapers featuring pictures of a total eclipse that
occurred on the date of the title. The pages are pure white — a perennial favorite of Ms.
Charlesworth’s — having been stripped of everything but their nameplates and
photographs. They chart how one event registered with 29 sets of newspaper editors and
art directors in terms of size, choice and prominence of image (or images), giving us a
small study of human variability. It uses one of the premier strategies of Conceptual Art
— nothing but the facts, sorted — but achieves a new level of visual fascination and
glamour.
Ms. Charlesworth had a sense of precision, beauty and mystery all her own, and an eye
for clean design that made her images look modern, even if the objects in them were
not. Her best pieces have a tendency to appear perfect but simple and then to open
inward, spurring you to think through the image and its meanings and effect on you.

The show’s opening gallery is a gripping introduction to this tendency. The space is lined
with grainy grisaille images, gelatin silver prints about the size of large doors or
windows. It takes a moment to start seeing the falling body in each of these nearly
abstract fields of dark and light. When you do, your brain freezes a bit.
Collectively titled “Stills,” these works were made in 1980 — years before Sept. 11 —
using published photographs, enlarged and reworked to be atmospheric and indistinct.
Do they depict people at the end of their psychic ropes and ready to die? Or are their
subjects leaping from burning buildings, trying to live? Did any of them survive? Who
could take a picture like this? Who would? Looking at them feels taboo, like an invasion
of privacy. Their factuality doesn’t disguise their extreme emotionality. Few human
gestures are more fraught, desperate or often final than these.
In several cases, the long, narrow image feels like motion itself: You almost expect the
body to move, or to appear more than once in a series of frames. Yet the size, proportion
and texture of the images also evoke painting. And the enlarged bodies, each in its own
horrific posture of free fall, approach our own size. The space around them is usually
immense, a void into which you could almost jump.
Ms. Charlesworth, who considered her work to be as much like painting as like
photography, would not allow as much space in her images again. Hereafter, the
photograph as flat object, as physical entity, dominates, and never more than in the
show’s next gallery.
With the “Objects of Desire” series (1983-88), which follows the “Stills,” the show
abruptly shifts from the metaphysical to the physical. Here one or a few objects are
isolated on fields of saturated color so bright and glossy that they resemble lacquer, and
perfectly match their lacquered frames. They are Cibachrome prints of appropriated
images photographed against bright, laminated monochrome backgrounds. Seductive,
repellent, otherworldly, these works picture things that are often fetishized: the female
body, exotic animals or religious objects. “Lotus Bowl,” for example, shows a gold ritual
vessel on a bright green ground. An image of a real lotus flower floats above it,
reminding us of art’s grounding in nature, and also contrasting solidity with fading,
soul-like fragility.
The most successful “Objects of Desire” pieces tackle the obsession with objects from
other cultures, with the two-panel “Maps” being a high-voltage case in point. On one
panel, the yellow-on-black stripes of a highway’s center line are seen up close and from
above, like a Pop Art abstract painting. On the other, an orangey ancient bowl is also
seen from above on a bright highway-stripe yellow background. The bowl’s motifs
suggest a horizon line, a blazing sun and a time long before hardtop roads. The work’s
visual strengths keep the mind going with possible interpretations, both graphic and
spatial.
The next two galleries show Ms. Charlesworth in a relative holding pattern in the 1990s.
She cut images from photographs of Renaissance paintings, assembling them into little
morality plays concerning gender that again use the monochrome grounds, but matte

and restrained. In “Figure Drawings” (1988/2008), she covers a wall with tiny black-on-
white images of bodies — from a dancing Shiva to a giant statue of Lenin — as if
indexing both the variety and constancy of the human form throughout time.
And with the “Doubleworld” series (1995), she eases into arranging and photographing
actual objects, initially from the history of optics. In “Still Life With Camera,” a 19th-
century wet-plate camera is pointed at a fittingly antique bottle of wine, a leather-bound
book and an amulet-like photograph of a female nude, crisply suggesting the continuity
of male pleasure. In “Untitled (Voyeur),” a shiny gold telescope pokes suggestively — if
simplistically — between the folds of heavy red curtains.
In the last dozen years of her life, Ms. Charlesworth continued to make photographs
about photography while giving her penchant for almost breathtaking beauty fuller
expression. “Camera Work,” from her “Work in Progress” (2009) series, is a Calumet
view camera shown twice — upright and inverted, positive and negative — a stark
abstraction based on a picture-taking apparatus. Beauty of an especially philosophical
sort reigns in the “0+1” series (2000), which shows white objects of desire against white
grounds — for example, a bough of orchids, a Buddha — creating a very modern vanitas
about the world melting away.
And in her last series, “Available Light” (2012), Ms. Charlesworth’s attachment to
beauty, optics and the elucidation of photography come completely into real space,
where the reflections and refractions of natural light do the talking. These studio setups
seamlessly merge past and present while light acts upon various glass objects and art
materials. In “Carnival Ball,” an almost frivolous sense of elegance, perfectly executed, is
belied by sheer simplicity. A glass sphere sits in a cut-glass goblet in front of a swath of
wallpaper whose broad blue and white stripes are seen through them, first bulging like a
hot-air balloon and then contracting into tiny bars.
In this new, unexpectedly final blossoming of her unfailing precision, Ms.
Charlesworth’s art is softer but no less rigorous and still a source of eye-opening
experiences. It is as if she were saying: “I’ve done almost nothing. See for yourself.”

Artsplainer: Decoding Sarah Charlesworth’s Patricia
Cawlings, Los Angeles at New York’s New Museum
JULIA FELSENTHAL
Sarah Charlesworth, Patricia Cawlings, Los Angeles,from the “Stills” series, 1980.
Black-and-white mural print, 78 x 42 in (198.1 x 106.6 cm).
Photo: Courtesy of the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York
The Manhattan- and Connecticut-based photographer Sarah Charlesworth was a friend
and contemporary of famous members of the Pictures Generation like Cindy
Sherman and Laurie Simmons, but unlike them, she never became a household
name.
July 9, 2015

A just-opened retrospective at the New Museum, her first major exhibition in New York
City, could change that. Charlesworth, who died two years ago at 66 from an aneurism,
was a “pioneer in appropriation,” says Margot Norton, an associate curator who co-
organized the show. “She was one of the first to really look at photographs as this
alternate lexicon that we are absorbed with on a daily basis. And of course I think her
work really reverberates with the pervasiveness of images in social media.”
The show’s title, “Doubleworld,” is a reference to Charlesworth’s 1995 series of the
same name, and to a specific image from that series: a still life of two antique
stereoscopic viewing devices each holding a doubled photo of two women standing next
to each other. The title also illustrates Charlesworth’s notion that photography is an
increasingly ubiquitous “alternate universe” that we interact with every day.
It’s a theme that pervades her diverse body of work, made over nearly four decades.
Charlesworth first became known for her “Modern History” series, in which she traced
the language of news events by photographing the front pages of newspapers and
removing everything other than the masthead and the images. Later, in her “Objects of
Desire” series, she repurposed images of objects and rephotographed them against
richly saturated monochromatic backgrounds, playing with the sleek visual lexicon of
advertising and fashion magazines.
But the masterpieces of the show, says Norton, belong to Charlesworth’s “Stills” series,
which she first showed in 1980, and then revisited with six more images in 2012, near
the end of her career. Norton calls these a bridge between “Modern History”— “more in
tune with what was happening in conceptual art in the seventies”—and “Objects of
Desire.”
For “Stills,” Charlesworth combed through the archives at the New York Public Library
looking for newspaper images of figures suspended in midair, people who had

deliberately jumped or accidentally fallen off buildings. She cropped the images,
mounted them on boards, and rephotographed them, blowing them up to a slightly
larger-than-life six and a half feet tall. “She’s taken a very small clipping and brought it
to human scale so the viewer is able to enter the image,” says Norton.
The titles of the pieces include only the most basic information, sometimes the name of
the falling person, sometimes the location—as in Patricia Cawlings, Los Angeles above.
It’s just enough context to spark our curiosity, but not enough to tell us what happens
next. The effect is that the viewer is stuck in the moment of the fall, forced to really look.
In a 1980 interview in Cover Magazine with Betsy Sussler, Charlesworth put it like this:
“One of the things that fascinated me was the tension inherent in the image, the
contradiction between the desire for information that completes the ‘story’ and the
experience of an incomplete moment. One knows there’s a human history which exists
outside the image, and yet as photographs they are complete. They are static. They
never fucking fall.”
Here, Margot Norton on Sarah Charlesworth’s Patricia Cawlings, Los Angeles and the
rest of the artist’s “Stills” series.

Sarah Charlesworth in New York City in the nineties.
Photo: Anthony Barboza/Getty Images
How does this series about people connect to Charlesworth’s later preoccupation
with photographing objects?
They’re people, but they’re also still, as the title suggests. They’re frozen in this specific
moment between whatever caused them to jump or to fall off of the building, and
whatever might happen after. She was isolating a specific moment, which she would
later carry out with the “Objects of Desire” series.
And she’s treating the photo like an object in and of itself.
Yes, of course. You know, the edges of all of those images are cut out, so they show
what the original source is, the grainy texture of the newspaper paper. And because
they’re blown up, too, you can really see the grain. There’s this abstract quality to the
images.
Do we know anything about Patricia Cawlings?
What the title tells us. That’s all. But that information really does not give any clues as to
why has this person fallen off a building. The viewer is really left to ponder the story, not
only the reasons why this person has fallen, but also the relationship between the
photographed and photographer. Was this photographer a journalist on assignment?
Were they placed outside this building to take this image? Or was this a passerby who
happened to capture this? How was this image taken pre-iPhone? And also, how did
Sarah find this image? What were the circumstances?
Charlesworth first created this series pre-Internet. But now I could google Patricia
Cawlings, Los Angeles and probably find something.
You know, I haven’t done that, but I’ve thought about it. I totally have. In 1980, you’d
have to go to the library and do some digging. Now it takes a lot less effort to do that

same thing. It is interesting because Charlesworth gives you just that small amount of
information where if you wanted to find out about it you could. But I think just that small
amount of information does make the viewer identify with the person in the image, and
also with what the circumstances might have been, without giving away what has
happened before or after the snap of the camera’s shutter.
When these were first displayed in 1980, was there any backlash to the idea of
making art out of someone’s personal tragedy?
It’s funny because there was a lot of criticism about her later work, the “Objects of
Desire” series, but there wasn’t that much criticism about this series. I think the
emotional intensity of their content is something that’s very special. The work that she
was known for before was “Modern History,” which also dealt with specific events. But
with these the emotional poignancy is really heightened.
It’s hard not to see September 11 when we look at these, even though they were
created well before that. When my editor and I were looking at the images, we
also thought about the opening credits for Mad Men.
Obviously when she reprinted them in 2012, Sarah knew how these images had taken
on a different significance in light of the terrorist attacks of September 11. The image
ofThe Falling Man, that was a really widely disseminated image. Something that Sarah
spoke about throughout her career was how images take on a different significance in
light of events that have happened since then. And also the way that images are
disseminated in the media, how they almost become ingrained in our consciousness
without us knowing it. They shape the way we see. These images, which beforehand
didn’t have anything to do with a terrorist attack, there was this way the whole series
she made previously had shifted. It’s fascinating how each person relates to these

images in a different way dependent on their own personal experiences of this. And I
think that September 11 is something that everyone can relate to.
Can you describe the experience of standing in front of these? What does
it feel like?
When you’re looking at a newspaper clipping surrounded by text, there’s a remove.
[Here] you identify differently with the person that you see in the image because they
are so large. You’re confronted by them. Especially when you see these together,
there’s this feeling of falling, a visceral response. But they’re also such objects
themselves. They’re large, but they’re just slightly taller than human scale. They do
have this relationship with the body that I think was very intentional.
What do you see in this image of Patricia Cawlings in particular?
This one is very clear. You really can see her. In some of them, they’re falling so fast
that the camera can’t really [make out] the individual. Or they’re abstracted because it’s
taken from so far away. To me this one also really seems stuck; she looks like she’s
falling, but there’s also a stillness to her. The photograph cheats her out of that falling
experience. She could be somehow flying or leaping from building to building. There’s
such a heaviness when you see them together in the room. Then, when you look more,
there’s a hopefulness that emerges.
It’s also interesting that she’s seeing her shadow, a representation of herself doing that
act. It’s not just the camera seeing; there’s also this doubling with the shadow on the
building.
So . . . Doubleworld?
Yeah, definitely!

‘Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld’ Review:
Should We Look Away?
An exhibition asks tough questions about the voyeurism inherent to photography.
Sarah Charlesworth’s ‘April 19, 20, 21, 1978,’ from the ‘Modern History’ series, 1978 (detail).
PHOTO: COURTESY THE ESTATE OF SARAH CHARLESWORTH AND MACCARONE GALLERY
By RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Exiting the elevator on the second floor at the New Museum, where the Sarah
Charlesworth retrospective, “Doubleworld,” is on view through Sept. 20, one enters a
room lined with 14 pictures of people falling. Blow-ups of photographs originally
published in newspapers and magazines between the 1940s and the 1970s, the grainy
black-and-white images depict figures suspended in midair, having jumped or fallen
from a tall building, presumably to their deaths.
July 8, 2015

Conceived in 1980 but not printed in this fashion until 2012, the series (titled “Stills”)
was exhibited last year at the Art Institute of Chicago and should be even more
discomfiting for audiences in New York, where the memory of those who died on 9/11—
and how they died—remains vivid in the mind.
That the images are printed on large panels shaped like the boxy towers at the World
Trade Center may be accidental but for some will add another pang of historical vertigo.
Charlesworth, who died suddenly in 2013, at the age of 66, devoted most of her career
as artist, writer and teacher to analyzing our complicated relationship with photographs,
how they trigger emotions and deliver information while floating everywhere and
nowhere, objects distinct from but somehow connected to the material world.
“Stills,” among her most coolly provoking works, harkens back to a time before
cellphones and the Internet, when news images of this sort were less prevalent. Editors
at newspapers and magazines continue to worry every day about how much human
blood and pain to feature on their pages.
“Newsworthiness” determines if macabre images are printed. Tabloids (and their
readers) are presumed to have lower social standing, and therefore looser ethics,
because of their keener appetite for gory fare. As none of these men and women, most
of them suicides, led a “newsworthy” life—only five of the 14 are named—we may
assume these photographs did not originally run in the “respectable” press.
Charlesworth reveals how the last sad acts and moments of people can become a
public display because all images are enmeshed in a social web over which individuals
exercise little power. By reprinting a photograph taken by someone else, she was able
to give herself some ethical absolution. The decision to portray a stranger about to die
had already been made by others.
But she does not evade tougher questions about human voyeurism, the secret and
complicit fascination with death and violence, that photography forces us to ask. Should

you avert your eyes out of respect? Or will you, as I did, study details of the
photographs for clues about the time and place they were taken?
A paradox of news photography is this seeming ability to bring us closer to distant
events while highlighting our lack of control over them—our unwitting passivity.
Charlesworth touched on the theme of helplessness in a few of the multipanel works
from the series “Modern History” (1977-79). In perhaps the most renowned piece she
ever did (only excerpted in this show), she reprinted the front pages of 45 different
newspapers from April 21 and 22, 1978. Blotting out story texts, she noted how editors
around the globe treated a photograph of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro that was
released on April 20 to the media by his kidnappers, the Red Brigades. Moro was
murdered less than three weeks later.
In organizing the retrospective, which contains more than 50 pieces from her 40-year
career, the New Museum curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton, give
premium space to Charlesworth’s less heralded post-1980 photo-based work. Much of
this is in glowing color, quite unlike her impoverished-looking black-and-white.
She was one of several artists in the 1980s—Jack Goldstein, Frank Majore and
Stephen Frailey among them—who either appropriated or made photographs that
adopted the meretricious language of spectacle and consumerism: images of
explosions and fire, mirrored surfaces, lush textures, occluded perspectives, seductive
shadows.
The danger, of course, for those claiming to undermine or mock the wily blandishments
of advertising is that they are caught in its snares. Their manufactured photographs can
easily become indistinguishable from the luxury goods they’re purporting to deride.
In her 1983-88 series, “Objects of Desire,” Charlesworth was seldom able to achieve an
instructive tension between attraction and repulsion. Much of this work is as slick as the
magazines from which her images of golden artifacts and lotus bowls were lifted. A

diptych of a blue Buddha and a column of sky seems to whisper, “Buy me, and install
me in your Beverly Hills meditation room.”
In only a few examples from these years is the whole picture more meaningful than its
parts. “Natural History” is one of these successes. It consists of an isolated photo of a
Roman-style bench on a red-saturated panel, which is itself fixed against a wider panel
depicting red lava spilling out of a black volcano. The color scheme suggests
decadence. Images and title hint at the destruction of Pompeii in A.D. 79 by Mount
Vesuvius, described in a letter by Pliny the Younger, whose uncle wrote the
encyclopedic “Natural History” and died from the volcanic fumes. The piece is also
about photography, which can “freeze” the past, much as the ash and pumice from
Vesuvius mummified the death gestures of its victims (and Pompeii’s red frescoes) for
centuries.
In works such as this, one senses Charlesworth’s desire to extend interests from her
own past in a direction that allowed more aesthetic freedom. (Her work from the mid-
’70s came out of hardcore Marxism.) These later efforts aren’t always supported well
here by her curators, who overly rely on the jargon of art theory.
“Figure Drawings” (1988/2008), for example, consists of 40 tiny laminated photos—of
gods, dancers, politicians and workers—spread high and wide on the wall. The wall text
claims the piece “underscores the way that images reinforce power structures tied to
gender, politics, and spirituality.” But as the array appears to be nonhierarchic, and was
done by the artist, this description is neither accurate nor illuminating.
No matter. At her best—and from the evidence here, that remains her essay-like works
in black-and-white, including the new/old “Stills”—Charlesworth was an artist who
significantly altered how photographs could be used to expose the many hidden
meanings they harbored.

SARAH CHARLESWORTH Doubleworld
by Simone Krug
NEW MUSEUM | JUNE 24 – SEPTEMBER 20, 2015
They descend from the sky, soaring—captured mid air—in oversize grisaille panels, caught in the brief
moments before hitting ground. The clipped, cropped, and expanded newspaper cutouts of suicide
and accident victims that comprise Sarah Charlesworth’s fourteen life-size “Stills” series (1980,
printed in 2012) transcend time and penetrate a space beyond. Gravity pauses here. The posthumous
retrospective exhibition Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld, nowat the New Museum, pools these and
other photographs from the artist’s forty-year career that straddle the heady ethos of Conceptualism
and the playful aesthetic of the Pictures Generation. She masterfully stages floating worlds, isolating
objects on monochrome backgrounds to reveal tropes in contemporary visual culture and the systems
of image construction. Her photographs are meticulously rendered, exuding a studied grace in their
polished end result. The creation, or in some instances, the destruction, of the image is the artist’s
ultimate task. Images duplicate reality, forming a false yet identical mirrored space. Charlesworth
hones in on this reflection, beckoning viewers to peer in and gain knowledge about the real and the
imagined in their world.
Sarah Charlesworth, April 19, 20, 21, 1978, from the “Modern History” series, 1978 (detail).
Black-and-white print, 22 × 16 in., approximately. Courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth
and Maccarone Gallery, New York.
The fourteen “Stills” are just larger than human scale, enveloping
the viewer in the simultaneous movement of the drop and the
stillness of the captured moment. The panels present a particular
choreography, as the subjects whirl, leap, and somersault toward
death. Figures appear obscured by the motion of their falling,
literally erasing their likenesses in these fatal descents.
Charlesworth further blurs these anonymous characters in the
gritty reproductions: the result of enlarging newspaper images to
this scale. Some “Stills” resemble abstract brushstrokes rendered
in grainy black and white. The works likewise call to mind Andy
Warhol’s “Death” and “Disaster” series in their morbidity,
cropping, and use of photojournalism. There is a perverseness in regarding, or enjoying, these
moments of death, and there is also a certain helplessness in being cast as a powerless onlooker. The
images are wholly emotional, and unnerving, especially in their resemblance to the headline images of
the 9/11 victims jumping off the Twin Towers. With these works, Charlesworth eerily recalls a future
moment.
September 8, 2015

The artist deconstructs time in print media in April 19, 20, 21, 1978 from her “Modern History” series
(1979), where she presents a set of Italian newspapers from three consecutive dates. The first day’s
paper reports the supposed assassination of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. In the next day’s paper
Charlesworth redacts the print text and leaves only the picture of Moro holding the first day’s paper to
prove he is still alive. In the third day’s paper she again redacts the text, which recounts the
disproving of the rumor with an image of newspapers from both the previous days. This work
challenges photography’s reputation as the embodiment of truth. Words are unnecessary.
Charlesworth demonstrates the magnitude of mass media’s reliance on pictures. The blankness on the
page is unsettling, but here the image recounts the entire narrative.
Sarah Charlesworth, Half Bowl, from the “Available Light”
series, 2012. Crystal Archive print, mounted and laminated
with lacquer frame, 41 × 32 in. Courtesy the Estate of Sarah
Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York.
Newspaper mastheads and front-page
images appear sans text in Arc of Total
Eclipse, February 26, 1979, also from the
“Modern History” series. The work
documents the print media coverage of a
solar eclipse as it travels north from the
Pacific Northwest into Canada. On some of
the twenty-nine covers, a crescent waxes
and wanes, and on others a black orb
emanates ethereal light. The blankness of
the page frames the images, creating a
space that resembles the vast darkness of
the sky. Like “Stills,” this series documents
motion, both of the moon moving through
the sky and of the shifting vantage points
of small towns from North Dakota to
Ontario. Each individual image
contributes to one total depiction of
specific moments in the moon’s movement
to partially block the sun. The opening and closing of the camera’s shutter repeats the movement of
the planets in a solar eclipse, where the presence and absence of light form an image, be it the moon
in the sky or its likeness in a mass-reproduced photograph.
Charlesworth toys with—and isolates—light in her own color photographs. In Half Bowl, part of her
“Available Light” series (2012), shadow and sunlight dissect space in a photograph of a silver bowl of
water. Light is her stylus. The half-lit magical tableau resembles a flag of clearly defined colors and
lines. Even the reflection of the water is split into distinct sections by light and shade. The pieces from

this series are defined by the rigorousness, approaching rigidity, of their tonal precision. This
formality simulates the glossy finish of print advertising while at the same time revealing the oft-
hidden process of their construction.
Other works are composed to create distance
between background and foreground. In the
forty small works that make up Figure
Drawings (1998/2008), the backgrounds are
white and the foregrounded human figures are
dark gray. The universal characters are
familiar: a Jesus figure bears a cross, a lithe
belly dancer gyrates, an East Indian goddess
statue nurses an infant, the chiseled Oscar
motion picture award icon stands stoic, etc.
Each figure carries out its subscribed,
stereotypical role, where men are strong and
women are seductive or maternal.
Individually, these ingrained images are
inoffensive. Depicted together, however, sexist
and racist undertones emerge. In this
grouping, Charlesworth asserts how images
may assume unsuspected power.
Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Man, Ontani Hotel, Los Angeles,
from the “Stills” series, 1980. Black-and-white mural print, 78 × 42
in. Courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone
Gallery, New York.
The Renaissance-era reliance on iconography,
wherein objects stand-in for more abstract
ideas, is inherent in Charlesworth’s oeuvre as
a whole, and especially in her “Objects of
Desire” series (1983 – 88). The artist isolates a
studded black leather dominatrix harness on a
monochrome lacquered red background
in Harness (1983 – 84). Though the prop stands alone, viewers may envision its wearer underneath
the glint of the taut leather straps. The object, too, is loaded in its overt reference to sexuality and
fetish. The diptychFigures (1983 – 1984) from this series utilizes almost the same image to recount
two disparate narratives. In the image on the left, a shiny dress appears graceful when shown on a
slender female form before a slick black background. In the image on the right, a female form appears
bound in the same fabric, prostrate and helpless on a glossy red background. These juxtaposed

depictions of the feminine are simultaneously vulnerable and disturbing, baring the layers of
symbolism that often linger just below the surface in our contemporary visual culture.
Sarah Charlesworth’s appropriation and reconstruction unearth much about the way we see and how
we (de)value images and image making. This show is timely for an audience that exists in a world
saturated by images in the way it subverts our understanding of signs and symbols, which are fluid,
moving, and always evolving. The world Sarah Charlesworth depicts is not simply a duplication of the
world we know, but a separate world that insists upon the infinite complexity—and power—of
pictures.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simone Krug

DOUBLEDOWNER: NEW MUSEUM RETROSPECTIVE GIVES
TOO BRIEF A LOOK AT SARAH CHARLESWORTH’S WORK
BY JENNIFER KRASINSKI
"Art is not defined by the medium it employs, but rather by the questions that it
asks," wrote Sarah Charlesworth in 1983. More than 30 years later, the New Museum
has organized "Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld," the first major New York survey of
her work. The exhibition presents a selection of her photographic series, each of which
centers around certain questions regarding photography. By turns intelligent and
romantic, stately and ethereal, utterly genteel and unabashedly seductive,
Charlesworth's photographs are both a salve and a challenge to the ways in which we
see.
Like contemporaries Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger,
and Richard Prince, Charlesworth, who died in 2013 at age 66, is lumped into the loose
collection of conceptual artists known as the "Pictures Generation." Making images
versus taking images, media versus messages: These were the shared interrogations
July 14, 2015

for a distinct group of artists who, in late-1970s–early-1980s New York, recognized what
lurks beneath the image surface. Charlesworth's earliest works were pictures of
pictures, decontextualized and rephotographed to see what information popped out
when an image was piled up on itself. About fellow Pictures Generation
artist/rephotographer Sherrie Levine, Donald Barthelme once wrote: "She steps in the
same river twice." Charlesworth, however, honored the inimitable flow, dipping into the
endless slipstream of images, placing the specimens she caught under her lens for
closer inspection.
On view in its entirety for the first time in New York is Charlesworth's harrowing and
transcendent "Stills" (1980), a series of fourteen images of people falling, or perhaps
jumping, from buildings. Appropriated and rephotographed from news sources, the
works are printed a bit larger than human scale so that our bodies more directly confront
these imperiled counterparts — some identified, most anonymous — surrendered to
gravity, momentarily seized by the camera before their fate is met. Here the message is
clear: Photography can stop time — preserve life, in a sense — yet it's somehow always
in cahoots with death.
Less disturbing, but no less pointed, are Charlesworth's sumptuous "Objects of Desire"
(1983–1988), a series the artist crafted by meticulously cutting images of objects from
magazines, books, and other sources, and photographing them against laminated color
paper. A black leather harness, a geisha's face, a movie star's satin evening gown, a
Buddha statue: These and other fetishes float against rich, monochromatic
backgrounds, returned from the flat image world as seductive, lickable surfaces.
Consumption, erotics, spirituality: Is it the object, its image, or the artwork that most fully
entwines these?
It may escape the notice of a post-Photoshop eye that Charlesworth's images were
created in-camera, without the assistance or manipulation of computer software, though
she was acutely aware of the changing times. Perhaps feeling the limits of appropriation
and rephotography — the artist claimed that every two years she immersed herself in a
new question, a new strategy regarding art-making — in the early Nineties she began to
make the subjects for herself. "Being in the wane of the age of photography, I was trying
to talk about the age in which the world became organized through photography,"
Charlesworth once explained about her 1995 series "Doubleworld." For these
photographs, she arranged tableaux of nineteenth-century antiques in a painterly
manner, to perform as symbols for the means of seeing and knowing the world.
In Doubleworld, the series' titular image, two stereopticons stand side by side, a slide
portrait of two women clipped to the front of their lenses. The image obviously nods to a
kind of voyeurism — an experience of double vision — yet there's more here than
meets the eye. Charlesworth created the photograph by means of double exposure —
she could only find one stereopticon she didn't think was "cheesy" — and the slide is a
prop she made from a single found photograph.

There is an icy theatricality about this series, which prevents the photographs from
creeping into oddball nostalgia. "I'm also very interested in the question of 'What is time
— what is this thing we call the past?' " she said in 1998. "How is it knowable, and is it
actually knowable, and is it possible to transcend it for a moment, and if so, how?" In the
ghostly pictures of "0+1" (2000), the subjects appear and recede, almost like vapor,
alluding to time and its fragile, earthbound documents. As though in counterpoint, the
auratic photographs in her final series, "Available Light" (2012), are bold and vivid,
transforming light into near-solid matter, capturing moments when camera, object, eye,
and sun all line up in harmony together.
Though stunning and inarguably considerate, the New Museum exhibition is, at the
same time, brief and blunt — Charlesworth's work is wrapped up too neatly, too tightly
— especially in light of the fact that this will undoubtedly be her only hometown
retrospective for quite some time. Part of the show's lack of stretch and breath may be
due in part to the exacting rigor of Charlesworth's practice, yet the curators add little to
the artist's own prescriptions for the work. Is this approach a sign of respect, or
complacency? This kind of party-line presentation isn't uncommon in museum
exhibitions of contemporary art, yet it's clearly a slippery angle considering the private
interests that continue to wind their way around the spaces for public art education. This
isn't to suggest a retrospective is an opportunity for aggressive puncturing. Rather, it
should be an opportunity for nuanced and rigorous thinking alongside that of the artist
herself.
There is an interesting challenge — an irony — that Charlesworth and others of the
Pictures Generation pose to the form of the retrospective. These artists were and are
keenly aware of the economy of images, understanding that pictures always accrue or

lose interest over time. Images never go extinct, but their meanings can shift when
references are lost or conversations change. To freeze these works, particularly
Charlesworth's early works, inside a singular, solid narrative is to inhibit their natural
progression or erosion. To somehow articulate or activate the distinct half-life of the
photograph would have been well worth the effort, particularly for Charlesworth, an artist
devoted to the art of questions, a photographer for whom there was always something
more to see.

by Cynthia Cruz on September 11, 2015
Sarah Charlesworth, “Still Life with Camera,” from the ‘Doubleworld’ series (1995), diptych, Cibachrome print with
mahogany frames (51 x 81 in) (courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York)
Exiting the big, steel elevator to enter Doubleworld, the first major survey of Sarah Charlesworth‘s
work currently at the New Museum, one steps into another, double, world and directly into the gallery
of Stills: 14 photographs of people jumping or falling from tall buildings. The bodies appear as if
caught or trapped inside the cropped photograph, each body held in space forever. We know, of
course, the bodies will hit the earth, but this is not what is captured. Instead, the bodies are dropping
and flying through space, cocooned in the ephemera of the black-and-white photograph. What does it
mean to capture these moments of near death?
Like an animal glassed in an aquarium or a mannequin trapped in a storefront window, the bodies
seem fixed in space as if preserved, as though Charlesworth were attempting to save them. And each
body is framed, each photograph framed. Some of the photographs take up all the edge of the
September 11, 2015

frame’s border, some are ragged, and some are cropped, allowing for space to surround the image.
These three attempts at framing show the artist’s hand, reminding the viewer that what she is looking
at is a creation, an artifice. Furthermore, the framing acts as a way to “fix” the body in place the way a
lepidopterist pins a butterfly into the shadowbox. The butterfly becomes a specimen.
In an interview with Betsy Sassier in BOMB Magazine, Charlesworth explained her technique:
I abstract objects that socially, carry a strong emotional charge or symbolic significance. I’ve
abstracted them from the context in which we normally confront them, a fish out of a natural history
magazine or a heart out of an anatomy magazine and recreated another context which is within my
work … I’m trying, almost to castinto imagery a specific feeling.
Sarah Charlesworth, “Unidentified Woman, Hotel Corona de Aragon, Madrid,” from the ‘Stills’ series (1980),
black-and-white mural print, 78 x 42 in (courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery,
New York) (click to enlarge)

In the same interview, when asked whether she is a photographer, Charlesworth replies, “I don’t think
of myself as a photographer. I’ve engaged questions regarding photography’s role in culture for 12
years now, but it is an engagement with a problem rather than a medium.” By removing images from
their original context and placing them in an alternative space, Charlesworth is in essence creating a
new language. Again, in the sameBOMB interview, she stated:
I’m exploring a level of unconscious engagement in language, a covert symbology. There’s a level on
which this involves a personal as well as a societal confrontation. In other words, I think that a
symbolism is attached to particular images, becomes marked in the unconscious. To exorcise it, to
rearrange it, to reshape it, to make it my own, involves unearthing it, describing it, deploying it inform,
and then rearranging it. In each individual piece, I’m going for a different kind of emotional psychic
chord.
At its core, Charlesworth’s work appears to be an ongoing study of meaning and language, or of
semiotics. In fact, her insistence on the double meanings of symbols seems to be referring to the
semiotic terms “denotation,” the most basic and shared meaning of a word, and “connotation,” the
secondary, cultural meanings of signs, or the myriad ways people understand a word based on their
personal cultural backgrounds. Which brings us back to the “fixing” of bodies inside their frames: how
else can one truly begin to examine what one is seeing unless the object, itself, is removed from
context?
Charlesworth created Stills in 1980, three years after Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977series of
paintings based on photographs of the Baader Meinhof Group. Richter’s paintings of photographs as
well as his archive of photographs explore and interrogate the meaning of photograph while
attempting to deconstruct it. Asked in an interview in 1972 with Rolf Schön, “Why is photography so
important in your work?” Richter responded:
Because I was surprised by photography, which we all use so massively every day. Suddenly, I saw it
in a new way, as a picture that offered me a new view, free of all the conventional criteria I had
always associated with art. It had no style, no composition, no judgment. It freed me from personal
experience. For the first time, there was nothing to it: it was pure picture. That’s why I wanted to have
it, to show it—not use it as a means to painting but use painting as a means to photography.

Installation view of Sarah Charlesworth’s ‘Figure Drawing (1998–2008)’ (courtesy New Museum, New York)
I do see a connection between Richter and Charlesworth’s deconstruction of photography in their
respective series. This isn’t, of course, to imply Charlesworth was in direct conversation with Richter,
though, of course, they may have been. Richter has called his series on the Baader Meinhof Group a
“leave taking,” which implies a moving away from the events. By “fixing” the images into the artwork
he draws a border between those episodes and himself, not unlike Charlesworth’s “fixing” of figures
into frames, removing the bodies from their death.
Each of Doubleworld’s six rooms introduces a new series, and each series is one more attempt at
removing meaning from context. In the second room, American History, made from 1977–1979,
explores the power of images in the media. In what Charlesworth called “Unwriting,” she
photographed the front pages of newspapers and then removed the text, leaving only the image and
masthead. By freeing the images from their accompanying text, she allowed the images to “speak” for
themselves. As with Stills, here, again, she removes an idea or image from its context and fixes it into
a kind of emptied out frame. The blank space surrounding the now-floating image, like the blank
space surrounding the falling bodies in Stills, creates a silence which previously would have been
filled with the voices of the newspaper’s writers explaining and contextualizing the image.

Sarah Charlesworth, Doubleworld, from the “Doubleworld” series, 1995. Cibachrome print with mahogany
frame, 51 x 41 in (129.5 x 104.1 cm). Courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New
York) (click to enlarge)
In “Available Light (2012),” also in the second room, Charlesworth introduces a series of shapes and
colors, mostly spheres that play with darkness and light, and appear like tarot or playing cards. The
series’ similarly shaped objects create an optical desire to find likes. I found myself standing before
the line of images, pointing out the moon-shaped objects. The simplified language of these works
acts as a kind of blanking of the slate. The series O+1 (2000) in the next room is similarly sparse,
completely drained of color, as vitrines appear filled with fog.
In a corridor at the back of the gallery are a series of small, framed human figures. This collection of
40 works, titledFigure Drawings (1988/2008), was conceived in 1998 and completed in 2008.
Presented from floor to ceiling, the images are a map of human behavior. Like Charlesworth’s other
works, these are also made from prints. All of the figures derive from public sources. It is interesting
that Charlesworth titled the series Figure Drawings: the figures aren’t “drawn.” But, again, the title
questions language and meaning. What does it mean to “draw” something? The word “draw”
originates from the Old English dragan, meaning “to drag, to draw, protract.” What, then, is
Charlesworth “dragging”? And here I’d say she’s dragging meaning through each of her works, each
of the series, each of the rooms. To title this series “drawings” is to force the viewer to question her
conception of drawing. Also, to draw means to pull someone or something in another direction. In
journeying through the exhibit, Charlesworth draws us away from one idea to another.

In Renaissance Paintings (1991), a series reimagining Renaissance paintings, Charlesworth
photographs images from Renaissance paintings and essentially “fixes” them onto lacquered wood
frames. Again, as in the Stills and Modern History, these works, removed from their original work of
art and “re-fixed” onto a blank space allow the viewer to consider the images alone, the cut-outs
presented on a large, blank space like a specimen on a petri dish. The result is uncanny. Like a
phantom limb, the redacted imagery lives on, but only as a shadow. Standing before “Transfixion” I
found myself dredging my mind to recall the original imagery now removed.
Sarah Charlesworth, “April 19, 20, 21, 1978,” from the ‘Modern History’ series (1978) (detail), three black-and-
white prints, 22 x 16 in each, approximately (courtesy the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery,
New York)
In Doubleworld (1995), cibachrome prints of still lives appear within mahogany frames. The term “still
life” can also be called “nature mort,” meaning “dead nature” and in bothDoubleworld and Objects of
Desire Charlesworth presents “dead objects.”
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’s meditation on photography, was published in English in 1982. One
year later, in the panel paper she presented for the Society for Photographic Education, Charlesworth
wrote, “To live in a world of photographs is to live in a world of substitutes—stand-ins—
representations of things, or so it seems, whose actual referents are always the other, the described,

the reality of a world once removed.” Charlesworth was loath to be considered a
writer, correcting Betsy Sussler in an interview. When asked “Tell me about doing the research for
these,” Charlesworth responded, “You’re using a writer’s word.” But Charlesworth was, in fact, a
writer: authoring artists books and, of course, The Fox, an art theory magazine she co-edited with
Joseph Kosuth. But perhaps, more accurately, we might call Charlesworth not a “Writer” but instead
an “un-writer” who un-wrote: removing, redacting, and then showing us our world anew, through her
eyes, in her Doubleworld.
Installation view of ‘Doubleworld’ (courtesy New Museum, New York, photo by Maris Hutchinson)
Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld continues at the New Museum (235 Bowery, Lower East Side,
Manhattan) through September 20.

Sarah Charlesworth’s Retrospective Gives You
Double Vision
Sarah Charlesworth, Bowland Column; Images courtesy of The New Museum, 2015
Sarah Charlesworth’s career can be broadly situated alongside the Pictures Generation,
a cohort of artists who came of age in the Seventies and began to work within the newly
circulating visual language of mass media. For many, Charlesworth among them, the
photograph became a device rather than a tool, and images were used self-referentially
to upend photographic conventions pervading the ever-expanding worlds of film,
television and print. Through the appropriation and altering of pre-existing “pictures”,
artists sought to disrupt the political, sexual and social hierarchies that these modes of
distribution enforced.
July 1, 2015

Sarah Charlesworth, April 19, 20, 21, 1978, installation view; Images courtesy of The New Museum, 2015
“Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld”, now on view at the New Museum, does the
supreme job of articulating this early conceptual legacy, while expanding on her oeuvre,
giving an inclusive look at her unyielding dedication to photography beyond the
boundaries of newspapers and magazines. Curated by New Museum Artistic Director
Massimiliano Gioni and Associate Director Margot Norten, the exhibition is organised
into five rooms, each space presenting a cohesive and distinctly styled body of work
that outlines the evolution of a practice that begins in the late Seventies and continues
until 2012, just a year before the artist’s untimely death.

Sarah Charlesworth, Unidentified Woman Hotel de Aragon; Images courtesy of The New Museum, 2015
“Doubleworld” opens with “Stills”, a series from 1980 in which Charlesworth tightly
cropped and re-photographed black and white press clippings of human figures falling
from buildings. The fleeting second between jump and landing has been hauntingly
immortalised on film and enlarged by Charlesworth into six feet high vertical monoliths.
The body remains a suspended gestural mark, rendered motionless among the
architectural detailing and this pause in movement, the activated act of looking, serves
as a melancholic reminder of the photographer as bystander and the sensation and
spectacle for the sake of journalism.

Sarah Charlesworth, Patricia Cawlings, Los Angeles; Images courtesy of The New Museum, 2015
These 14 grainy black and white gelatin silver prints are of a particularly evocative
nature within the context of New York City, a curatorial move that candidly sets the tone
for the remainder of the exhibition. It is one that lays forth an idea that Charlesworth
continually explores: the image may be made with the camera’s lens but it is created in
the mind of the viewer.
Moreover, it is the artist who truly dictates what we see and how we see it.
Charlesworth’s practice is a series of strong edits and a continual act of reduction. This
is seen most clearly in her earlier, and much celebrated, series of front page newspaper
alterations “Modern History” (1978-79), and later in works such as “Objects of Desire”
(1983-1988), where the artist meticulously cuts out individual objects: a man’s face
made up to look like Geisha, a black harness, a sculptural bust, among others, and re-
photographs them floating centred within the frame, upon boldly hued backgrounds.
Unlike “Stills”, with its explicit narrative and relation to movement, “Objects of Desire” is
intentionally opaque in its presentation of object, time and place. This requires the
viewer to conjure their own impulses, their own fetishisms, all within Charlesworth’s
carefully nuanced and predetermined set of of socio-cultural meanings.

Sarah Charlesworth, Red Mask; Images courtesy of The New Museum, 2015
“Doubleworld” continues on into Charleswoth’s use of the studio still life as a possible
site for image manipulation and control. Relying less on found images and more on
pattern, symmetry and controlled light, Charlesworth’s work edges into a highly
meditative abstraction. The question at stake becomes less about the power structures
that these images propagate and more about the photograph itself, its ability to
represent, and its essential characteristic that runs throughout: the artificial doubling of
our world into its own.

The artist and linguist: Sarah Charlesworth's 'Doubleworld'
on show at the New Museum
BY STEPHANIE MURG
The first major New York survey of Sarah Charlesworth's work is on show at the New
Museum, New York. Pictured here: Still Life with Camera, from the 'Doubleworld' series,
1995. Courtesy of the Estate of Sarah Charlesworth and Maccarone Gallery, New York
'In one sense, we live in a regular three-dimensional image world, and in another sense,
we inhabit an entirely different image-world,' said Sarah Charlesworth (1947 – 2013),
who found in the latter a common vocabulary for history and popular culture, creation
and reception, artist and viewer. The first major New York survey of her work, 'Sarah
Charlesworth: Doubleworld', on view until 20 September at the New Museum in New
York, probes and celebrates the landscape of images, at once mining its terrain and
savouring its glossy surface.
'Sarah was interested in engaging with photography as a problem rather than a
medium,' says Margot Norton, a curator at the New Museum whoorganised the
exhibition with the institution's artistic director,Massimiliano Gioni. 'That spoke for a
July 9, 2015

generation of artists that were immersed in the image culture which we all exist in and
heralded a change in the way that artists used photography.'
Bridging the conceptual art of the 1970s and the 'Pictures
Generation', Charlesworth favoured making pictures to taking them, drawing upon her
own vast cache of images (culled from newspapers, fashion magazines, pornography
and textbooks) not as mere collage fodder but as a means for transforming photographs
into something closer to objects. The 50 works in this exhibition
reveal Charlesworth acting as both artist and linguist, decoding the grammar, syntax
and lexicon of photography.
A work from her 'Modern History' series of 1977 – 79 (though it was added to in 1991
and 2003) brings together the front pages of 29 American and Canadian newspapers on
the day of a total solar eclipse. Swept clean of their headlines and body text to leave
floating images of the Moon-obscured sun, the black-and-
white broadsheets (reproduced at the same size as the original newspapers) become a
visual glossary, demonstrating the differing prominence afforded to the cosmos on a
particular day in a particular town.
The provocative power of familiar images unmoored from their original contexts is also
apparent in Charlesworth's later 'Objects of Desire' series (1983 – 88), in which images
of different objects – a goat, a golden bowl, a Buddha, a disembodied satin dress – are
cut out and isolated against shiny,colourful backgrounds. This approach gives way to an
entirely new set of associations with 'Stills', the 1980 series of 14 outsized images that
each show a single human figure in free-fall. The viewer can only intuit that it is an act of
escape, whether from danger, from life, or from a combination of the two.
'When seeing the 'Stills' today, after the events of 11 September 2001, the images take
on an even more emotional and haunting power,' says Gioni. 'It's a sober beginning for
an exhibition that resonates with faith and skepticism, and the power of photography
and the power of images.'

SARAH CHARLESWORTH: DOUBLEWORLD" @
NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK
“Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld” currently on display at New Museum is the first
major survey in New York of the artist’s work to date, encompassing an innovative
career that played a crucial role in expanding the possibilities of photography and
establishing the medium’s centrality to contemporary art. Invested with rare precision
and dedication, Charlesworth’s influential body of work and philosophy on art-making
continue to reverberate and take on shifting significance with time as new technologies
emerge and our inexhaustible reservoir of images expands with astonishing speed.
Her influential body of work deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave
emphasis to the medium’s importance in mediating our perception of the world.
Charlesworth’s practice bridged the incisiveness of 1970s Conceptual art and the
illuminating image-play of the later-identified “Pictures Generation.” She was part of a
July 13, 2015

group of artists working in New York in the 1980s—which included Jack Goldstein,
Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, among others—
that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the imprint of ubiquitous
images on our everyday lives.
This exhibition at the New Museum features Charlesworth’s poignant series “Stills”
(1980), a group of fourteen large-scale works rephotographed from press images that
hauntingly depict people falling or jumping off of buildings. The installation of “Stills”
marks the first time that the complete series has been displayed in New York and is
presented alongside other prominent works by the artist: her groundbreaking series
“Modern History” (1977–79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the alluring
and exacting “Objects of Desire” (1983–88) and “Renaissance Paintings” (1991), which
continued Charlesworth’s trenchant approach to mining the language of photography;
“Doubleworld” (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in premodern art; and her
radiant latest series, “Available Light” (2012). The title of the exhibition is taken from one
of her photographs, Doubleworld (1995), from the series of the same name, which
presents two nineteenth-century stereoscopic viewing devices, each holding a
stereophotograph depicting two women standing side by side. The continuous doubling
of images in this work underscores the duplicitous role of the photograph as an
alternate, optical universe and a stand-in for the physical world.

Sarah Charlesworth: Doubleworld
By Johanna Burton, Hal Foster, Kate Linker, Margot Norton, Barbara Kruger, Laurie
Simmons, Sara Vanderbeek, and Cindy Sherman
Sept/Oct/Nov, 2015

THE 10 BEST NEW PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITS OF
SUMMER 2015
Group shows, solo spotlights, and epic historical surveys
By Lindsay Comstock
Sarah Charlesworth | The New Museum, New York, NY | June 24 to Sept. 20, 2015
The summer season is often punctuated by dizzying energy, heat waves, wanderlust,
and the draw to water. In the art world, it’s all about the summer group shows that unveil
emerging artists and further propel the industry’s rising stars; it can also be a time for a
few standout one-person shows and historic surveys honoring the craft. Here, we’ve
rounded up ten of our picks for summer photo exhibits that are sure to quench the thirst
for enticing visual stimuli.
June 22, 2015

FINAL Sarah Charlesworth Press Highlights Report

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