"Althought the manipulations to which Sherrie Levine subjects her pictures are farr less obsessive than Brauntuch's, her subject is the same: the distance that separates us from what those pictures simulatneously proffer and withhold and the desire that is thereby set in motion. Drawn to picture whose status is that of cultural myth, Levine discloses that status and its psychological resonances through the imposition of very simple strategies. In one tripartite series, for example, Levine cropped three photographs of a mother and child according to the emblematic silhouettes of Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy. The currency of myths with which Levine deals is exemplified by those profiles, taken as they are from the faces of coins: the photographs are cut out of a fashion magazine. The confrontation of the two images is structured in such a way that they must be read through each other: the profile of Kennedy delineates the picture of mother and child, which in turn fills the Kennedy emblem. These pictures have no autonomous power of signification (pictures do not signify what they picture): they are provided with signification by the manner in which they are presented (on the faces of coin, in the pages of fashion magazines). Levine steals them away from their usual place in our culture and subverts their mythologies. Shown as a slide projection at the Kitchen, the mother and child/Kennedy picture was magnified to a height of eight feet and diffused through a stream of light. This presentation of the image gave it a commanding, theatrical presence. But what was the medium of that presence and thus of the work? Light? A 35-mm slide? A cut-out picture from a magazine? Or is the medium of this work perhaps its reproduction here in this book? And if it is impossible to locate the physical medium of the work, can we then locate the original artwork?"