Life and work
A graduate of the Central School of Art and Design in London, Levine first moved to Canada in 1960. He eventually settled in New York City in 1964 and became a resident artist at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1973. Early in his career, Levine introduced the idea of a disposable art and was given the nickname Plastic Man. [3]
In 1965, Levine, with Nam June Paik, were among the first artists to buy and use portapaks. Thus he was one of the first artists to try television as a medium for the dissemination of art. He has also used the telephone for this purpose, as well. [4]
In 1969 he exhibited White Sight at the Fischbach Gallery, a work consisting of a room as the inside of a featureless whitecube illuminated by two bright sodium vapour lights. This meant that the spectator was confronted with their own act of looking presented as an artifact. [5] The installation was also included as a feature for a charity ball at the New York Museum of Modern Art, to attend which museum patrons had to pay $75 per couple. Whilst Levine regarded the installation as a great success, this view was not shared by all the patrons. The yellow light drained the women's dresses of color. One visitor said: "All the men looked as if they have been dead for two centuries. All the women looked like their grandmothers. The beautiful ladies fled within one minute." One of these accused Levine of making the museum "look ugly and silly" and promptly transformed the artwork by pulling the main light switch. [3] In 1984, Levine produced the short film Made in New York in collaboration with fashion designer Willi Smith. He also designed a T-shirt for Smith’s label WilliWear Productions that was featured in the film. [6]
Also in 1969, Les Levine presented the durational environment Process of Elimination. The work involved 300 plastic sheets that were exhibited in a vacant lot owned by New York University, which the artist systematically removed over the course of a month. The art historian Corinna Kirsch describes this as a work about authorial control, particularly as "Levine's ability to control the removal of his work can be seen in parallel with the formation of the Art Workers' Coalition", a group that was formed the same month as Process of Elimination and which also involved the removal of a small sculpture. [7]
Levine has written on art for Arts, The Village Voice , Art in America and the Saturday Review . In 1969 his work was published in 0 - 9 magazine, an avant-garde publication which experimented with language and meaning-making.
He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 and again in 1980. [1]
Intermedia is an art theory term coined in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins to describe the strategies of interdisciplinarity that occur within artworks existing between artistic genres. It was also used by John Brockman to refer to works in expanded cinema that were associated with Jonas Mekas' Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Gene Youngblood also described intermedia, beginning in his Intermedia column for the Los Angeles Free Press beginning in 1967 as a part of a global network of multiple media that was expanding consciousness. Youngblood gathered and expanded upon intermedia ideas from this series of columns in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema, with an introduction by Buckminster Fuller. Over the years, intermedia has been used almost interchangeably with multi-media and more recently with the categories of digital media, technoetics, electronic media and post-conceptualism.
Assemblage is an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium. It is part of the visual arts and it typically uses found objects, but is not limited to these materials.
Fountain is a readymade sculpture by Marcel Duchamp in 1917, consisting of a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt". In April 1917, an ordinary piece of plumbing chosen by Duchamp was submitted for the inaugural exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to be staged at the Grand Central Palace in New York. When explaining the purpose of his readymade sculpture, Duchamp stated they are "everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist's act of choice." In Duchamp's presentation, the urinal's orientation was altered from its usual positioning. Fountain was not rejected by the committee, since Society rules stated that all works would be accepted from artists who paid the fee, but the work was never placed in the show area. Following that removal, Fountain was photographed at Alfred Stieglitz's studio, and the photo published in the Dada journal The Blind Man. The original has been lost.
Marcel Barbeau, was a Canadian painter, sculptor, graphic and performance artist who used different forms of abstraction and art techniques and technology to express himself.
Clement Meadmore was an Australian-American furniture designer and sculptor known for massive outdoor steel sculptures.
Leon Polk Smith (1906–1996) was an American painter. His geometrically oriented abstract paintings were influenced by Piet Mondrian and he is a follow er of the Hard-edge school. His best-known paintings constitute maximally reduced forms, characterized by just two colors on a canvas meeting in a sharply delineated edge, often on an unframed canvas of unusual shape. His work is represented in many museums in the United States, Europe, and South America. Thanks to a generous bequest from the artist, the Brooklyn Museum has 27 of his paintings on permanent display.
Henry Geldzahler was a Belgian-born American curator of contemporary art in the late 20th century, as well as a historian and critic of modern art. He is best known for his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, and for his social role in the art world with a close relationship with contemporary artists.
Robert Whitman was an American artist best known for his seminal theater pieces of the early 1960s combining visual and sound images, actors, film, slides, and evocative props in environments of his own making. From the late 1960s on he worked with new technologies, and his latest work incorporated cellphones.
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John Harvey McCracken was a minimalist artist. He lived and worked in Los Angeles, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and New York.
Robert Goldwater was an American art historian, African arts scholar and the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art, New York, from 1957 to 1973. He was married to the French artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
De Wain Valentine was an American minimalist sculptor who was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. Often associated with the Light and Space movement in the 1960s, he is best known for his minimalist sculptures of translucent glass, fiberglass and cast polyester resin having slick surfaces suggestive of machine made objects. He lived and worked in Gardena, California.
Claes Oldenburg was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.
Bill Vazan is a Canadian artist, known for land art, sculpture, painting and photography. His work has been exhibited in North America and internationally.
Thornton Willis is an American abstract painter. He has contributed to the New York School of painting since the late 1960s. Viewed as a member of the Third Generation of American Abstract Expressionists, his work is associated with Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, Process Art, Postminimalism, Bio-morphic Cubism and Color Field painting.
The feminist art movement refers to the efforts and accomplishments of feminists internationally to produce art that reflects women's lives and experiences, as well as to change the foundation for the production and perception of contemporary art. It also seeks to bring more visibility to women within art history and art practice. The movement challenges the traditional hierarchy of arts over crafts, which views hard sculpture and painting as superior to the narrowly perceived 'women's work' of arts and crafts such as weaving, sewing, quilting and ceramics. Women artists have overturned the traditional view by, for example, using unconventional materials in soft sculptures, new techniques such as stuffing, hanging and draping, and for new purposes such as telling stories of their own life experiences. The objectives of the feminist art movement are thus to deconstruct the traditional hierarchies, represent women more fairly and to give more meaning to art. It helps construct a role for those who wish to challenge the mainstream narrative of the art world. Corresponding with general developments within feminism, and often including such self-organizing tactics as the consciousness-raising group, the movement began in the 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s as an outgrowth of the so-called second wave of feminism. It has been called "the most influential international movement of any during the postwar period."
Kynaston Leigh Gerard McShine was a Trinidadian born curator and public speaker. His visions about contemporary art made lasting contributions to the lives of countless artists and colleagues at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City where he worked from 1959 to 2008. He is said to be the first curator of color at a major American museum and at his retirement he had risen to the position of chief curator at large of painting and sculpture.
Marilyn Levine was a Canadian ceramics artist known for her trompe-l'œil art. She built a reputation making ceramic works of art that looked like leather handbags, garments, and briefcases. She was associated with the funk art movement.
Victor Spinski was an American artist and professor best known for his ceramic works in the trompe l'oeil style.
Erik Levine is an American visual artist. He is a Professor of Art in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
