Page 61 - Studio International - May 1969

Les Levine, born in Dublin, living in New
York, is the first artist of the young Canadian
establishment to be seen one-man in London.
He is in his early thirties. As he is pledged to a
programme of impermanence he may not like
the idea of establishment, but he must take it
as doing at least for now. His exhibition at the
ROWAN GALLERY is not installed, as I write,
though I have seen some of the work. I shall
not review it but welcome him to London.
The first works I saw were paintings hanging
in Jerrold Morris's gallery in Toronto in
1964. They were large canvases subdivided
symmetrically into four, six or more equal
rectangles. Each rectangle contained, on a
black ground, an array of narrow white
shapes, arranged in rows, horizontally or
vertically, in some appearance of order but
not according to any obvious system. The
sensuous vitality of the ground and of the
lights struck me first; the references were not
immediate. The white bars were in fact nega-
tive images of chair legs, brush handles or
other lathe-turned rods that had been laid on
the canvas and painted around by spray gun.
The picture recorded their absence and their
transient disposition which had interrupted
the field of the painting. They were economi-
cal acknowledgements of the effect of what
has been abstracted on what is retained. This
has interested me. I see it not so much as a
problem to be solved as one of the conditions
in which painting is produced and find my-
self dissatisfied when it is by-passed. I recog-
nized an elegant visual statement of the condi-
tion. The chair legs had gone and the surface
on which they had rested, to be complete,
needed the light of their absence.
In 1965 I saw an exhibition at the Blue Barn 6
Gallery in Ottawa, which I believe had been Les Levine
shown earlier in Toronto. It consisted of a plug assist 2
Uvex plastic 35 x 50 in.
series of objects suspended from the ceiling at
about head height, as near enough identical
as not to matter, if not identical, painted a three dimensions into the two dimensions of of plexiglass between which the spectator can
uniform pink. These were chairs of a simple surface. Others have felt this exhibition as pass to see his surroundings transformed and
kitchen type encased in tight-stretched can- environment, in line with later developments to see and hear himself repeated, facing
vas, suggesting superficially a consignment of of Levine's work, but I remember objects of a questions of the sort Les Levine suggests as
flayed carcases of unnervingly toxic colour or kind of philosophic art, expositions of a applying : 'Do you know where you are ? ... Do
perhaps the bladders of automata. In fact perplexity of physical existence. you know who you are ? ...Do you like what
I'm not sure the colour mattered so much nor Of this family are the more mature, silver- you see and do you see what you look at ?...
the mildly surrealist fantasy; the sliding light sprayed, encased objects at the Rowan How do you feel ?'
on the taut surfaces and the knuckle-tight Gallery. The chair, recumbent on a sloping From such works and such questions Levine
prominences would be more to the point. plinth, through its slightly mortuary allusion has proceeded to argue the case for transient
They were, you could see, chairs strangely and the contained light of its surfaces seems and disposable environments and for dispos-
denatured, weightless, each one swaying at endowed with a ritual suggestion, ritual con- able art in general and to produce the needful
some wrong angle; the volumes proposed by cerned with the existence of inanimate things. disposable components.
the extending legs and backs of chairs were In 1966 Levine installed in the Art Gallery of Of his disposables Levine has said, 'I wanted
cruelly constricted so that usual ideas of Ontario a transient environment, entitled to create a non-object. Its concern is not with
chairs waiting to be sat on, to receive a body, Slipcover, draping the walls of one of ownership. It is concerned with active experi-
wouldn't occur. And of course you couldn't the galleries together with its exhibits with ence. The purchaser may arrange and re-
be sure the chairs were there at all and no mylar and creating an inflating, deflating, arrange the units according to his personal
Johnsonian kick would prove anything—there breathing labyrinth, combining with mirrors taste. The disposable does not in fact become
might be a hidden armature of struts that and light—a sensation to which photographs art until arranged by someone. Prior to that
distended the envelope in directions that have as little relevance as to a beat session. I it is merely a component.'1 The modules he
simulated a chair. However, they were more have this only from description; to the same offers are something quite different in inten-
likely to be chairs unable to exist as such any purpose would seem to be some of the later tion from the current run of multiples, in
longer, in the moment of disappearing from free-standing structures incorporating domes which mass-production technology is used by