Les Levine — electronic environments and Iris

1968

Artists: Les Levine · Year: 1968 · Medium: Electronic multi-monitor installations; environmental sculpture · Substrate: Multiple television monitors; closed-circuit video; environmental-scale gallery installations · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Fischbach Gallery; independent Les Levine, an Irish-Canadian artist based in New York since 1964, opened The Restaurant of the Society of Creative Anachronism (commonly known as Levine's Restaurant) in the spring of 1969 in the East Village and, over the preceding year and a half, had produced a series of systemic sculptural and video works under names like Systems Burn Off (1969) and the 1968 Electronic Art Diary that give him a position in this archive. His 1968 work Iris, a three-channel video installation commissioned by the Architectural League of New York, used closed-circuit television cameras to record visitors and play the footage back on wall-mounted monitors on a six-second delay. The viewer entered a room and saw themselves six seconds ago from three angles. The installation ran continuously during the exhibition and is one of the earliest delayed-video self-portrait pieces in the American video-art canon. What distinguishes Levine from his American-video-art contemporaries of the same year (Nam June Paik had been doing closed-circuit work since 1965; Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor would not appear until 1970) is the specific argument Levine was making with video: that the medium's economic and infrastructural properties — its cheapness, its reproducibility, its suitability for non-gallery distribution — were the conceptual content of the work, not just its technical conditions. Levine's 1969 Public Mind, which he distributed as a set of 500 videotapes to museums and universities, was an early argument for the artist-as-publisher economic model that would become dominant in American video art through the 1970s. This archive cares about Levine for a secondary reason: his 1968 Electronic Art Diary — a daily tape he kept for a full year, documenting his studio life, his conversations with other artists, his thoughts about the medium — is one of the earliest sustained artist-produced video diaries, and a direct predecessor of Lynn Hershman Leeson's 1984 Electronic Diaries and of every subsequent artist-confessional video practice. Levine continued to work prolifically, has been the subject of multiple retrospectives (Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, 1969; Stedelijk in Amsterdam, 1976; New Museum in New York, 2012), and remains alive in his eighties, still living in New York. Lore Levine had been a painter in Dublin and Ottawa before moving to New York in 1964. His 1969 restaurant was partially an artwork, partially an actual restaurant — it served Irish food, accepted cash, and was funded initially by the proceeds from a gallery show — and it ran for approximately eighteen months before closing when the food-quality complaints from neighbors began to interfere with Levine's other work. The Electronic Art Diary tapes were recorded nearly daily throughout 1968 on a Sony Portapak; the full 1968 run is held at the Archives of American Art and has been only partially digitized. Levine's New Museum retrospective in 2012 was called Les Levine: Pioneer of Media Art and was the first institutional survey of his 1960s–70s work after several decades during which American critics had largely forgotten his specific priority. Sources • Levine, Les — Les Levine: Kitsch and the New Consumerism (self-published, 1974). • Archives of American Art, Smithsonian — Les Levine papers. • New Museum — Les Levine: Pioneer of Media Art (exh. cat. 2012).