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David Levine

Things being what they are these days (art world, money, cult of youth, Berlin), it's not uncommon to wind up at an opening and to feel surrounded by young adults who have just recently assumed the part of Artist - or Curator or Gallerist or Critic or Whatever - and are playing it, maybe a little too ardently, just hoping not to get caught out.

Such was the case with the crowd circulating through Brunnenstrasse's Curators Without Borders at last month's opening of the group exhibition 'The Disappearance Gradient' - except they were in fact actors. All of them. The gallerist was played by a study-abroad student from North Carolina, Jerry, alias James Rafferty (if self-selected curator names were subject to art historical contextualization, I'd locate him in New York somewhere between the Ash Can School and Abstract Expressionism), whose consternation seemed particularly apt. One of his artists, erstwhile a fellow student in his acting class at the Freie Universitaet, was bullying him to kick out the riffraff and sell more art, faster. Another - an actionist throwback who had to be shoehorned into the program under the auspices of reappropriative practice, but who seemed pretty unreconstructed - was inciting visitors to mess with his installation with the rally: "It's about the Process". The press was there, too, but had gotten buttonholed by someone talking about the former East Germany. Meanwhile, a well-dressed dude had shown up who no one was talking to. Rafferty decided - curatorially - to get drunk.

Or it might have been the case that all this felt eerily familiar, if it had been possible to get inside the gallery - which was in fact locked from the outside with a U-lock. (Information about the content of the conversations was reported by the internees in a debrief a few days later.) The shifting crowd outside included a pretty standard mix of Brunnenstrasse gallery marauders, and paid about the kind of attention to what was going on through the gallery's big vitrine as it standardly does (idle). The outdoor opening seemed happy enough to mill around regarding its indoor image occasionally, the way people relate to the TV in sports bars. There were drinks outside, too, and some considerable press. Also, there was the person who had conceived the closed opening, Berlin-based New Yorker David Levine - I guess you could call him the artist.

David Levine is an artist by way of acting, he has a degree in intellectual history, English literature, and directing - but it's hard to feel comfortable characterizing him as anything else. He's shown at New York's Gavin Brown@Passerby and was included in last year's Documenta XII. He publishes texts (the wording is deliberate) in highbrow arty magazines like Cabinet. But you'd never guess it, because Levine seems like such a fun guy, genuinely down to earth, and categorically too cool to take that sort of stuff all that seriously - which is probably a testament to how well he's learned his own lessons.

Still from Bauerntheater

In staging a fishbowl opening Levine's central preoccupation was not in the art world as such - at least in same sense that his previous work, Bauerntheater, is not mainly about potatoes. That piece, which premiered last year in Joachimstal, a town in the countryside near Berlin, involved training an American actor to become a character from The Resettler by GDR playwright Heiner Mueller. The preparation was conducted in New York at great expense (to the German government, as it happens, which put up 67,000 euro for the production out of the Federal Culture Fund), especially given that the play was never staged. Instead David Barlow of the Kansas City Repertory Theater, having been amply prepared by dramaturges, Heiner Mueller scholars and David Levine, farmed potatoes. He did this in character for weeks, to intermittent applause.

Bauerntheater, like last month's 'Closing/Opening', literalized Levine's interest in acting without the theater. It may not be totally surprising that a former actor rejects theater as obsolescent, but finds in it elemental bits of infinite potential: acting as either "a way of becoming another person", or as a metaphor, or a "technique of knowledge acquisition".

In a convenient instance of life imitating art-imitating-life, or at least accommodating it, the actors Levine engaged for 'Closing/Opening' were in fact his students. (He teaches at two Berlin universities.) Each had been assigned a Berlin-based artist whose character they were to assume, who they had been studying and following around, whose studios they had been visiting and whose dogmas they had been internalizing, for several weeks. The project was inspired by Ed Harris's preparation for his title role in Pollock, for which the artist created all his own "work". The premise of the acting method Harris engaged in is one central to Levine's own practice: that ideally one should be able to become as good an artist as one is an actor playing an artist (a thesis for which arguably drip painting provides convenient but non-definitive evidence, but never mind).

As it happened, the artwork that Levine's students came up with - if not uniformly fantastic - ranged from very good to entirely plausible. It was then down to Rafferty, under coaching of his own subject/muse, Curators Without Borders' director Sarah Belden, to select the work for the show. He, Levine and Belden met at the gallery the morning before the lock-in's dress rehearsal to put together an exhibition from the multimedia work. Inter alia, they selected: a video documentation of a hair-cutting performance (with installation); a lackluster tempera abstraction; a small, photo-realistic pencil sketch of a dog; from four series of black and white photos, one of each; and from a group of naked self-portraits drawn in Sharpie marker on discarded windows, the least vagina-showing one.

I got to have a special view of the curatorial pedagogy at various levels because I had secured a minor role in it: a colleague had been recruited to write the show's press release. Let me now share a sampling of what we came up with to elucidate Rafferty's conceptual strategy:

"Where Adelaide Dartig explores the subversion of processual resolve within the formal confines of the autonomous picture plane, the photos of Yolanda Leary are drawn from her series Malagi (2007), hence becoming unresolved, or "unbecoming resolved", as anomic members of a putatively complete set, series, totality or whole. Similarly, Rafferty has disincluded the two remaining works in Andrea (2006-2008). In this series the artist graphically yet perhaps ephemerally, and perhaps ultimately impermanently - raises the question: how are we to construe the temporality-related claims that inhere in both architecture and commodities (eg: "permanent marker")? The curatorial effacement of the absent works is pursued as a gesture toward the possibilities of incompleteness inherent in series-based practice."

Pretty good!

For us at least, a brief brush with the David Levine method worked a little too well. We both became enamored of "our" curatorial statement; so much so, in fact, that we started wondering why we were spending all our time hacking away at "real" criticism. We began to think about seriously shifting our attention largely to the more liberating and equally gratifying genre of fake criticism in future - perhaps maintaining only a small real critical sideline. The only thing holding the plan back, it seemed to us, was the current lack of reception for fake criticism by real critics; or, looked at differently, the sense that broadening operations into fake criticism was not professionally-speaking simple for would-be real critics to do (otherwise we'd obviously hear of it happening more often).

"That's why institutional critique doesn't work," Levine explained when I recounted our discussion to him after he had released his opening. (He said it with a devious earnestness - giving the impression that that the joke was on institutional critique and that he personally had played it.) "You have to make it over the top, you have to do something to advertise that you're 'just kidding'."

As far as I understand it, institutional critique deserves to be made fun of for a number of reasons. It's not just that its very premise gratifies the pretensions of the institutions under question - a kind of self-importance that Levine seems to do his best to derobe them of. (Riffing on Michael Fried's famous essay in an article entitled 'Bad Art and Objecthood', Levine writes: "Don Rickles at Zach Feuer would TOTALLY rock. Tamy Ben Tor at the Vegas Sands would totally, like, not. So are we letting our standards DOWN, or what? ... Back to Don Rickles at Zach Feuer... He wouldn't be Don Rickles anymore. He'd be 'Don Rickles'. This is how modernist gallery space works; everything turns into a specimen of itself.") Nor is it simply that Levine is less interested in the institutions themselves than how "mere" actors can perform within them - can you sell fake artwork? How many potatoes? - though that is true too.

But functionality tout court isn't art, and Levine's aims at more. In the press release for 'Closing/Opening', Levine claims: "Performance art announces itself by the expressionistic flash of its rituals. Theater announces itself by the elaborateness of its rituals. I want an art that doesn't announce itself." And here again Levine has more in common with contemporary artists than with contemporary theater directors. In referring to Levine's work, for once it feels okay to indulge the use of the placeholder "practice" for the working-out of a set of artistic ideals which aren't themselves conventionally pre-specified.

But without recourse to stages or frames, or even boxes or rectangles, what does an artwork that doesn't announce itself look like? Like "quiet moments of insincerity floating through the world." Levine recognizes them in some of the humbler works by Vito Acconci, and Adrian Piper's stint disguised as a flamboyant black man cruising for women in Harvard Square. (Was Carey Young's besuited 'Lines Made By Walking amid London commuters' too referential? Was Sharon Hayes' "I am a man" placard too showy? I think that as Meg and Jack White's career before they stopped being siblings would qualify, and also maybe lying - artfully.)

But of course these are very fragile as works go, and they're only known of in the context of careers made making art that did announce itself, successfully. What are the aesthetic criteria for insincerity? Can it have any without itself becoming insincere? There remains a question whether the kind of artwork that Levine wants can develop independently of his desire for it, or distinct from it.

It may or may not be significant that after enough contact with his work one winds up constantly devising Levine-style projects in one's head. What if we interviewed each other about our dream partners, and then paid actors to impersonate them? (Would we be able to resist?) What about prank calling - in character as someone else? What if actors were paid to perform their way through their day jobs, rather than simply doing them? What if we invited a focus group to discuss matters of public importance, without telling them the exercise was scripted?

(Roughly half of those examples are not in fact works by David Levine.)

AR: This interview you sent me in preparation for ours has no names or initials on it. It just says "Interview with David Levine". One seems to be a writer, and the other some sort of practitioner - either could be you, or both. A send up of the self-congratulatory format that is the artist interview, or what?

DL: IT'S COMING OUT IN THE BELIEVER NEXT FALL. INTERVIEWER'S NAME IS CHRISTIAN HAWKEY. SELF-CONGRATULATION, ENTIRELY SINCERE.

AR: Bad Art and Objecthood talks about why theater, even good theater, is embarrassing to art people. But it also seems to me that embarrassment is an impulse motivating a lot of your own work - I'm thinking about the headshot project, for instance, that involves the unsolicited pictures and accompanying cover letters sent by actors looking for work - which you're collecting by the truckload.

DL: INDEED. WHEN I TALK IN THAT PIECE ABOUT CATHERINE SULLIVAN, I'M ALSO TALKING ABOUT MYSELF ("AS ONLY SOMEONE FROM THEATER CAN BE"). THE LACK OF SELF-PROTECTIVE IRONY IN THEATER IS JUST EXCRUCIATING. IT'S LIKE WATCHING CINDY BRADY ON THE BRADY BUNCH WALK DOWNSTAIRS SINGING "ON THE GOOD SHIP LOLLIPOP," BECAUSE SHE'S CONVINCED THERE'S A TALENT AGENT IN THE LIVING ROOM WAITING TO BOOK THE NEXT SHIRLEY TEMPLE (SOMEHOW WATCHING THIS BIT- OR BEING UNABLE TO WATCH THIS BIT- WAS A FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE IN MY LIFE).

SO YEAH. AND IT'S SOMETHING I'M WRESTLING WITH. HOWEVER, IN ACTUAL PERFORMANCES, I'M TRYING TO USE WHAT IS DIGNIFIED ABOUT ACTING - THIS SEARCHING, PROFOUND REALISM - TO TRY TO SURPASS THE IRONY OF CHEESY PERFORMANCE. AND I'M TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHY IT'S NOT ONLY NAIEVETE THAT'S EMBARRASSING TO ART PEOPLE (I SHARE THAT), BUT WHY PERSUASIVE REALISM, OR NARRATIVE, IS EMBARRASSING TO ART PEOPLE (I DON'T SHARE THAT).

AR: What does an "artwork that doesn't announce itself" look like? (Could you elaborate on this idea of artworks as floating islands of insincerity - as in the Piper and Acconci pieces that you mentioned? Is there any contemporary work you admire for similar reasons, or is it necessarily impossible to know the answer to that?)

DL: NECESSARILY IMPOSSIBLE. I ADMIRE KAPROW'S PIECES IN THE INVISIBLE VEIN, ALTHOUGH I'M MORE INTO THE PIPER AND THE ACCONCI PIECES BECAUSE THEY'RE MORE SOCIAL, THEY'RE LESS ABOUT LITTLE PRIVATE RITUALS, AND MORE ABOUT GRAND-SCALE DECEPTIONS. IT WOULD BE HEARTBREAKING TO FIND OUT, FOR INSTANCE, THAT SOMEONE WAS NOT WHAT THEY SEEMED.

OTHERWISE IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO KNOW THE ANSWER. I THINK A LOT OF CONCEPTUAL PIECES THAT HIRE ACTORS START OFF THAT WAY, BUT THERE'S ALWAYS A "GIVEAWAY" MOMENT, WHERE THINGS START GETTING "CRAZY," WHICH IS A MOMENT WHERE THE PERFORMANCE ANNOUNCES ITSELF, WHICH I CONSIDER MERE VANITY. I THINK I'D HAVE TO GIVE SOPHIE CALLE RESPECT IN THIS REGARD (SHE'S REALLY FOLLOWING PIPER AND ACCONCI HERE), EXCEPT THAT HER STUFF'S SO WRAPPED UP IN THIS SUBMISSIVE/OBSESSIVE FRENCH CHICK ROUTINE - AND HER DOCUMENTATION IS SOMEHOW SO VISUALLY FLAT - THAT IT DOESN'T REALLY BURN INTO ME THE WAY MY FAVES DO.

AR: At the moment that the action stops being insincere - let's say a fist fight breaks out at your 'fake' opening - does it stop being interesting to you? Or is that when it starts being interesting?

DL: DEPENDS ON WHETHER THEY'RE USING STAGE COMBAT TECHNIQUES.

IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO ME; BUT NOT MORE OR LESS SO THAN ANYTHING ELSE. WHO WOULD BE FIGHTING? WHO WOULD THEY BELIEVE THEY WERE FIGHTING? I THINK WHAT WOULD INTEREST ME MOST IN EXTREME MOMENTS LIKE THAT IS LESS THE OUTCOME THAN EACH PARTICIPANT'S EFFORT TO SORT OUT THEIR OWN IDENTITY AND THEIR OWN RESPONSES FROM THEIR CHARACTERS' - AND LIKEWISE THE ATTEMPT TO SORT OUT WHO/WHAT THEY'RE ACTUALLY RESPONDING TO. WE TALKED ABOUT THAT IN CLASS A LITTLE...

IN CLASS I REALIZED THAT WHAT I REALLY WANT TO START DOING IS STRAPPING PORTABLE EEG AND BRAINWAVE SCANNERS TO ACTORS AND JUST TRACK THAT.

AR: Does your work have aesthetic criteria? What are they?

DL: NO CAMP.

AR: You talked about acting as "an accelerated means to knowledge-acquisition". But I take it you're not really interested in acting as (get ready for the intellectually trendy catch-all) pedagogy?

DL: I TOTALLY AM. IT'S SOMATIC PEDAGOGY. A SCIENCE OF EMPATHY. A LOT OF THE PROJECTS I DO HAVE AN INFORMAL AND UNINFORMED INSPIRATION IN THE BEHAVIORAL-PSYCH EXPERIMENTS/ENVIRONMENTS OF THE 50S AND 60S, WHERE THE REHEARSAL ROOM BECOMES A LABORATORY FOR BREAKING DOWN THE INDIVIDUAL; IN A SENSE, I BECOME THE GUY BEHIND THE PLEXIGLASS WALL, OBSERVING HOW THE ACTOR BECOMES SOMEONE ELSE. IF I COULD CONTROL THE CONDITIONS, IF I HAD THE BUDGET, I'D MAKE ALL THE PREP GO ON IN ONE ROOM (LIKE BAUERNTHEATER), AND HAVE IT TAKE A YEAR. JUST TO WATCH HOW AN ACTOR LEARNS/TEACHES HIMSELF.

AND OF COURSE, WHAT KIND OF KNOWLEDGE IS AN ACTOR ACQUIRING? AND WHAT'S THE RELATIONSHIP OF INTUITION/ABILITY TO IMPROVISE VS. HARD, MEMORIZABLE FACTS?


David Levine founded the Studio/Performance Component at ECLA. He was awarded a 2006 Kulturstiftung Des Bundes grant for BAUERNTHEATER, the film of which has screened in New York, Berlin, and Austria. His work, which fuses performance, theater, and visual art, has appeared in Europe and the USA at Documenta XII, Galerie Magnus Muller (Berlin), Gavin Brown@Passerby (New York) and HAU2 (Berlin), as well as appearing in Cabinet, the New York Times, ART/US, Theater, BOMB, and Theater der Zeit. He is the 2007 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for Cross-Disciplinary/Performative work, and has directed conventional theater at the Sundance Theater Lab, the Atlantic Theater, Primary Stages, and the Vineyard Theater in New York. He lives in New York and Berlin.