Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Les Levine
American (b. 1935)
BLOODY SUNDAY (1978)
photo-etching
24.75” x 32.75”

STYLE: TOTAL ART

 


Born in Dublin, Les Levine attended art school in London and emigrated to Canada in 1958. Levine began working in New York in the early sixties and is one of the first artists to be known as a “media artist.” His first videotapes were produced in 1964. Since the, he has had over 100 exhibitions in the United States and has participated in such groundbreaking international exhibitions as Documenta 77. His work has been collected by most major contemporary art museums. Levine’s most famous projects include his Irish-Jewish Canadian restaurant (New York, 1969), his imaginary “Museum of Mott Art” and his billboards with the slogan “Sex Won’t Save You.”

Levine has been called the founder of media art, but his intent has been to question societal and cultural norms in innovative ways rather than to simply advance the use of technology in art-making. The artist has been known to use crayons as well as photography and video for his witty, provocative, and occasionally controversial works. Bloody Sunday is part of a series of photographic works Levine made from news images; this image is actually labeled "Mrs. Young (Catholic) is consoled by neighbors after hearing her son, John, was shot on 'Bloody Suday.'"

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Vivien Raynor, New York Times, 6/3/83
"Not chic, not subversive and not even the tiniest bit didactic, Mr. Levine makes art about real life, which may be why, despite more than 120 solo appearances, he has not achieved the status of the other media artist he is often contrasted with, Andy Warhol.”

Jack Burnham, Great Salt Works, 1974 (Brazillar)
“Levine’s strength as an artist is his ability to reify art as social context, that is, to create art out of whatever concerns art...Possibly since Duchamp no artist has challenged the infrastructure of artistic taste with as much rigor. the substance of Levine’s approach is essentially this: esthetic choices and categories are to an overwhelming extent defined by communication structures. thus what we define as ‘art’ in the art historical tradition is no more than neo-Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest.’”