Les Levine | Levine’s Restaurant

Les Levine

Levine’s Restaurant

Filderstadt, Germany: Edition Domberger, 1969

50 x 65 cm.

Edition of 100

The artist as restauranteur has a long and rich history that includes Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark's FOOD, Jon Rubin’s Conflict Kitchen, Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy, EYE SCREAM by N.E. Thing Co., and Al’s Cafe by Allen Ruppersberg. Levine’s Restaurant preceded them all, and began as a proposed trade. 

Mickey Ruskin, the owner of Max’s Kansas City, approached the artist about trading an artwork for a tab at the club. Levine replied "Well, I'm a conceptual artist, so what can we do in relationship to that?"

From March to September 1969, Levine operated Ruskin’s 19th Street and Park Avenue South property as "New York's only Canadian restaurant". The venue featured "deplorable food and dismal light.” Some examples of the former include Salmon Steak Halifax, Chopped Chicken Liver Levine, and London Broil.

Levine viewed the restaurant as a kind of space-age Howard Johnson’s for tourists, but Ruskin hoped to corner the "meat-and-potatoes artists’ trade”. The decor revelled in its tackiness, with plastic light fixtures, kelly-green tablecloths, black walls, and white plastic bucket seats. The waitresses wore bowling team T-shirts, and the bartender was chosen because he was bland. 

This Edition Domberger boxed portfolio commemorating the project includes nine screen prints, a plastic sculpture of potato latkes, a bag of lentils, a stack of postcards,  a 26-inch-wide illuminated plastic sign, a T-shirt, and tablecloth, each signed and numbered (excluding the postcards and lentils), 

"Around the same time he presented “The Big Eye,” Levine issued a press release announcing the opening on St. Patrick’s Day 1969 of the Irish-Canadian-Jewish eatery Levine’s Restaurant. Initiated by Mickey Ruskin, proprietor of Max’s Kansas City, and designed by John Brockman, the restaurant could nonetheless be considered another instance of systems aesthetics from Levine’s artistic menu, this time using his name and biography as the conceptual backdrop to a “relaxing, pleasant environment”—albeit one where closed-circuit television had been installed to monitor each table. The place, contemporary with Allen Ruppersberg’s similarly conceptual Al’s Café in Los Angeles, was a total failure and closed after only a few months. Looking on the bright side, Burnham, ever a champion of the artist’s endeavors, found the work successful in terms of its further radicalization of the concept of the environment and in its direct engagement with the art world. He hailed Levine’s “ability to reify art as social context, that is, to create art out of whatever concerns art.”

- Tom Holert, Artforum

Geoffrey Hendricks | Flux Divorce Box

Geoffrey Hendricks

Flux Divorce Box

New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1973

11 × 51 × 37 cm.

Edition size unknown

Ten years into their marriage, Geoff and Bici Hendricks mutually revealed to each other that they were gay, and separated. They remained close friends, and Bici Forbes Hendricks changed their name to Nye Ffarrabas. 

Flux Divorce Box documents the couple’s joyous divorce.  All of their shared belongings were ceremouneously sliced in two. Items from their decade-long marriage - including documents, clothing, a love seat, and their marital bed - were cut in half with scissors, a paper cutter, an ax, and a power saw.

Housed in a box crafted by a woodworking graduate student, Flux Divorce Box includes "Our Flux Divorce" which resembles a wedding album bisected horizontally. Fragments of coats, barbed wire, plastic, correspondence cut in half, and half of a wedding announcement are also included. 

The documentation of the performative event is by Fluxus photographer Peter Moore. The work was distributed through Fluxus newsletters and price lists (initially offered for $300), and George Maciunas assisted with the design. His invitation to the couple’s divorce features a graphic that had previously been used on Ken Friedman’s Flux Corsage, from 1968. It too is sliced in half. 

When Maciunas married in 1978, Hendricks officiated (in a clerical robe) and the event can almost be viewed as the inversion of his divorce. Hendricks told Lars Movin "Early in 1978 while George Maciunas was battling terminal cancer, he said to me "Geoff, we had your "Flux Divorce", we should also have a "Flux Wedding". He wanted to have a Flux Wedding with Billie Hutching, who he was with, and he wanted me to be 'minister’."

I visited Hendricks’ home in the nineties and he showed me this extraordinary work. I asked how many were produced and he replied “ Not a lot. They were all hand done. There's one in the Silverman collection, there's one in the Jean Brown collection that's now in the Getty. Francesco Conz has one, Barbara Moore. Not many more than that.”

I recall him showing me images of the Maciunas wedding, including one of a chair that had been sliced in half and then tied back together again, reinforcing the idea of marriage as an inverse to a divorce. 

The above copy of Flux Divorce Box is from the Conz collection, and differs in size slightly from the one that MoMA acquired (the dimensions of which are listed as 39.7 x 50.6 x 10.5 cm., see below). 

From an Oral history interview with Geoffrey Hendricks, 2016 August 17-18:

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: With our 10th wedding anniversary coming along, it was like, How do we celebrate it? Because we were both, you know, queer and involved with others, and I just sort of tossed out the idea, what about a Flux-divorce? And it sort of resonated, and I said, "Let me talk to George Maciunas." And so I talked to George. He was absolutely thrilled and so he did a lot of the orchestrating of it, and figuring out how to divide up the house with a wall of cardboard boxes to separate one half of the room. For another, barbed wire between the living room and the kitchen island in the middle of the—before the dining room.

[...]

And then upstairs in the bedroom, we had a division of property and with a paper cutter, we cut our wedding document in half, the wedding invitation, some correspondence that was sort of symbolic. And then with, I guess, a utility knife, cut the mattress in half with scissors and ripped the sheets in half. And then I had this circular saw and cut the wooden platform of the bed in half. And there was a wicker loveseat that I chopped in half. So this was the division of property and we tore our wedding garments in half.

LINDA YABLONSKY: Was this documented?

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: There's some documentation of it.

LINDA YABLONSKY: Photographs or video?

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: Yeah, Peter Moore took photographs. And there are maybe some others. I don't know that there's video, but then I made a Flux–Divorce Box so that I have this as an object. And there are copies of it in, I guess, in MoMA and the Getty and the Sohm [Archive] collection in Stuttgart, and sort of, you know, there may be half a dozen key Fluxus collection series.

LINDA YABLONSKY: It sounds like it sets quite a precedent for Gordon Matta-Clark.

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: [Laughs.] Yeah, right, well—

LINDA YABLONSKY: Remember he split the house—

GEOFFREY HENDRICKS: Oh, yeah, no, I know.

Gordon Matta-Clark | Splitting

Gordon Matta-Clark

Splitting

New York City, USA: 98 Greene Street Loft Press, 1974

[32] pp., 18 x 28.2 cm., staple-bound

Edition size unknown

In the early seventies, New York City was economically depressed and crime-ridden, and properties could be purchased for very little. Gordon Matta-Clark had bought a few slivers of unusable land for between twenty-five and seventy-dollars, at auction. He had hoped to develop his idea of "anarchitecture" (a conflation of the words anarchy and architecture) but zoning irregularities prevented him from completing his plans.

He was scouting for a new site when gallerist Holly Solomon offered him a house she owned in Englewood, New Jersey. The building at 322 Humphrey Street was slated for demolition and became the site of the artist’s first monumental work.

The intervention was documented in photographs, a film and this bookwork. The film consists of “intentionally artless footage” showing the artist and assistants making two parallel cuts down the centre of the house. The home is bisected, creating an ephemeral display of light. 

“It was always exciting working with Gordon,” said his assistant Manfred Hecht. “There was always a good chance of getting killed.”

Matta-Clark invited members of the art community to travel by bus to the location, to witness the work firsthand, before it was levelled three months later, to make way for new apartments. 

Destruction

This week and next, I’ll be guest lecturing in a class called Destruction in Art, at Mount Alison University. In the lead up, I’ll be reposting earlier blog entries that cross over into the subject matter, some with new information and/or images. These will include works by Christian Marclay, VsVsVs, Guy Debord, Jon Sasaki, Lil Picard, Daniel Spoerri, Gábor Altorjay, Ben Vautier, Yoko Ono, The K Foundation, Lee Lozano, Michael Landy, Gustav Metzger, Santiago Sierra, and others. 

Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective

[Gordon Matta-Clark]

Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective

Chicago, USA: Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, 1985

8 x 5.5 x 1.75"

Edition size unknown

Produced for a posthumous retrospective of the artist's work, this collection of ephemera includes a plastic respirator mask, a photocopied description of the Fresh Air Cart taken from the artist's catalogue raisonné, a Museum of Contemporary Art Guest Pass, and a Matta-Clark postcard, housed in a clear ziplock pouch. 

The breathing apparatus was provided for viewer participation in the exhibition's installation of the artist’s Fresh Air Cart (see below). The work consists of a vehicle made from two wheelchairs bound back-to-back, equipped a tank of "pure" air (79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen). 

Intended as a comment on air pollution, the Fresh Air Cart was first seen in 1972 when Matta-Clark wheeled the cart in the Wall Street District of Manhattan, inviting passers by to breathe the clean air though the mask. When staging this work, Matta-Clark used the pseudonym 'George Smudge', citing him as a "para-medical philanthropist".

Gordon Matta-Clark | Walls Paper

Gordon Matta-Clark

Walls paper 

Buffalo, USA: Buffalo Press, 1973

144 pp., 25.5 x 18.5 cm., staple-bound (split horizontally in halves)

Edition of 1000 (of which 100 were signed and numbered)

Available from Printed Matter for $2000 US, here. 

Gordon Matta-Clark's only artist book - self-published in 1973 - functions both as a wallpaper sample book, and as an intimate version of the large-scale "anarchitectural" works he is best known for. The title features re-coloured black and white photographs the artist took of abandoned, half-demolished tenements in the Bronx, with the pages split down the middle. 

Alden Projects, here, unpack a unique variation of the title, found in the collection of Richard Artschwager (below). 

"Wallspaper is an artist’s book published in 1973 which relates to Gordon Matta-Clark’s multi-part installation Wallspaper 1972. The book comprises reproductions of the coloured prints that the artist used to make the installation, which were themselves derived from black and white photographs.

Wallspaper is a multi-part installation comprising photographs and newsprint, which Gordon Matta-Clark presented at the artist-run space 112 Greene Street in New York in 1972. Earlier that year, he took various black and white photographs of derelict and semi-demolished project houses in the Bronx and the Lower East Side of New York City. As only the facades of the buildings had been taken down, the photographs reveal the interior walls of the houses. Some of these walls were covered in paint that was flaking away; other walls were covered in wallpaper. Matta-Clark used the photographs to create his installation. First he heightened the colours of the photographs to abstract the images of the derelict houses. Next he printed the photographs on long strips of newspaper and hung these strips on a large wall from ceiling to floor. The wall consequently looked as if it were ‘wallpapered’ with images derived from walls in another part of New York City. The installation also included a stack of newspaper booklets which viewers were able to take away. These booklets were made of individual sheets of newspaper, each presenting one photograph of the Bronx walls. A number of the original black and white photographs from which the installation derived also survive.

Matta-Clark only presented Wallspaper once during his lifetime, and the long strips of newspaper hanging from the wall were destroyed some time after the Greene Street show. The work now consists of seventy-two individual sheets that had originally been in the bundles of newspapers placed in front of the wall.

Wallspaper was one of the first works in which Matta-Clark’s interests in photography come together with his explorations of the built environment. For art historian Thomas Crow, the crucial significance of the work is the way in which the photographs distort the images of derelict housing, and therefore conjure a space of reverie. Crow implies that the piece produces a new means of representing dilapidated architecture, quite distinct from traditions of socially-concerned documentary photography in New York City:

He hung strips of paper printed with close-up photographs of peeling and crumbling walls from derelict buildings in the Bronx and Lower East Side. With the delicacy of watercolour or Japanese prints, he subjected cropped and enlarged segments of his photographs to a newly free manipulation of colour and tone. [The work] registered a gritty streetscape while simultaneously conjuring some other, imagined space closer to reverie and dream. While another bundle of prints lay on the floor as an object analogue, the cascade descending from the ceiling points to [Matta-Clark’s] growing readiness the manipulate the photographic document in the direction of suggestion and secondary illusion.

Art historian Pamela Lee has a different approach to the work. For her, what is most interesting is the way in which Matta-Clark transposed images of one set of buildings onto the walls of another building. Encountering the piece involved not only thinking about the buildings pictured on the newspaper strips, but the building in Greene Street where the work was presented, and the relationship between the gallery and the derelict house. Lee has written:

Picturing the exposed walls of lower income housing, the photographs present the buildings’ ruinous state as a gridded, blank-faced visage. [At Greene Street] Matta-Clark registered an acute correspondence between walls and wallpaper, not unlike the floorpieces exhibited before. Its effect was to throw the still functioning site of the gallery into a certain relief, locating the outmodedness of a building elsewhere by reproducing the structures of its walls on another building’s surface. As such, the relationship between the respective sites was not conditioned simply by the place of art and architecture, but by the uneven temporalities of both. The timeliness of each building – one now ‘alive’, the other now ‘dead’ – spoke to the virtual ‘speed’ of the built environment, the endlessly fluctuating historicity of its architecture.

Much of Matta-Clark’s work addresses public space and the built environment, often drawing attention to the ways in which architects failed to address the housing crisis in New York in the 1970s. Having trained as an architect himself, he created an artistic practice that targeted this discipline. His best known works are the ‘cuts’ into buildings which he made in New York, New Jersey and in Europe. These actions led to related films, photocollages, drawings, and sculptures." 

- Tate Modern