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

Yoko Ono and John Lennon from Roberta Flack’s Collection

In 1976, singer Roberta Flack purchased an apartment in the Dakota building at 1 West 72nd Street, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was the first (and for decades, the only) black person to reside in the cooperative apartment complex. 

Her seventh floor, Central Park-facing unit [see below] shared a wall with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and the three became friends. 

Their son, Sean Lennon recalls "I was very blessed that I grew up with the coolest neighbour in the world. At first, I didn't even think of Roberta as this incredible artist and musician, she was just this really cool neighbour. We used to call her Aunt Roberta, and we were very close."

Flack performed at John and Yoko’s One-to-One Concert in 1975, covered Ono’s song "Goodbye Sadness" for the first Ono tribute album, Every Man Has a Woman in 1984, and appeared in Yoko Ono’s music video for "Bad Dancer" [see below].

Roberta Flack sold her apartment in 2018, and died in 2025, at the age of 88. Her estate has recently begun to sell some of her belongings, including the above John and Yoko books, bags, cards, and invitations. 

 

Wim Delvoye | Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century

Wim Delvoye

Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century

Antwerp, Belgium: Editions Carine Rot, 1990 - 1992

32 x 28.5 x 5.5 cm.

Edition of 25 [+ 4 AP] signed, titled, numbered and dated copies

Never one to shy away from scatalogical humour, Wim Delvoye’s Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century brings to mind Yoko Ono’s film Bottoms (whose script reads "String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace”) and Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. The two-ring binder houses fifty photocopies of asses - of the rowdy seated on the copier office party variety -  purportedly representing twentieth century disasters. 

The work is produced by Editions Carine Rot, the French Fashion editor’s imprint best known for their  Lawrence Weiner publications. 

Ian Roy | Astrid, Aghast

Ian Roy

Astrid, Aghast

Sackville, Canada: Gaspereau Press, 2026

208 pp., 20 x 13.5 x 1.7 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Last month Gaspereau Press launched its first title since moving to Sackville, New Brunswick, under new ownership. 

Founded almost thirty years ago in 1997 by Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Gaspereau Press took pride in doing everything in house: editorial, publicity, sales, distribution, design, typesetting, printing, and binding.

“You can’t say I’m alienated from my labour,” Steeves told The Walrus magazine, “I’ve touched every book.”

This artisanal boutique approach to publishing is responsible for much of the acclaim the press has received over the years, but also led to perhaps the most infamous and controversial tale in their storied history.

Johanna Skibsrud’s book The Sentimentalists - a debut novel, published in an edition of 800 copies by Gaspereau - was nominated for the prestigious Giller Prize, in 2010. This is typically the lottery ticket that publishers wait a lifetime for - the kind of attention that can lead to a financial windfall and help keep the lights on. 

But the press was not interested in upscaling their production. The hand-made operation could not handle more than a thousand books a week, and made it known. 

“We got here because we make nice books,” Dunfield said. “The independent book stores, most of them understand that very clearly. They like our books, most of them can pick our books out blindfolded because we make nice books, and that’s our reputation. And a year from now this will have blown over … and we’ll still make nice books and the bookstores will still like them. So why would we change that? That’s what we do. We got here because that’s what we do. And our future is to keep on doing that.”

Then The Sentimentalists - viewed by many as the ‘dark horse’ nominee - won the award. The fifty-thousand dollar prize is typically accompanied by a huge sales bump, known as The Giller Effect. Random House and other big publishers offered to print large quantities of the novel, to help meet demand. When Gaspereau waited a few days to mull the offers over, they were vilified in the press. 

"Pretentious. Antediluvian. Mean-spirited," wrote Tasha Kheiriddin in the National Post, accusing them of sabotage. The Globe and Mail wondered if “perhaps some grudging admiration is due to anyone who hews to a principle” and ran the misleading headline "Author's angst grows over unavailability of Giller winner.” Toronto Life declared “Public denied award-winning book by territorial East Coast publisher.” 

Ultimately, Gaspereau sub-licensed the book to Douglas & McIntyre, who produced a trade edition 

which shipped 30,000 copies ten days after the prize was announced. It retailed for $19.99, ten dollars cheaper than the hand-made Gaspereau Press version, which still racked up 4000 orders. 

Gaspereau gave up the foreign rights to the novel completely. 

The pair weathered the storm and the iconoclastic approach helped cement the legacy of the press that operates by its own rules. They operated together for another fifteen years, until Dunfield announced his intention to retire and they started looking for a succession plan. 

Keagan Hawthorne is a poet and proprietor of Hardscrabble Press, a micropress that shared many of same principles as Gaspereau. He was chosen to succeed Steeves and Dunfield, and has been working closely with the pair long before the transition. The Hardscrabble Press ­will be folded into the larger Gaspereau publishing program and Hawthorne will strive to maintain the approach of his retiring predecessors. 

He shares the pair’s love of letter-pressed covers and their notion of the book as a beautiful object, and brings an indefatigable work ethic. He has also secured one of the most iconic buildings in town to house the press (not sure if this is public knowledge yet)

“Above all else I remain committed to the values that for me, as a  long-time reader and lover of these books, exemplify everything that  Gaspereau Press stands for: great design, careful attention to the  details of production, and a commitment to literature that reminds us of  who we are, and what we have the potential to become,” he wrote on the Gaspereau website. 

At the standing-room-only launch for Astrid, Aghast, Hawthorne introduced its author while carrying his young daughter in his arms, who infectiously giggled into the microphone at every opportunity. He described the manuscript as one of the most exciting pieces of mail he had ever received. 

The book is available for $28.95, from Gaspereau Press, here. 

"The stories in Astrid, Aghast are by turns funny, poignant, magical, and humane. Two public-library workers fall in love with each other’s foibles while stuck in an elevator. A young boy stumbles upon a bucket of eels that stirs up family memories he’d rather forget. A solitary entomologist tries to make sense of a life filled with pianos and beetles. Ian Roy takes us on journeys through a world that is like our own, but not quite: a taxi driver falls in love with his car-jacker; an old man claims he can fly—and can, or almost.

This remarkable collection is understated, often slyly humorous, and peopled by characters so finely-drawn each one seems as familiar as they do strange.”

- press release

Susan Rothenberg | Bear Skin Rug

Susan Rothenberg

Bear Skin Rug 

Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett, 1995

5 x 30 x 33 cm.

Edition of 70 signed and numbered copies

A synthetic latex work cast by Art Foundry in Santa Fé, for Parker Magazine #43. The artists’s signature is incised with the date and the work is date stamped. 

“Susan Rothenberg always outlines, structures, isolates emotion. She has transformed the sounding-board of painting into a sound shape. … Breathing is metaphorically taken out of the painting and transferred to the subject matter. The painting is condensation, condensed in the subject matter, but the subject matter is not the prime mover of the painting. It joins the painting at the juncture of idea, immense feeling, and the necessity of painting.” 

- Jean-Christophe Ammann, Parkett No. 43, 1995

Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari was born on this day in 1932.