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

Puzzles

 

Allen Ruppersberg | The Mystery Of Nobokov's Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours

Allen Ruppersberg

The Mystery Of Nobokov's Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours

Los Angles, USA: MoCA LA, 1999

27 x 35.5 x 4 cm.

Edition of 50 signed and numbered copies

Allen Ruppersberg’s interest in jigsaw puzzles reportedly began with reading the classic 1978 Georges Perec tour-de-force Life: a User’s Manual (below)

In the novel(s), the protagonist plans to spend his remaining years (and fortune) traveling the world painting ports and transforming his watercolour works into puzzles, which he then disassembles and reassembles. 

From the book’s Preamble: 

“To begin with, the art of jigsaw puzzles seems of little substance, easily exhausted, wholly dealt with by a basic introduction to Gestalt: the perceived object – we may be dealing with a perceptual act, the acquisition of a skill, a physiological system, or, as in the present case, a wooden jigsaw puzzle – is not a sum of elements to be distinguished from each other and analysed discretely, but a pattern, that is to say a form, a structure: the element’s existence does not precede the existence of the whole, it comes neither before nor after it, for the parts do not determine the pattern, but the pattern determines the parts: knowledge of the pattern and of its laws, of the set and its structure, could not possibly be derived from discrete knowledge of the elements that compose it. That means that you can look at a piece of a puzzle for three whole days, you can believe that you know all there is to know about its colouring and shape, and be no further on than when you started. The only thing that counts is the ability to link “this piece to other pieces, and in that sense the art of the jigsaw puzzle has something in common with the art of go. The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbours, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece. The intense difficulty preceding this link-up – which the English word puzzle indicates so well – not only loses its raison d’être, it seems never to have had any reason, so obvious does the solution appear. The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.”

The puzzle has appeared in Ruppersberg's practice for over thirty years, as has the subject of the library, and collecting. 

Elsewhere on the blog (not hashtagged, sadly) are puzzles by William Anastasi, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Micah Lexier, Michael Dumontier, Ben Patterson and Dieter Roth. 

“[I]n the exhibition is a jigsaw puzzle, made by Ruppersberg in 1999. Its title is written in two parts, like the two parts of a story, and with two different fonts, A Mystery Of Nobokov's Room and No, Sir, My Library Is Not Yours... On the box’s lid, each of the titles seems to refer to one of the two images below, as a guide for the "player" to reproduce each side of this puzzle.

The first image is the reproduction of a room, of which only the bed is visible, with its bedding matching the wallpaper. The second image reproduces a library. However the experience of the player is disrupted or complicated by the artist, who established a protocol during the production of the work:

The artist bought puzzle boxes of different sizes on a flea market. On each of these boxes lids, he adds a title and two images. He made a double-sided jigsaw puzzle, using shapes that are not the most common with a variation increasing the difficulty of the game. The artist placed each puzzle in a different box and randomly removed some pieces from each boxes...”

- Michèle Didier, Press release

Artists' Matchbooks: Allen Ruppersberg

 

This Week on Tumblr: Artists' Puzzles

This week on Tumblr: Puzzles by artists such as Keith Haring, Yoko Ono, Wim Delvoye, Bruno Munari, Micah Lexier, George Brecht, Allen Ruppersburg, Alighiero Boetti, Art&Language, etc. etc.

http://artistsbooksandmultiples.tumblr.com/tagged/puzzles-by-artists

A curated selection from Bill Clarke's collection

Some images from collector Bill Clarke's artists' books, multiples and record collection, that he has selected for the Independent Collectors website, here:

https://independent-collectors.com/exhibitions/bill-clarke-art-book-art-record

Allen Ruppersberg

Allen Ruppersberg turns 72 today.

Allen Ruppersberg | Sourcebook: Reanimating the 20th century

Allen Ruppersberg
Sourcebook: Reanimating the 20th century
New York City, USA: Independent Curators International, 2014
284 pp., 28 x 21.5 cm, Paperback
Edition size unknown

In 2011, the ICI created the Sourcebook Series, dedicated to contemporary artists’ personal perspectives on social, political, and cultural issues. For the second in the series, Allen Ruppersberg has mined the archives of his Cleveland family home and his studio in Los Angeles. He has assembled a collection of source material of texts, images, films, records and ephemera influential to his practice from the years 1978 to 2012.

The publication focuses on nine artworks from the artist's career, including his 1995 project for the 50th Anniversary of the United Nations; his 1997 guide book for the Münster Sculpture Project; his 2012 project dedicated to the American vernacular of recorded music, No Time Left to Start Again/The B and D of R ‘n’ R, and more.

Availble from Ti Pi Tin, for £30.00, here.