David M. Levine

David Marcel Levine (b. 1970) is a theater professor and visual artist, currently a Professor of the Practice of Performance, Theater, and Media at Harvard University.[1]

David M. Levine
Born1970
New York City
Occupationartist, professor

Selected works

Levine's work encompasses performance, installation, and video.[2] Performance installations include Bauerntheater, Farmers’ Theater in 2007, a project in Joachimsthal, Germany sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation in which he hired an American actor to learn German farming and then "farm" on a publicly accessible field for 10 hours a day, six days a week, for six weeks.[3] This was an early example of his later themes of "acting as a technique for absolutely turning into someone else."[3]

In 2012 he created the performance installation Habit in which the audience is mobile, viewing the performance through the windows of a house, moving from vantage point to vantage point as the action moves.[4] The actors in Habit worked for eight-hour days, performing the same 90 minutes worth of dialogue by playwright Jason Grote, but improvising the staging from moment-to-moment.[4][5] In the summer of 2015, as a commission from the public art organization Creative Time, he restaged iconic scenes from movies set in New York's Central Park.[6] Actors performed the scenes in their original location, on a perpetual loop, for six hours a day. in what The New Yorker called "A Real-Life GIF in Central Park".[6]

Levine's solo exhibition Some of the People, All of The Time featured 8 actors performing a monologue from the point of view of a movie crowd extra turned paid protester.[7][8][9] The New York Times called it some of the best art of 2018.[9]

Levine worked as a theater director in New York and Berlin before branching out into conceptual art.[10] For his first solo gallery show, he created an installation entitled Hopeful at the Feinkost gallery in Berlin, which consisted of thousands of actors' headshots collected from the trash cans of New York casting agencies, a meta-commentary on the headshot-as-object.[11]

Writing

Levine's essays on art, theater, and performance, have been published widely. He is the author, along with Alix Rule, of the 2012 essay, International Art English which describes and diagrams the language of contemporary art by analyzing artists’ statements, wall labels, criticism, and a corpus of more than fourteen thousand press releases sent by e-flux.[12][13] The essay has been both anthologized and republished, and considered a key text (and term) in debates over the politics of art writing.[14][15][16] He wrote and contributed images to A Discourse on Method , an artists' book he created with Shonni Enelow which came out in 2019.[17] An anthology of his writing, Best Behavior, will be published in 2020.[18]

Levine's father was one of the executors of the estate of Mark Rothko, a situation that turned into a protracted legal dispute, the Rothko Case.[19] He wrote about the effect that had on his family and his career for Triple Canopy in Matter of Rothko.[20]

Awards and recognition

Levine was a 2013 Fellow in Visual Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.[21] He was the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.[22] His installation Habit received a 2013 Village Voice Obie award.[23]

His work has been presented by MoMA, Mass MoCA, PS1, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.[24] He has received fellowships and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Watermill Center and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.[25][26][27]

Early life and education

Levine was born in 1970 in New York City to Morton and Anne Marie Levine.[27][28] He holds a B.A. from Cornell University (1992) and an M.A. in English Literature from Harvard University (1996).[29][27]

References
  1. "In Terms of Performance". In Terms of Performance. 2014-10-25. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  2. "David Levine: Bystanders". Gallery TPW. Retrieved 24 September 2020.
  3. "Bauerntheater Potato Farming - Theater". The New York Times. 2007-05-20. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  4. Brantley, Ben (2012-09-23). "'Habit' at the Essex Street Market, Building B". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  5. Kozinn, Sarah (Summer 2014). "Making Theatre Art: David Levine's "Habit"". The Drama Review: TDR. 58 (2): 171–176. Retrieved 26 September 2020.
  6. Altman, Anna. "A Real-Life GIF in Central Park". The New Yorker. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  7. Young, Paul David (2018-06-08). "At the Brooklyn Museum, Actors Play at Faking Democracy". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  8. "Brooklyn Museum: David Levine: Some of the People, All of the Time". Brooklyn Museum. 2018-07-08. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  9. Smith, Roberta; Cotter, Holland; Farago, Jason (2018-12-05). "Best Art of 2018". The New York Times. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  10. "David Levine :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". Home. 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
  11. Schafer, Ellen; Boucher, Brian; Zwick, Tracy (2014-05-19). "Keeping the Hope - News - Art in America". artinamericamagazine.com. Archived from the original on 2014-05-19. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  12. Canopy, Triple (2018-11-07). "Triple Canopy – International Art English by Alix Rule & David Levine with Mariam Ghani & Alexander Provan". Triple Canopy. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
  13. Steyerl, Hito (2013-05-05). "International Disco Latin". e-flux. Retrieved 2020-09-27.
  14. Ives, Lucy. "Triple Canopy – International Art English by Alix Rule & David Levine". Triple Canopy. Retrieved 2020-09-27.
  15. Beckett, Andy (2013-01-27). "A user's guide to art-speak". the Guardian. Retrieved 2020-09-27.
  16. Heddaya, Mostafa (2013-03-06). "When Artspeak Masks Oppression". Hyperallergic. Retrieved 2020-09-27.
  17. Enelow, Shonni; Levine, David (2019-09-18). "Enelow/Levine: A Discourse on Method". 53rd State Press. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
  18. Levine, D. (2020). Best Behavior. 53rd State Press. ISBN 978-0-9978664-4-5. Retrieved 2020-09-27.
  19. Hughes, Robert (1978-12-21). "Blue Chip Sublime". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
  20. Levine, David M. "Matter of Rothko". Triple Canopy. Retrieved 2020-09-28.
  21. "David Levine". Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. 2013-09-25. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  22. "David Levine". John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  23. Pristin, Terry (2013-05-20). "Announcing the Winners of the 2013 Village Voice Obie Awards". The Village Voice. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  24. "David Levine: Some of the People, All of the Time". Onassis. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  25. "David Levine - Artist". MacDowell. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  26. "David Levine". The Watermill Center. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  27. "David Levine :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". Home. 2016-12-22. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  28. Akhtiorskaya, Yelena. "Triple Canopy – Matter of Rothko by David Levine". Triple Canopy. Retrieved 2020-09-26.
  29. College, Bard. "Profiles". Bard College Berlin. Retrieved 2020-09-24.
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