Art in America, March 2006

Critic’s Beat

A recent exhibition in a New York gallery presented working materials from the files of Kim Levin, a longtime art critic for the Village Voice.

If collections are created through the deliberate decision to acquire certain objects, archives develop less intentionally. Generally, they are byproducts of the daily life of an institution or an individual, a sum of the items that accumulate in the pursuit of some larger project. An unusual exhibition held recently at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in Manhattan gave viewers the opportunity to examine (in bewildering detail, if they had the time) an archive of material generated by Kim Levin in her position as an art critic at the Village Voice.

Titled “Kim Levin: Notes and Itineraries, 1976-2004,” the exhibition, which was organized by John Salvest, an Arkansas artist whose work involves accumulation, presented three groups of documents: the handwritten itineraries that Levin uses to organize her visits to New York galleries, a selection of notes she has made on individual exhibitions and a gathering of exhibition announcements from downtown galleries over the last 30 years.

Displayed at right angles to the walls of the larger of Feldman’s two rooms (pins held each card in place), the hundreds of itineraries are written on gallery announcements, mostly of the 4-by-9-inch size that fit into standard envelopes. On them, in colored inks, the hyper-organized Levin writes the names and addresses of the galleries she intends to visit on a given day, the artists who are showing there, the time she intends to arrive at each gallery and, occasionally, a comment on a show. That’s a lot of information to get onto a 4-by-9 inch surface, so, perforce, Levin abbreviates as much as she can and limits her comments to pithy characterizations. Of Wolfgang Tilman’s photographs, she says, “The best thing: they don’t look like Nan Goldin clones.” Karin Davies’s abstract paintings are summed up in three words: “hairpin curves dizzying.” Although she’s chiefly concerned with managing an awesome number of artists’ names, exhibition dates and gallery locations, Levin sometimes relaxes enough to play with the graphic possibilities of her scavenged notepaper. In a tiny white square on a black-background card from P.S.1 she inscribes the words “resin pods” to succinctly describe a sculpture by Peter Soriano.

The remainder of the show filled the gallery’s second room. Pinned flat to a wall in a large grid was a group of notes made on 81/2-by-11-inch gallery and museum press releases. Presumably these are for shows that Levin not only visited but also w rote about. The larger size of the paper allows for lengthier notes and often, some rudimentary, if informative, sketches of artworks. A second selection of notes, also pinned flat to the wall, was made on variously sized gallery announcements. Even on these smaller surfaces Levin is able to easily fit in her telegraphic viewing notes, but in one case she dispenses with written language altogether and simply makes a schematic drawing of an oval-filled painting by John Tremblay.

Both the itineraries and notes cover the years 1994 to 2004 (it was only in 1994 that Levin, at someone’s suggestion, began to save her working materials); the downtown announcements go back to 1976. In contrast to the simple name-of-gallery-and-artist cards in the main room, many of these feature striking images and graphics, from Act Up’s “Silence=Death” to a Martin Wong painting. For this show, they were displayed standing upright on a long table in close rows. The effect was part parade, part cemetery. The funereal associations were strengthened by the fact that a number of the artists whose names appeared on the cards are no longer alive. As Feldman’s own press release for this show pointed out, many were felled by AIDS. Also no longer with us are large numbers of the galleries that Levin visited, and more than a few artists she names have since vanished from public view. For those of us who have followed similar itineraries, but lack Levin’s meticulous record-keeping, this was an invitation to nostalgic rediscovery. For others, I suspect this intelligently presented display of Levin’s archive was, if nothing else, a revelation of the grueling legwork that is demanded of New York art critics.

RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN