Les Levine is a naturalized American Irish artist known as a pioneer of video art and as a conceptual artist working with mass communication. In 1967 Levine won first prize for sculpture in the Canadian Sculpture Biennial.
Life and work
A graduate of the Central School of Art and Design in London, Levine first moved to Canada in 1960. He eventually settled in New York City in 1964 and became a resident artist at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1973. Early in his career, Levine introduced the idea of a disposable art and was given the nickname Plastic Man. In 1965, Levine, with Nam June Paik, were among the first artists to buy and use portapaks. Thus he was one of the first artists to try television as a medium for the dissemination of art. He has also used the telephone for this purpose, as well. In 1969 he exhibited White Sight at the Fischbach Gallery, a work consisting of a room as the inside of a featureless whitecube illuminated by two bright sodium vapour lights. This meant that the spectator was confronted with their own act of looking presented as an artifact. The installation was also included as a feature for a charity ball at the New York Museum of Modern Art, to attend which museum patrons had to pay $75 per couple. Whilst Levine regarded the installation as a great success, this view was not shared by all the patrons. The yellow light drained the women's dresses of color. One visitor said: "All the men looked as if they have been dead for two centuries. All the women looked like their grandmothers. The beautiful ladies fled within one minute." One of these accused Levine of making the museum "look ugly and silly" and promptly transformed the artwork by pulling the main light switch. In 1984, Levine produced the short filmMade in New York in collaboration with fashion designerWilli Smith. He also designed a T-shirt for Smith’s label WilliWear Productions that was featured in the film. Levine has written on art for Arts, The Village Voice, Art in America and the Saturday Review. He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 and again in 1980.
