constance
lewallen

What were you showing at Jablonka Gallery in Cologne?
 

sherrie
levine

I was showing, for the first time, sculptures based on 1934 furniture designs by Gerrit Rietveld. He called them “Krate” furniture and designed them as inexpensive country furniture that could be easily mass produced.

lewallen

The Frank Gehry of his time.

levine

Exactly. The earliest futon furniture, or crate furniture, of the type we had in college. The word “Krate” comes from the fact that they not only look like crates but they knock down.

lewallen

You mean you could easily disassemble them?

levine

Yes. The tables are in three pieces and put together with screws. Rietveld designed them to be seventeen inches high, which is quite low. To function as sculpture I thought they needed to be larger, so mine are tea table height, thirty inches high.

lewallen

You didn’t make them.

levine

No, I had them fabricated.

lewallen

What inspired you to do them?

levine

I’ve gotten very interested in Modernist architecture, in part from the year and a half I spent in Los Angeles about a-year-and-a-half ago. While I was there, I bought a book on Rietveld and I was struck by how beautiful his furniture is, particularly this body of work, which is not that well known, especially in the States. I am also interested in the ambiguity between the relationship of the object to both sculpture and furniture.

lewallen

How many designs have you done?

levine

So far only these two crate tables. The ones you see in my studio are prototypes. The larger one has already been fabricated in a suite of six.

lewallen

You are doing them in editions the way you did the billiard tables in After Man Ray (La Fortune)?

levine

No, these will be suites, so that they stay together. In other words, an institution or a collector would buy all six tables.

lewallen

The entire suite.

levine

A series might be a better word. A series that stays together, with references to Donald Judd. I imagine that he was also interested in this furniture because his own furniture designs seem to be influenced by Rietveld.

lewallen

You have created “furniture” sculpture before, like the billiard tables in After Man Ray, which I saw exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

levine

Yes.

lewallen

I saw the show subsequently at Mary Boone’s where you showed four rather than six billiard tables. What is the minimum number necessary for the installation?

levine

I never had a number specifically in mind. Obviously six was ideal. I was happy to have a situation where that was possible.

lewallen

Are you planning to do more photographic works?

levine

Yes. My project has never been specific to any media. I’m still making paintings and working on ideas for new photo projects. I’ve also been drawing lately. I like the way the different media inform each other. I really welcome opportunities to show works I’ve made in various media together.

lewallen

Did the cast-glass wine bottles that I saw reproduced in Parkett just precede these tables?

levine

Yes.

lewallen

Tell me about them.

levine

I thought a wine bottle was the perfect generic Modernist icon, having been so frequently used as a subject by the Cubists and Surrealists.

lewallen

Are the black bottle and the white bottle identical? The black looks smaller — is that an illusion?

levine

It’s an optical illusion. They are identical in every respect, although the black one is solid glass and the “white” one is solid crystal, and they are a pair.

lewallen

How many pairs are there?

levine

An edition of twelve.

lewallen

Where did you have them made?

levine

The Rhode Island School of Design has a sophisticated glass department. A lot of students stay in the area after they graduate and open their own shops. I’ve been working with people there.

lewallen

They are very elegant. The beautiful object has always been an aspect of your work. It’s what separates you from a lot of other artists with similar concerns. The beauty of the object draws you in, on an aesthetic level, which is, I imagine, your intent.

levine

I am interested in making a work that has as much aura as its reference. For me the tension between the reference and the new work doesn’t really exist unless the new work has an auratic presence of its own. Otherwise, it just becomes a copy, which is not that interesting.

lewallen

“Aura” in the sense that Walter Benjamin used the term.

levine

Yes.

lewallen

Paradoxically, he said that work loses its aura because of duplication ...

levine

Right (laughter).

lewallen

And what you’re doing is duplicating objects in a way that they will have an aura, not the same one as the referent, but their own, Sherrie Levine aura?

levine

Right.

lewallen

You’re turning Benjamin’s theory in on itself. A lot of your work has the effect of taking ideas one step further than one would expect.

levine

To create a conundrum.

lewallen

The bottles, like your stripe paintings, are a generic type, rather than references to a particular work of art as, say, your rephotographs are. As you say, the bottles are a generic icon of Cubist still life.

levine

Or sculpture. Several of the Surrealists actually painted on wine bottles.

lewallen

The wine bottles allude to two movements. Similarly, the stripe paintings refer back to both Suprematist painting and more recently to Minimal painting.

levine

Right.

lewallen

To talk more about elegance and beauty, your works are often referred to as “objects of desire.” Jeff Koons, whose work was exhibited recently at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, professes to give viewers desirable objects, objects people want. There are obvious relationships as well as differences between your work and that of Koons. How do you feel about his work in relationship to yours?

levine

I am not sure ... actually, there are a lot of similarities and I have always thought Koons was an extremely interesting artist. He’s one of the first artists of my generation whose work I knew in New York. But the biggest different between our work is our subject matter. My subject matter is high art and his is popular culture.

lewallen

And he’s interested in shock value now, blurring the line between art and pornography (though he wouldn’t admit to this), and you are not.

levine

A lot of people still find a photograph of a photograph appalling. I’m always glad to hear that.

lewallen

One of the things I’ve remarked upon is that when one first sees a new body of your work, at least this is true for myself, one can’t quite ... get the link. And then one realizes it makes perfect sense. Rather than giving you an immediate hit, it works the opposite way, slowly.

levine

I think it’s the auratic quality that’s built into it. There’s a level of seduction in the work that keeps you ... It’s a visceral, sensual seduction that always draws you back. That’s where the hook is. Otherwise it would be an idea as opposed to ... I want it to be an experience.

lewallen

A work of art.

levine

A work of art. Something you experience in a visceral sense, because I believe that intellectual experiences are stronger when related to sensual experiences, a sense of the world. I sometimes paraphrase Lawrence Weiner on this; he said that he wanted to make art that throws you back on the physical world, that makes you think about your relationship to the physical world. I think that’s a wonderful way to think about artmaking.

lewallen

So much contemporary idea-based art is one-dimensional — once you get it, you get it, and you never really have to see it again. There is no pleasure in looking.

levine

Yes, sometimes having a work described is pretty much the same experience as seeing it. I always feel I have failed if that is true of something I’ve done. The way I try to prevent that is by making things I want to look at, that I feel a need to see realized. Generally that’s a safeguard against something having ...

lewallen

Only an idea value. I saw a work you made in collaboration with Robert Gober at the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco —  the light bulb hanging from a cord.

levine

It’s a wax cast.

lewallen

I wondered about the nature of the collaboration.

levine

Bob and I were invited by Kathy Halbreich, who was doing a group show in 1990 at the Hirshhorn, to collaborate on a room. We had previously done a table with a chess board on it so I thought it would be funny to make a light bulb, sort of like a Guston light bulb, a cartoon light bulb. So I called Bob up and I said, “What if we do a light bulb hanging from a cord?” And he said, “That’s a good idea; I’ll have my assistant make it.” And in twenty-four hours we had this piece (laughter). And it’s beautiful, it’s a really nice piece.

lewallen

You’ve done other collaborations. I remember reading about a piece you did with Louise Lawler where you invited people to the studio of an artist who had died, a Russian artist, but then, as someone wrote, and I agree, in a sense you are always collaborating.

levine

I never thought about it that way, but that’s true. That’s great. I like that a lot.

lewallen

The ultimate collaborator. But it’s likely with someone who’s not around any more.

levine

It sounds like something John Baldessari would have said; did he say that?

lewallen

It might have been him. I saw some pieces of yours, watercolors after Matisse, reproduced in an old issue of File magazine. They were dated 1968. That must be wrong.

levine

It’s wrong; maybe it was a typo. I made them in 1985.

lewallen

Were these the first drawings or paintings after modern masters?

levine

No, the first ones were in 1983.

lewallen

After Egon Schiele?

levine

The first ones?

lewallen

Yes.

levine

Well, the very first ones were charcoal drawings I made in 1981 after Willem de Kooning. But I was so insecure about them I didn’t show them for a very long time. (Laughter)

lewallen

There’s a history of artists doing self-conscious works after De Kooning, like Rauschenberg erasing a De Kooning drawing.

levine

Also, that particular series I worked from De Kooning had made with his eyes closed and with the paper upside down. So, I thought it was particularly amusing to do work referring to that series in such a self-conscious way.

lewallen

This must have been in the interview you did with Jeanne Siegel recently. Siegel said, “Appropriationist work has been criticized for its lack of conviction.” And then you went on to say that you saw this as a virtue.

levine

(Laughter)

lewallen

But I didn’t know if that was tongue-in-cheek or ... ?

levine

No, no. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

lewallen

Tell me about your watercolors after Mondrian.

levine

All the watercolors, those included, were after book reproductions of paintings. They were about book plates in the sense that I tried to recreate the flavor of the book plate.

lewallen

If there were imperfections, you reproduced them.

levine

My “Mondrians” had a lot of green because the reproductions had a green cast, which everyone found very amusing because the color green was an anathema to Mondrian.

lewallen

Right. The works after Egon Schiele were done around the same time?

levine

About a year later; 1984 to 1985.

lewallen

You once said they were surrogate portraits of yourself.

levine

Well they seemed like the ultimate artist self-portrait to me; they were kind of wonderful in that way.

lewallen

And then Mondrian and Schiele represent two different strains of Modernism.

levine

In fact, I showed the Schieles with the Malevichs. As I was doing them, I realized that they were contemporaneous. Both groups of works that I referred to were made around 1917. I am interested in the idea of parallel realities — it was incredible to me that these two projects could be happening at the same time.

lewallen

The materials you use always have a sensual quality; I’m thinking about mahogany panels ...

levine

I think about materials the way a sculptor does. It goes back to that idea that my work has to have an interesting physical presence for me, or I lose interest.

lewallen

The checkerboard paintings were done on mahogany.

levine

I often paint on mahogany planks.

lewallen

And lead — the chevron paintings. What made you choose lead?

Levine

It’s the same thing; it’s a sensual surface. The casein paint I was using at the time sat on the lead in a beautiful way.

lewallen

Casein is similar to tempera ...

levine

It’s like tempera, but it is milk- rather than egg-based. It is very easy to get a painterly, lush surface using oil, but people rarely go after a very dry, beautiful surface, and that was something I was interested in discovering for myself. Casein on lead is perfect for that.

lewallen

Casein on lead. One doesn’t generally think of those two materials in the same breath.

levine

They don’t have a natural affinity for each other; it’s a bit of a problem technically.

lewallen

A lot has been made of the fact that many of the artists you appropriate, in fact all, are men. I guess this is for a number of reasons. One is you choose well-known, iconic figures from the history of modern art, most of whom happen to be men, and secondly, you are commenting on that very condition. Donald Kuspit accused you of choosing famous artists to increase your own fame. That was a more mean-spirited way of looking at it.

levine

It’s definitely mean-spirited, but it is something artists do all the time unconsciouLeviney, working in the style of someone they consider a great master. I just wanted to make that relationship literal.

lewallen

At the same time that your work is a critique of the referent-artists, they are artists I feel you admire — a kind of homage is involved, in every case.

levine

Definitely. When I was in school in the mid-sixties, I was doing a lot of Minimal paintings, and they always looked so derivative to me that I decided to move to photographic imagery as a way to break what I thought of as a cul-de-sac. I remember doing a grid drawing that my teachers all loved and a couple of weeks later, I think it was in Artforum, I saw an article on Brice Marden. I was heartbroken. I had the feeling I was reinventing the wheel. There was no way to do it better than the New York Minimalists were doing it. Eventually, I decided to make that a virtue, as opposed to a problem, in my work.

lewallen

Hopeless. (Laughter) It does raise the question, and it’s obviously a question you began asking yourself when you started working: is there a way to continue painting, if you are working in the tradition of Modernist abstraction? I happen to love Modernist abstraction.

levine

Me, too,

lewallen

I find it extremely seductive. I love Marden’s early work, too, for instance. I don’t know quite what to think when I see a Günther Förg work, which is à la Brice Marden. I don’t know how ironic Förg intends his work to be.

levine

Well, I think Förg is an interesting case. Our work looked similar at a certain point in our careers; there was a convergence. We were both very enamored with Blinky Palermo’s work. Because Förg saw himself, as a German and a man, he saw himself in the tradition of Palermo, whereas I saw myself as an outsider looking in. I was thinking about how similar the work looks, but in fact there’s a very different relationship, as an American woman than as a German man, to Palermo.

lewallen

Förg’s black and white etchings are beautiful.

levine

He also has an appreciation of materials. There are a lot of parallels in our work.

lewallen

You think Förg sees himself working in and extending a tradition?

levine

I would think so. I doubt that he would find that something he would disagree with. I don’t think it’s an ironic relationship to that work at all on his part.

lewallen

You did some woodblock prints recently, I noticed, that had to do with the “Meltdown” paintings. Where did you do them?

levine

I worked with a wonderful printer, Maurice Sanchez. I had wanted to do prints based on a geometric grid with computer averages of colors of modern master paintings.

lewallen

Which paintings did you use as a starting point?

levine

For example, we used a Monet “Cathedral.” We put a slide of the picture into a computer with graphic capabilities and the computer created a grid in which each section corresponded to an average of the color in that section of the painting. The “Meltdown” paintings are based on the same principle but rather than being gridded off, they represent one uniform average for the whole surface. In fact, it’s funny, I had been wanting to make work after Marden’s early work, because some of his monochromes are some of my favorite paintings. For me they are the ultimate late-Modern paintings. I am also a big fan of Olivier Mosset’s monochrome paintings, and Yves Klein is another favorite of mine. For years I have been trying to think of a way to make monochromes that were interesting but not the same as those I admired, but I never came up with a solution. Then, when I was working on the print project, almost as a mistake, the computer also gave me the color average of the entire ...

lewallen

So, the print project preceded the paintings?

levine

Yes, the average of the entire painting, all the colors in the painting, like when you mix your whole palette together you get these beautiful, Mardenesque greys and greens and mauves. And I realized I had finally found a method.

lewallen

What were the colors like in the prints, working with color mixes from grid to grid?

levine

They were much less greyed down than the paintings.

lewallen

Depending on the section.

levine

I originally thought they should be lithographs or silkscreens, and Maurice came up with the wonderful idea of woodcuts on Japanese rice paper. He used a high-tech method; he made a grid of the twelve tongue-and-groove blocks using a laser saw that he inked up separately and printed all at once. I liked the combination of high-tech and low-tech techniques.

lewallen

What is the next series of work going to be? It’s always unpredictable.

levine

I orchestrate each series so that each series re-informs everything that came before.

lewallen

Right, because the crate furniture refers to the same period as Mondrian, Malevich, Schiele, all of whom you have made paintings after, but it is three-dimensional like much of your most recent work — after Duchamp, Man Ray, and so on. How would you feel if someone used the crate pieces as furniture?

levine

I don’t think I’d be very comfortable. I’ve been wanting a tea table for years, and I am tempted, but somehow I think that would be a mistake. That’s why I made them as suites. I think what’s important is the ambiguity about whether they are furniture or sculpture. You know that beautiful Artschwager table in the shape of the cube?

lewallen

Yes, of course.

levine

It’s really nonfunctional. Artschwager has been a big influence on me. Bob Gober’s work has some of that same quality. I find the beds really moving in that way. There was this incredible ambiguity about whether they were really furniture. There wasn’t really any ambiguity ...

lewallen

... because you knew they weren’t functional.

levine

But visually ...

lewallen

Which is different from Scott Burton’s work ...

levine

It’s really very different from Burton or from Holzer’s benches.

lewallen

One time Artschwager did a piece in Berkeley that I commissioned. He made a door. It was Levineightly squat; the proportions were wrong. He painted a wood-grain pattern on it and added a beautiful blown-glass, larger-than-life, knob on it.

levine

I know that piece. I like it very much.

lewallen

Although everything about it was slightly off, there were people who tried to open the door. I also find humor in Artschwager’s work that I don’t find in yours.

levine

Well, I like to think of myself as funny, although I know very few people see it that way. (Laughter)

lewallen

Well, Artschwager’s pieces are often humorous because of their awkwardness, and yours are never that.

levine

No. Uncanny is the word I like to think about in relationship to his work.

lewallen

I can see what you mean.

levine

There’s a quote I like of Richard’s in which he talks about the uncanny in his work. Here, I have it. I don’t know where this was printed. It might be from an unpublished interview. “I like to think of my art as things for the home that are, well, not at home. That’s my definition of Conceptual Art — an art of weak relations. The thing has got to seem unstable in a stable setting if it’s going to make you stop, reconsider, look.”

lewallen

Let’s go back to the “Meltdown” paintings, I saw those for the first time at the San Francisco Museum with After Man Ray. Was that the first time you showed them?

levine

Yes. There were two after Monet, two after Mondrian and two after Kirchner. They were all necessarily greyed down color, which is what I was after at the time, but I realized that if I did more, they were all going to look the same, because of the process. So, I thought, “How can I get a saturated color?”

lewallen

So you did the Yves Kleins, which don’t really look like the real thing. Are yours very thinly painted?

levine

Yes and the wood grain is present.

lewallen

Are there any gold ones?

levine

Yes, gold, copper, blue, and red.

lewallen

Did you also do a Meltdown after Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q.?

levine

Yes, that was one of the prints.

lewallen

After a photograph?

levine

After a book plate.

lewallen

Prints are generally made in editions. Is that what interests you in making prints or is it just the challenge of using a different process?

levine

I think I am interested in the way ... I like the way some artists feel demeaned by printmaking media, because they think in paint or sculpture and then they try to translate, but because I was trained as a printmaker, I can think in print media. So for me it’s a different way to think about things, because you can do things differently.

lewallen

And you get a different result?

levine

Right. The woodgrain print was photogravure and the gold was aquatinted. An aquatint was laid underneath, too, as a ground. There were three layers — the ground, the woodgrain and then the gold knots.

lewallen

The Walker Evans was photogravure ...

levine

With an aquatint ground also.

lewallen

The Malevich and the Lincoln silhouette are aquatints as is the striped image.

levine

Yes.

lewallen

Did you make new editions of your own images from the seventies for your first show at Mary Boone — Rodchenkos and others?

levine

No.

lewallen

What was in that show?

levine

There were photographs after Rodchenko; they were new photographs of mine. I redid some Walker Evans photographs but they weren’t in that show.

lewallen

You’re not against doing that?

levine

That’s the nature of photography — you can reprint.

lewallen

So you reprinted from your original negatives.

levine

Yes, but I changed the scale.

lewallen

You made them bigger?

levine

Well, there’s a set from 1981 that is four by five inches, which I own. And then at some point I started making them eight by ten. There was absolutely no market for my work at that time so I gave them away to friends, or as presents to people who had written about the work, and I was sloppy about numbering them. When I started to work with Mary [Boone], she said, “This is really a mess.” I suggested we change the size, start over and be very careful about the numbering.

lewallen

That’s what you did?

levine

Yes. I made them eleven by fourteen, and they were unique, not in editions.

lewallen

I saw in Parkett that you made an edition of children’s shoes, which refer to an early installation from 1977, I think.

levine

Yes, I have them here, I’ll bring them over.

lewallen

God, I love them. They’re like miniatures.

levine

Well, they are children’s shoes.

lewallen

Brown and black children’s shoes in the style of adult shoes. These are done in editions?

levine

Well, in the early seventies, when I first got out of school, I lived in Berkeley and taught in the area. One of the jobs I had was at San Jose State. I used to stop at a thrift shop on my way home. One day I went in and saw a carton of seventy-five pairs of little black shoes for fifty cents a piece. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I bought them. And when I moved to New York in 1975, I had nothing but a suitcase and this carton of shoes. (Laughter) Then I just kept them around, I never knew what to do with them. In 1977, Barbara Ess introduced me to Stefan Eins who was running the Three Mercer Street Store. He was looking for artists who wanted to show things ... that weren’t the kind of thing you find in a gallery, but which made reference to the store. Barbara told him about the shoes, and we did a show that took place on two weekends. Two shoes sold for two dollars, and they sold out immediately. It’s very funny, because it turns out ... I didn’t know who anybody was then — I had just moved to New York — that they went into some interesting collections. Roberta Smith has a pair, Paul Schimmel has a pair. I keep meeting people who have them, even people in Europe. I, in fact, only kept one pair for myself. Subsequently, I received a lot of requests for a pair of the shoes, and so when Parkett wanted to do an edition with me, I asked them if they would be interested in reproducing these shoes, and they loved the idea. Louise Neri, the American editor of Parkett, was wonderful. She knew an editor of Vogue Bambini who hooked us up with an Italian manufacturer.

lewallen

How many are there?

levine

About a hundred.

lewallen

Brown ones?

levine

The black ones are the readymades. The brown ones of course are much more beautifully made than the cheap ones.

lewallen

They are irresistible; I can see why everybody wants them. This reminded me of Oldenburg’s store but actually it was quite different, because you sold things you bought and he sold things he made.

levine

Right. It was a Duchampian gesture.

lewallen

Speaking of Duchamp, I think that when you first showed the Malic Molds, people were pretty surprised.

levine

Is that true?

lewallen

First of all, they were among your first sculptures.

levine

They were my first sculptures I showed — other than the shoes.

lewallen

They were elegantly displayed in wood vitrines that you designed.

levine

Actually, I didn’t design them. They are based on the vitrines in the library at Mönchengladbach. Beuys and Byars had used the same vitrines. There were lots of references. It was Mary’s idea, through Byars, and I thought it was a great one.

lewallen

Broodthaers used similar vitrines.

levine

I don’t know if they were the same, but in Europe these vitrines are common.

lewallen

But they were fabricated?

levine

Yes.

lewallen

And there were nine Malic Molds in The Large Glass.

levine

Yes and I produced only six.

lewallen

Were they made in editions?

levine

No, they were unique but each one had an artist’s proof.

lewallen

Were they made in a similar fashion to the wine bottles?

levine

Yes, they are cast, solid glass. It’s a lost wax process, very similar to casting metal.

lewallen

Like the wine bottles?

levine

The wine bottles, also.

lewallen

You chose Duchamp to work after because he is an artist you have thought about a lot and who means a lot to you.

levine

Yes.

lewallen

And number two, there’s a feminine quality to the forms themselves which refers to Duchamp’s interest in androgyny and recognition of his feminine alter ego, Rrose Selavy. Is that all part of it?

levine

Well the forms are biomorphic and it’s kind of a High-Modernist aesthetic that I’m interested in.

lewallen

Arp-like.

levine

Yes, and Brancusi-like.

lewallen

The same could be said of the urinals, Fountains After Duchamp, too.

levine

Industrial design and visual art were very closely related during that period — I am thinking of that great designer Raymond Lowey — and they informed each other. In fact when I first cast the urinal in high polished bronze, I really didn’t know what to expect. When I got the first one back, I was totally amazed at the reference to Brancusi and Arp. As I said, I wasn’t expecting that at all, but once I actually saw it, the similarity was unmistakable. In looking at this dirty old urinal that I found in the second hand shop, the Modernist similarity wasn’t obvious at all.

lewallen

Your urinals are not cast from the same model Duchamp used.

levine

No, the same year and the same manufacturer, but a different model.

lewallen

Your urinal is more curvilinear?

levine

No, the wing attachments are slightly differently placed, that’s all.

lewallen

So it’s not more feminine?

levine

No, it just happens to be the one I was able to find.

lewallen

And, did you do your sculptures around the same time as Gober did his urinal pieces?

levine

Mine came afterwards. Whereas I was not directly thinking about his work, I was spending time with Bob at the time and I loved his sinks. I always thought of the sinks as being very feminine. They always seemed like nuns to me (laughter). So I think my urinals had more to do with Gober’s sinks than his urinals.

lewallen

Also, since yours are cast in bronze they have a very different feeling from his, anyway.

levine

Right.

lewallen

I’m sure Duchamp would have liked yours.

levine

I wonder (laughter).

lewallen

You said somewhere you think of “The Large Glass” in terms of “Susanna and the Elders.”

levine

It’s so obvious to me. Duchamp had a sister Suzanne ... he was very close to.

lewallen

Also, the idea of fetish was brought up in terms of these works.

levine

Well, my work has always been very self consciously about fetishism. One could make the same argument about the shoes. The sculptures after Duchamp were the most literally phallic of my work because they referred to “bachelors.”

lewallen

Forever down there, grinding their chocolate.

levine

(Laughter)

lewallen

You also said in reference to the Man Ray-derived work and the Duchamp that they promoted a brand of infantilism that was charming and that you liked. Is that true?

levine

That was from the Jeanne Siegel interview in the catalogue. I was talking about a kind of “bad boy” attitude to which I have a certain attraction.

lewallen

I imagine you knew Man Ray’s “La Fortune” from the Whitney. Did you just see it one day and then get the idea for your installation?

levine

I had seen it a million times at the Whitney, but it was in the Man Ray show that was traveling around the country and was in Los Angeles when I was there and then I happened to see it in Philadelphia as well. That’s the wonderful thing about moving art around, that you can see it new, as if for the first time. And when I saw the painting again, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be incredible to build this table?”

lewallen

But your billiard tables are not really billiard tables.

levine

No, they’re sculptures.

lewallen

In fact, they are not exactly the right size.

levine

They are actually to scale but the tops aren’t slate and there are no works underneath. The painting has very exaggerated proportions, the legs are more delicate and more unstable than they would be in reality; they would never be able to sustain the weight of a game.

lewallen

In other words, the same principle as Charles Ray’s fire engine parked in front of the Whitney as part of the Biennial.

levine

He’s also interested in the idea of the uncanny. It’s an aspect of his work that I am attracted to the reference to the every day and making the familiar strange.

lewallen

Uncanny. Jeanne Siegel used this word in reference to After Man Ray (La Fortune). You two discuss the fact that your new work, like your former work, explores ideas, but is now more confrontational.

levine

Sometimes when things are almost original they can be as disturbing ... It’s a different relationship to identity, and I am interested in the tension between the original and my work. When it is close, but not the same, as the original, in my mind, there’s a different kind of tension.

lewallen

Like the tables as opposed to the photos after Walker Evans?

levine

Yes, what does it mean that they are one third bigger?

lewallen

In other words, what does that difference mean?

levine

Yes. I’m interested in what the work makes you think about.

lewallen

But it’s important to know ... Some seeing these tables will know the referent; others won’t. Most people will know Rietveld but not necessarily that these are his designs. Does it matter to you? I mean, with your work, getting the whole story requires art historical knowledge.

levine

I suppose so. In some ways it doesn’t matter to me in what order they get the information. I’m interested in as many layers of meaning as possible. The more you know, the more meaning and the more history can be brought to bear on it

lewallen

It enriches it. But isn’t that true of everything?

levine

Right. These are beautiful objects, no matter what else they are.

lewallen

So on that level, alone, someone could appreciate them.

levine

Yes, and a lot of people do appreciate my work just on that level. Here’s a funny story. When I moved to Los Angeles I moved into a beautiful 1960s International Style house in the Palisades overlooking the water. My landlords, who were sunday painters, were really excited. They gave me the house because I was an artist. The first thing I moved in were my Bill Leavitt paintings and they got so depressed. They said, “Is that your work?” And I said, No, they are by a friend of mine.” And then I pointed to the photographs after Walker Evans, and I said, “That’s my work.” And they said, “Oh, those are beautiful.”

lewallen

That’s funny (Laughter). You said once that you like gameboard paintings because you think of artmaking as a game. You can control it in a way that you can’t control your daily life.

levine

That’s one of the great attractions to artmaking for the people who make it.