Les Levine Riffs on Van Gogh Fever

At Ulrik, New York, the artist’s parodic installation contends with the seemingly immutable legend of ‘Vincent, who cut off his ear’

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BY Chris Murtha in Exhibition Reviews | 14 JAN 25

Vincent van Gogh must have seemed omnipresent when Les Levine, pioneering video artist and self-identified ‘media sculptor’, produced Analyze Lovers: The Story of Vincent for Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in 1990. It was the centennial of Van Gogh’s death; he was the subject of numerous blockbuster exhibitions; and his paintings were regularly breaking auction records. Levine’s video, currently on view at Ulrik alongside a selection of related works, gently parodies efforts to locate meaning within art and to separate, if possible, artists from their mythologies.

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Les Levine, Analyze Lovers: The Story of Vincent, 1990, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Ulrik, New York; photograph: Stephen Faught

The video begins and ends with a young girl using dolls to matter-of-factly recount the well-worn tale of a suffering artist at his lowest moment. Playing a knife-bearing Van Gogh, Disney’s Dewey Duck advances on a My Little Pony figurine that represents the artist’s friend and rival Paul Gauguin, before unleashing his wrath on his own ear. The remainder of the 45-minute video resembles a made-for-television documentary, featuring ‘talking head’ interviews not only with art-world professionals but with an economist, a priest and a flower-grower. They discuss, both sincerely and flippantly, Van Gogh’s martyrdom and posthumous redemption, his mystical connection to nature, his dependency on his brother and the commodification of his art, which was increasingly ‘expected to perform’, as journalist Grace Glueck notes, ‘like a stock’.

Especially tongue-in-cheek is the critic John Perreault’s performance as the Dutchman, wearing a straw hat and worker’s attire and offering up deadpan, beyond-the-grave rejoinders. On the 1987 sale of Van Gogh’s Irises (1889), he remarks: ‘It wasn’t a mistake that someone paid US$50 million for a painting: it’s a crime.’ On that incident with his ear: ‘You don’t want my paintings, take my body.’ Far from refuting established narratives, Levine’s ersatz Van Gogh reinforces them; when the video closes with the girl reintroducing the artist as ‘Vincent, who cut off his ear’, perceptions seem largely unchanged.

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Les Levine, Analyze Lovers: The Story of Vincent, 1990, video still. Courtesy: the artist and Ulrik, New York; photograph: Stephen Faught

For the 13 billboards that initially accompanied Analyze Lovers, Levine paired a vibrant silkscreen reinterpretation of Van Gogh’s drab early painting Peasants Planting Potatoes (1884) with two-word imperatives extracted from the artist’s abundant correspondences. Headlined in eye-catching purple block letters with phrases like ‘Touch Time’ and ‘Color Meaning’, Levine’s images reframe the agrarian scene with its weary labourers as ambiguous advertising or propaganda, drawing out the visual parallels between the two.

Levine only includes two billboards here, pasting Discourage Order directly to the wall and mounting Position Regret atop stretched canvas to imitate a painting. Instead of installing them on city streets, as he did with other ‘media sculptures’, the artist places these billboards (and several watercolour studies) in direct conversation with the video and its commentators. Animate Finance could, for example, promote the process described by dealer Richard Feigen as parking large sums of money in pretty pictures. Though the video can only contend with Van Gogh’s seemingly immutable legend, the appropriated ‘paintings’ rejigger the artist’s words and images to restore some mystery to a body of work that has become all too familiar.

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Les Levine, Discourage Order, 1990, silkscreen billboard, 1.7 × 3.7 m. Courtesy: the artist and Ulrik, New York; photograph: Stephen Faught

As exhibition curator Alex Kitnick notes in an accompanying text, Levine ‘didn’t want to talk back to the media as much as be a part of it’. Yet, the artist undermines the aesthetics and strategies of mass media just as readily as he co-opts them, which is partially why this project is shown in art institutions, not on television. A relic of legacy media, Analyze Lovers reflects our inclination to sensationalize an artist’s biography, our desire to intimately know the person behind the easel. Recently, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris tasked an artificial intelligence ‘Van Gogh’ with answering visitors’ questions (Hello Vincent, 2023). I can’t help but wonder what the 89-year-old Levine, an artist who has responded so deftly to new media, would do with such technology.

Les Levine, ‘Analyze Lovers’ is on view at Ulrik, New York until 25 January

Main image: Les Levine, ‘Analyze Lovers’, 2024–5, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Ulrik, New York; photograph: Stephen Faught

Chris Murtha is writer and curator based in New York, USA. His writing has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, e-flux, Mousse and X-TRA, among other publications.

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