Les Levine, Large Conceptual "Last Book of Life" Photo Etching 1970s Pop Art, c.1978

Description

Last Book of Life. (Photos from a dinner of Richard Nixon’s with Chou En Lai’s various views of Chinese chopsticks) … more Last Book of Life. (Photos from a dinner of Richard Nixon’s with Chou En Lai’s various views of Chinese chopsticks)
Photograph etchings
Printed on Stonehedge black paper
Hand signed, and numbered, by Levine in red pencil along the lower margin.
A fine impression and in good condition throughout never framed stored in flat files.

Les Levine (born 1935) is a naturalized American Irish artist known as a pioneer of video art and as a post conceptual artist working with mass communication. In 1967 Levine won first prize for sculpture in the Canadian Sculpture Biennial.
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 used the nickname Plastic Man. He introduced the terms disposable art. software art and camera art and was one of the first artist in the world to use video tape for artistic means. His work is at the intersection of Pop Art and Conceptual art.
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 white cube 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. Levine’s emphasis on the specificity of “place” and the totality of an aesthetic experience as opposed to the viewing of discreet individual works, speaks directly to the notion of the “environment” as conceptualized by Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) from 1958 onwards. In Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (1966), Kaprow argued that “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible,” with the boundaries separating the space of the spectator and the space of the artwork dissolved and shared. Kaprow, and peers such as Jim Dine (b. 1935), Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), and Geoffrey Hendricks (b. 1931), pushed this logic further through happenings. Levine opted for mylar, plastic, and steel, bringing about connotations to NASA and the Space Age, the futuristic and the industrial. Levine’s preference for the shiny and new chimes with Warhol’s contemporaneous Silver Clouds (1966), the inflatable floor sculptures made for his 1968 retrospective at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and the tin foil-covered interiors of the Factory. Both Les Levine and Andy Warhol arrived at Slipcover and Silver Clouds, respectively, via painting, rather than sculpture.
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.
Reference material
Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood (pp. 337–344). Beyond Modern Sculpture by Jack Burnham, The Britannica Encyclopedia of American Art Simon Schuster, Art and the Future by Douglass Davis, Science and Technology in the Arts by Stewart Kranz, Innovative Printmaking by Theima P. Newman and On Photography by Susan Sontag.

Select public collections
The National Gallery of Canada
The Art Gallery of Ontario
Walker Art Center
Whitney Museum of American Art
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Corcoran Museum, Washington D.C.
The Beaubourg, Paris
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
The Art gallery of South Australia
The Georgia Museum
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
the Donneil Public Library, New York.
Ludwig Museum, Köln, Germany.
Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg;
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam
Centre Pompidou, Paris
Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia less