David Levine

Performance: Sunday, October 29, 5pm

83 Pitt Street presents Private View, an exhibition that brings together for the first time David Levine's ongoing body of work surrounding the “Matter of Rothko.”

In 2011, David Levine published the essay “Matter of Rothko,” [1] a reflection on the role of his father, Morton Levine, in the scandal surrounding the ethically questionable activities of the Mark Rothko Estate after the painter's suicide in 1970. Morton, who died when Levine was eleven, was a close friend of Rothko's, and one of three executors tasked with carrying out the painter's ambiguous instructions regarding his estate—a duty whose dubious fulfillment would lead to a tortuous trial, scathing press coverage, and eventual public disgrace for the executors and for Marlborough Gallery, who were found to have engaged in self-dealing and conspiring to “waste the assets of the estate.”

Morton, a professor of anthropology, was well-versed in the documentary tools used in academic fieldwork—Super 8 film, 35-mm photography, audio recording—with which he incidentally chronicled his life throughout the late 1960s and '70s, including the years of the Rothko affair and subsequent trial. This resulted in a cache of films, cassettes, negatives, and handwritten notes, discovered decades later by Levine, which reveal private and enigmatic moments from his father's very public legal entanglement.

Using Morton's found Super 8 footage, cassette tapes, and 35-mm still images, along with video clips of The Rothko Conspiracy (1983), a made-for-TV movie about the event, Levine cut Folkloric Film (2017), a meditation on his father's ordeal and its intersection with his own childhood. This exhibition marks the premiere of the finished film.

In 2012, Levine debuted the first of seven audiovisual live performances that relay the tale of Morton's downfall via his intersection with this episode in the history of Abstract Expressionism. The Light Matter performances employ legal documents, personal ephemera, secretly recorded phone calls, and the occasional speculative use of pop-culture touchstones that overlap with this personal history: the 1980s romantic comedy Legal Eagles, Rosemary's Baby, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Broadway play Red. On October 29, Levine will present Light Matter VII(b), an English-language version of a recent performance at Fondation Cartier.

Primarily known for performance work that explores spectatorship, privacy, authenticity, and identity, in this body of work Levine employs his father's documentary materials to expand these questions to encompass a highly personal episode. How is genius established, and does it always require collateral damage? How does tragedy create value? What is the relationship between genius, appropriation, and expropriation?

Works from Levine's “Matter of Rothko” series have been included in group exhibitions at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and Untitled, New York. Previous iterations of Light Matter have taken place at Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Triple Canopy, New York; Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon; MoMA PS1, New York; and Fondation Cartier, Paris.

1 - Triple Canopy, July 29, 2011