by Catherine Perret

Space and the Site
Renée Levi is known for working in public space, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she works on public space, on its re-elaboration, whereas it is on the point of becoming undone from palpable space. Far from rejecting this, Levi takes it as her starting point, such that her pieces, although physically inscribed in public places (schools, working-class housing complexes, banks, hospitals, cantonal assemblies and so on), go beyond the framework of the in situ work of art. Her oeuvre betokens an age in which one can no longer postulate the identity of the space or the site. Real sites are no more because physical spaces are configured and established by virtual contexts, because the site is the canvas. Whatever a subject’s position on the surface of the earth, the question that can be justifiably asked is far less Who am I? than Where am I? On what control screen? In what fold of the globalized hypertext? It is a question that is immediately reversed to become Where am I then, I whose body is "here?" What is that "here" all about? Levi works at the heart of this seizure of the real body by the virtual text and the confusion that implies. Unlike the artists of on-site works of art, for whom space is a given situation, Levi sees it as a material that is secretly active, reworked by the growing cleavage between the inscription of bodies and the expectation of the gaze. It is an historical entity then that her art attacks in order to perform there the possibilities of a position, i.e., a subjectivated space, a space to get my bearings in. The paradox of her lucid and aggressive art is that this question has led her from practicing architecture to doing painting, i.e., painting-installation and painting-picture. This trajectory, which runs counter to the spirit of our day and age, raises at least one more question, What can painting, painting’s reflection about itself which forms Levi’s work as an artist, teach us about the now problematic articulation of space, the site and the subject?


Isaac 1, Renée and Léon
This is the title of a family photograph shot long ago by Isaac and later enlarged and exhibited by Levi in 1996 in Basel. The picture is of an interior view taken in broad daylight. The curtains are drawn. The scene’s central figure is the television sitting on a pedestal table and surmounted by a bouquet of artificial flowers that is framed by a Hertzian antenna. The lighted screen shows the image of a blonde, vaguely Hollywoodian television hostess. One can make out superimposed on the image the shadow of the photographer and the windows that open onto the other side of the room. On either side of the set, two children, Renée and Léon, are solemnly leaning on the TV, that lieutenant of the hearth, i.e., of the household. Between them the image of the woman is a queen while next to her the photographer-father’s silhouette is just visible, a tiny, ghostly apparition. Around the crowned television, the frozen bodies of the two children (girl on the left, boy on the right) stand at attention. An irremediable distance separates them. Each has to measure up to the image and each will indeed. This is the fate of families brought together by the "idiot box." Thomas Bernhard already described this when speaking about photography in his novel Extinction: "If photography were taken away from man today, if one were to rip it from the walls, I had said to Gambetti, and destroy it once and for all, one would be taking away from him nearly everything. It can be said therefore that the human race has nothing more to hold on to, nothing more to cling to and finally depends on nothing other than photography. Photography is its salvation." Nevertheless, television does have this symbolic privilege over photography. As Levi points out in this image, television is a mirror, which is capable of reflecting the father like the shadow of the TV hostess. In the family household that television now has become, the broadcasted (not projected) image, i.e., vision at a distance (at a distance first of all from the rear projector that is the gaze), stands as an authority. Nobody is there. Nobody has ever been there. No body is absent from there. No absence is represented there. No subject figures there. It is absolute presence whose "live" transmission is the dominant fantasy. And corresponding to this fantasy is that of the disciplined or rather rectified body. Obedient. Desubjectivated. Disoriented. Because it is cut off from the only otherness that exists, the body and the other’s voice that is found there, relative to me who am here. As a contrast to the straightforward record that this photograph constitutes, Levi’s work offers a single-minded exploration of what defines space as a relationship. Painting for her is first of all the name of that relationship.

The Trap
Renée Levi paints walls. The inside walls of institutions that invite her to practice her art. The outside walls of building facades (and in this case her painting may take the form of flowery curtains hanging in the windows). Walls detached from any building context which she simply has built inside the venue. These walls, which are completely covered in graffiti according to a technique that I shall come back to, are first of all the occasion for a dizzying experience that is due to the fact that in the end it is always the other who drives you into a corner (with your back to the wall!) Because to draw close to a wall, especially a wall that is thus overrepresented by the surface of its marking, at some point or another always amounts to passing over into "the" field. It means experiencing the threshold from which "I" shifts from the position of the observer to that of a supernumerary. From the position of the viewer who examines the expanse that is placed on view, to the position of the figure who, included "in" this view, stands out against the wall and becomes in turn a subject of painting. Nothing naturally indicates the point where the active viewer shifts over to a passive one. There is only that insidious awareness of not finding "your" place "in front of" the wall and the need then to physically experience this limit by testing the guide marks while moving around. The viewer begins then by searching for both the threshold and the possibility of mastering the passage, but this threshold eludes him. He is assigned to the duplication from the outside. What he learns anew then is that the active viewer in him is captive of the passive supernumerary, the supernumerary figuring in the other’s theater, and that he can only perceive (the formal qualities of this wall, for example) when framed by another gaze. The perceiving body of one is backed by the body (the same and yet another) viewed by others.
Levi’s walls thus consign the viewer to what we might call the "picture-structure" of experience that is historically constructed by modernity. Before the wall, the gaze is caught in the lens, trapped. Subsequently, as is underscored by the enlargement of Isaac’s photograph emphasizing the effect of the low-angle shot, which shifts the family portrait towards the ceiling, vision’s modern techniques were able to deframe the picture and reveal it as a structure of order (mirroring the Meninas or the television set in which the father, king or cameraman is reflected), to be sure… Yet the structure’s apparatus (the wall) is no less resistant. Except that—and here lies one of the theoretical interests of Levi’s work—the wall has stopped functioning as an orienting principle. This picture-structure leads the viewer up the garden path, makes him work and walk, ensures that he will wander, drives him mad. Levi’s walls say this first of all: "We are in a world where structures offer a resistance, of course, but in which they are delirious (and make one delirious)." This is probably why she ended a recent talk with these words and a demand addressed to herself, "A good painting is characterized by its clarity – clear in form, clear in color, clear in space."

Velocities
If they weren’t manifestos of this delirious "picture-structure," Levi’s walls would be Kafkaesque monuments. Moreover, locked up in banks and official institutions, at times even closed upon themselves as bunker-installations, they hold within themselves the power of the "Castle" as a threat that is never completely ostracized. Yet they are walls on fire. The fluorescent graffiti covering them, which emits light well beyond the painted surface by illuminating all the surrounding space, makes clear that the "Castle" is on fire. The spread of incomprehensible injunctions, the collapse of twisted spaces. Clarity. But whence this clarity? Where does it come from? As always, from the very source of the oppression, i.e., from the temporal disconnect between framing vision and the perceiving body. Playing on the picture-structure, the painter’s art here lies in leading the viewer to a feeling of perception’s delay with respect to vision, to the awareness of the contretemps that causes the gaze to presuppose at least a return, and to take then the time required by that delay. Levi’s paintings play with a permanent differential of speed. They beat with an irregular pulse that constantly shifts from the vehement to the imperceptible. The wild rhythm of the gesture, the fluorescent paint, the potentially unlimited format, and at the same time the barely indicated legato of the joints, junctures and frames that lend structure to the panels or the graffiti "riffs." The "mad," almost feverish concentration demanded by the movement of the hand holding the color spray—a movement that cannot be salvaged if any error occurs—is elaborated according to the surfaces that have been cut up, thought out and painstakingly fitted beforehand. The combined counterpoint of the overflowing and the calculation of the latencies is the cause of this oeuvre’s unique respiration, a breath that is both panting and held in, which violates the wall’s balance and imposes on the viewer the impossible temporality of a too early that is always a too late. It is then that the breach of consciousness that is thus engendered places him in the position of being here. Not here, finally, wedged in, framed, but here, caught up in the painting’s rhythm and giving as much he takes, transforming the delay into a rebound, a gaze.

A Scandal
Painting requires time, but concomitantly it gives time and in this case the time that is granted is nothing less than the time of the structure’s turning back upon itself, i.e., from the wandering search for the right point of view to the viewer’s self-orientation using his own sensations. There is a lesson in painting here whose importance is only equal to the oblivion it seems to have fallen into. But this lesson can also be turned around into a lesson for painting. And it is perhaps at this point that Levi the painter recalls Levi the architect. Her painting itself only truly becomes perceptible because the "Silhouettenfiguren" that blindly shifted about there suddenly look and in turn activate its power of projection; or, in the case of art institutions where her murals are on display, because other works are projected there like the travelers, as Levi herself has put it, peopling the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. Her picture-walls offer the gaze the chance of a "hic" then because, on the one hand, they ordain for the body the disorder of a random inscription (the search for an inexistent place), and on the other they shatter the possibility of a "nunc" (in favor of the contretemps), and finally because they are reprojected in the end by the person who, once he is here, before the wall, acts, constructs connections and conjures up representations there. The presence of space that is reinvented by the work of art is a function of its status as social representation. Levi is well aware of this, she who prefers to see her walls installed at the bank or town hall rather than the museum, in other words, in places with a high degree of projection rather than a place existing in a situation of relative symbolic deflation. Thus, in the canton council hall of Lucern she realized a quite remarkable pictorial installation for which she had the common cross hanging above the canton’s elected representatives replaced by a white monochrome rectangle emerging from a wall of fluorescent graffiti of pale yellow. Needless to say, the thing touched off a scandal. The viewer who enters this neoclassical building, who mounts the marble stairs up to the floor where the assembly sits in session, an eminently political site of Swiss democracy, cannot not project the line of heads (of the elective representatives) into the white screen of Levi’s painting and the way in which the wisps of graffiti, more specifically scriptural in this case, i.e., more like letters than drawings, rustle around them like the law, whose whisper naturally no longer impinges on the consciousness of a citizen, who is himself naturally moral (and Christian). At which point the same viewer cannot not perceive the parody of Levi’s arrangement, which takes aim at least as much at the myth of politics as it does at the myth of religion. Fundamentally caustic, essentially figurative right down to its abstract sobriety, the work of art here is theater, a theater that thrives on a shared irony.

The Camera-painting
The Canton of Lucern’s assembly is steeped in an aberrant mixture of Kantian religiosity (the amphitheater, the neoclassical railings, the unvaryingly gray walls) and technological pragmatism (minimicrophones, mahogany lecterns equipped with sophisticated computer tools, capabilities for simultaneous interpretation). It is an impossible place in terms of an active material to work with, historically torn between the traditional horizons of expectation and the modes of inscription that are peculiar to controlled societies. This active rift would have remained abstract and hence nonsubjectivable (nonperceptible, unthinkable) if Levi’s pictorial intervention hadn’t taken it up and from an aberrant mixture transformed it into an explosive mix. Here it is suddenly oriented in a particular way and now is become a space of projection, a vector of identifications and therefore connections. It is on this condition that subjects can recognize themselves there and then, and only then, perceive what is going on there and have access to the sense of self, here: in this instance, the feeling that the assembly does indeed occupy (materially and therefore symbolically, not the contrary, as contemporary dematerialization tends to make us believe) the political space that falls to its lot. The entire importance of painting would be to produce the conduction underlying first pro-jection, then per-ception, thus enabling the fulfillment of sensation. It is far less a question of whether painting is a medium "as such," than a matter of conceiving it as a practice that must be redefined permanently if it is to be up to becoming the milieu thanks to which the potential activity of the space-material becomes real virulence, forcing our view to take the time to reflect itself reflecting itself, an imaginary rebound at first and subsequently a material impression, finally substantializing both the here and the body. In 2000 Levi created a video that offers a formal answer to this question. "The video was done in a large do-it-yourself store. I’m holding the video recorder away from my body and focusing on the face of the baby I’m carrying in front of me. We are moving through space in symbiosis, me the person operating the camera, the camera and the baby. The baby is overwhelmed by sound and visual impressions and immediately reacts to these influences. The face acts like a double support, on a mental-intuitive level, on the one hand, in that the face’s expression translates the child’s sensations; and on the other, on a formal level, in that the face reflects the environment." In order to be this conducting milieu, painting must come to resemble the child’s reflection-mirror face and partake of a paradoxical—that is both passive and active—practice. It is that practice Levi has adopted as her method.

Paleolithic
We can now finally take a look at Renée Levi at work. What does she do? Or more exactly, what device for acting has she set up to serve as a framework for the artwork itself? As she herself stated in her presentation of the video, she begins by becoming the operator of a machine. She puts herself at the service of the machine at work in her and without her, that is, impulse. This impulse machine is embodied here in the graffiti gesture, a movement of pure discharge of the visual economy that explodes in the flashing bust of fluorescent paint. Pink, red, yellow, these are indeed the colors of the "desiring machines" that serve in this instance to shatter within the painter herself the pre-defined connection between vision (in the framework) and perception (of something). Everything moves too quickly then for her to be able to stay in control and it is on this recreated condition of passivity that the body is emptied of both its representations and the representation that underlies all of these representations, i.e., that of time’s successivity. The graffiti-making body is a body that has become mad, freed of the rift between the mental and the corporal and suddenly radiating from the deep memory of the hand indifferently writing, drawing and painting, the hand of the Paleolithic hunter. Starting up the impulse machine, which requires absolute concentration, empties the subject of her own body (of her body in terms of what is peculiar to it, what is its own, recognizable) and frees the memory-function from the gesture, that practical knowledge that lies buried in the gesture and is older than consciousness itself. It also reactivates that immemorial technology that articulates the eye and hand in the production of a signifying image for the subject. The stroke that appears in that instance enjoys the same status as a self-reference point, an obliterated trace of a footprint in the sand which simply says "I, here." It performs a locus from which it absents itself at once by repeating itself up to the moment when, lacking energy, the hand drops, the eye is extinguished. This gesture displays a minimal, presymbolic technique, whose aim is to define a territory and deploy a living human space. And in this sense, it is the opposite of a movement (toward something), expression (of the self) or signature. It is a subjective, interpersonal projection that stretches out a surface in front of itself as it is enacted. Because it generates energy, this surface is itself saturated and full, as it were. Not only filled with signs, but above all substantial and gradually filling the space it occupies. The pictorial activity can be summed up by an odd oxymoron: the production of a substantial, amniotic image, first by absenting the subject and subsequently by liberating memory. This image amounts to little. It is neither a mirror nor a fetish. It is not a matter of seeing oneself or even of seeing something there. It is simply a question of being embodied and reborn to sensation there. Without this image, however, we do not know where we are and remain prisoners of the eternal cave transformed today into a fleeting network.


From the German by John O'Toole


Catalogue:
Renée Levi. Kill me afterwards
Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
Museum Folkwang Essen
2003