<<
{click on image to view more}
Kim Levin: Itineraries
Delta Axis @ Marshall Arts
Memphis, Tennessee, USA
October 17-November 22, 2003
Curated by John Salvest
A few years ago art critic Kim Levin invited me to tag along as
she made her rounds of New York City galleries and art museums gathering
information and forming opinions for the Choices section
of The Village Voice. For about twenty years Ms. Levin has
been a fixture of the New York art scene, steadfastly patrolling
its ever-changing neighborhoods and spaces with the immediate, deadline
driven task of compiling a weekly list of current exhibitions.
As we settle into a cab to head downtown, Kim says, "Oh, did
I forget my list" and starts to rummage through her bag."There
it is," she says, visibly relieved. I catch a glimpse of an
exhibition announcement with a hand-written list on the back. Are
we going grocery shopping too, I wonder, until I realize that her
instructions to the cabbie are directly related to the information
on the back of the card.
The lists, it turns out, are a critical and necessary part of Ms.
Levin's weekly ritual. With hundreds of invitations and press releases
pouring into her mailbox each week and new exhibitions opening practically
every weekend, how else can she keep things straight? The neat itineraries,
arranged neighborhood by neighborhood and street by street, are
portable plans of action that evolve over time. As she views the
shows, color-coded scratches, stars, asterisks and other notations
are added. Back at her desk, the now colorful and densely marked
cards, frequently augmented by more extensive notes and drawings
done on whatever paper was available during each circuit, provide
the information she needs to make her famously succinct recommendations.
During a coffee break, I ask Kim if she saves her lists. "Oh
yes, I have boxes full of them." She goes on to say that she's
been saving them since the early nineties when a European museum
director suggested that she should keep them. She has also been
saving the on-site notes and sketches I had watched her scribble
onto the blank spots of printed matter she scavenged from gallery
desks along the way.
I guess that's exactly where and when the idea for Itineraries
originated. Incurably predisposed as I am toward the obsessive and
systematic, I found these little documents irresistible. But more
than that, I felt as though I had stumbled upon an archive of remarkable
interest, a feeling confirmed when Ms. Levin generously granted
me access to her files. Represented here was more than a decade
of exhibition history from arguably the worlds most important art
center, all from a constant perspective. And since all of the itineraries
and most of the other jottings were applied to promotional materials
directly connected to the very subject of Levin's weekly investigations,
we are left with an especially layered record of the New York art
scene as a century turned.
I suppose that Ms. Levin's contribution can be conveniently examined
via microfiche and the digital archives of The Village Voice. But
instead of the tidy columns of print that have appeared so dependably
each Wednesday, I prefer the spontaneous notes and impromptu drawings
on scraps of dated material, evidence of an inventive and disciplined
mind fully engaged with the art of a particular time in a particular
place. << |