Kim Levin
She was an advisor to the first Kwangju Biennial in 1995, was curator of the Nordic Biennial Borealis 8 in Copenhagen (1996 - 97), and has curated exhibitions for museums in Asia, Europe, and the U.S. She exhibited her own Notes and Itineraries at Feldman Gallery in New York in 2006, and was guest curator of the retrospective Arnold Mesches: A Life’s Work at Miami-Dade Museum in February 2013.
Documenta On The Ropes
By Kim LevinThe gods weren’t smiling. Two weeks after the opening of Documenta 12, Sanja Ivekovic’s poppy field in front of the Friedricianum had exactly one crimson bloom. Sakarin Krue-On’s terraced rice paddy beneath Schloss Wilhemshohe had been washed away by a rainstorm—all 7000 square meters of it, along with its reference to Beuys’ 7000 oak saplings.
AICA in Europe
By Kim LevinThis was the summer before the Velvet Revolution: Vaclav Havel was in jail, Jan Urban was riding around on a bicycle in disguise, men in trench coats were threatening to shut down the exhibition. My first trip behind the Iron Curtain was surreal and fascinating.
Death in Venice
By Kim Levin“A biennale without a polemic? Oh please!” began an article in Corriere della Sera on the eve of the Venice Biennale press preview.
Everywhere and Nowhere
By Kim Levin“There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Those all too familiar words of course are from Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide during his attempt to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe in 1940.
Re: Art Criticism Today
By Kim LevinWas it Man Ray or Marshall McLuhan who said art is anything an artist can get away with? What art criticism should be doing is providing the rationale for whatever it is that artists seem to be getting away with: contextualizing the art in terms of time and place, in terms of cultural, sociological, psychological, political, and/or historical contexts—including the history of forms and ideas or anything else that is most relevant to the particular work.
