Ellen K. Levy

Physics in Architectural Settings

There is no science without fancy and no art without facts.
Vladimir Nabokov

Ellen Levy's new paintings are send-ups of various Natural History displays with an arrangement of things that is more enigmatic than functional. She has long created images that witness a genuine fascination with how scientific logic can augment the mystery and beauty of art. Levy's preoccupation with the "Two Cultures" (to paraphrase C.P. Snow's expression) brought first a series of black-and-white drawings that "documented" a hypothetical evolutionary link which she modeled after morphologist D'Arcy Thompson's topological transformations of forms based on Cartesian coordinates. With these works, she pushed a scientific method to an illogical end. She staged her reaction" in an architectural setting-a stand-in for human presence. Subsequently, Levy "documented"thelaunchingoftheSpaceShuttle"Atlantis" for NASA by painting SpaceChrysalis, 1985, a portrayal of the vertiginous interior of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. Responding to the "Challenger" disaster that occurred two months later, she re-enacted the processes of collapse and reconstruction of specific architectural sites in her art, again using twisted topological forms. In the nineties, she has returned to an examination of relationships between architectural and organic forms. She engages in a playful investigation of how a shifting context produces a sense of wonder and challenges notions of progress and evolution in art and science.

Levy's passionate and informed attitude toward science is dialectic-al. She stresses the irrelevance of classic dichotomy between art and science as the subjective versus the objective, pointing out their striking similarities. However, in an increasingly technological art world, she treats painting as a medium for expressing the mysterious, sensual, and fluid. With a tongue-in-cheek attitude toward sub . ect matter in her current art she engages in a freeplay of visual signifiers. Viewing her works one confronts, in fact, a painterly sensibility, passion, or perhaps even a creative "madness" that brings to mind the expressions of Wassily Kandinsky and Hans Hoffman. If we agree that art often springs from some sort of "madness", and we accept a Platonic topology, then Levy's limadness" embraces four ancient categories: it is poetic, prophetic, initiato , and erotic.

With this new body ofworks, Levy has once again entered into an encyclopedic dialogue with visual tropes of various traditions. To her previous interests in the work of Charles Darwin and Denis Diderot, she has added images borrowed from, or related to, photographer Karl Blossfeld, caricaturist Grandville, and naturalists Louis Agassiz and George Louis Buffon. As in her previous paintings she invents visual puns: cranes (birds) transform into construction cranes, living plants into industrial plants, bird beaks into pliers and other sharp tools, etc. Art references abound: Agassiz's statue upended in the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco is supplied with a head taken jointly from paintings by Edvard Munch and Georg Baselitz; a shark in one of her works resembles the one used in Damien Hirst's The Physical Iinpossibility ofdeath in the Mind of Soineone Living, 1991; Marilyn Monroe, stencilled in another painting, is taken from a famous film-still with the actress standing on a subway grid with her dress blown up. This referential "bestiary" can be fully legible to the artist only, yet the viewer can easily derive pleasure from the constant accumulation of visual components equipped with a wealth of information. Admiring this imaginary world, one cannot resist recalling the taxonomy of a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" that inspired Michel Foucault to write "The Order of Things." Foucault delighted at Jorge Luis Borges's tale of the discovery of "the exotic charm of another system of thought" that contains the following categories of animals: "(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (O fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies."

Charles Willson Peale's The Artist in His Museuin, 1822, is, perhaps, the most directly cited artwork in this exhibition. The famous painting depicts the artist in front of the museum he founded in the 1780s to show "the beauties of Nature" indoors. Peale painted himself lifting a curtain in a theatrical gesture, to reveal the content of his bizarre collection of art, science, natural history and technology, housed under one roof. As has been noted, the painting witnesses the Enlightenment's drive for collecting as a mean of studying Nature's general laws, while conveying the philosophical idealism of interpreting reality in cognitive terms. For Levy, however, it is, above all, another fascinating "record" of how culture has been employed to frame and display Nature.

In Levy's Display of Wonders, 1997, Peale's painting is scraped in the background, suspended in the airabove an open drawercontaining a mask. In the middle of this picture, a "soft" rib cage hangs like Peale's curtain. Then, there is another mask-like shape in the right-center, functioning abstractly, perhaps, as a reminder of the work's painterly quality. An adjacent abstract form, based loosely on an electron micrograph of plant cells, alludes to current technological developments. In Display of Wonders visual referents proliferate, filling the labyrinthine interior of schematized ramps, staircases and shelves with narrative possibilities. Placed in a gallery context, it is a Cabinet of Wonder in a Cabinet of Wonder.

Although each work in this exhibition possesses unique characteristics, they share a nonlinear quality of being woven along fractal paths of self-similarity. They convey Levy's interest in the aberrant, many-sided, and disjunctive. On the other side, she is obviously disinterested in referential mimetic aesthetics.
Thus, she replaces a traditional "cool" representative approach to art with a more polemical personative one realized in an act of channelling action through desire, humor and intellectual selfrealization. In Levy's predominantly large-scale paintings geometry is without dimensions, scale shifts, colors are usually arbitrary. (She explains, for instance, that the greens she uses are paradoxical tropes for Nature, for they are often artificial colors). The perspective is usually distorted, destroying certainty about the viewing position. The contrast of overlaid, abstracted, serpentine wrought-iron forms to a depicted interior expanse sets up active figure-ground relationships. Cleared of a rigid spatial orientation, the parts push and pull to form an irregular pattern that-as we know todaydefine our physical and psychological environments. Every moment in the paintings is a product of an intense labor of working and re-working (building and excavating) the surface until it achieves a quality of a sensitive palimpsest with multifarious textural and textual inscriptions. In the end, the provocative "chaos" in Levy's works turns into a holistic order with a striking painterly command.

Marek Bartelik

Marek Bartelik, an art critic and art historian in New York,
writes frequently for Artforum

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