“For eight years, Les Levine has been a prominent gadfly of New York avant-garde art,” Peter Schjeldahl observed in a New York Times review of the artist’s show at Manhattan’s Stefanotty Gallery in 1974: “But it is a role that Levine has had to play in increasingly lean times, as the pleasure-loving art scene of the middle sixties has disappeared under waves of Vietnam politics, cultural breakup and now economic recession.” It was in this mood of creeping stagflation and national disenchantment that the ubiquitous “media sculptor,” like 71 percent of his fellow Americans, watched the Senate Watergate hearings, which were broadcast “gavel to gavel” between May 17 and November 15, 1973. Conflating cloak-and-dagger secrecy with mediatized spectacle, the televised political soap opera appealed to Levine’s archly administrative sensibilities. From its palace intrigues and procedural tedium, he created Watergate Fashions, 1973–2023, a roughly forty-seven-minute recording of the artist describing, with bone-dry bathos, the daily wardrobe of every commitee member and witness to participate in the six-month-long proceedings.
Visitors to the gallery did not hear the explosive, inculpatory testimony of former Nixon counsel John Dean, but we did learn that he appeared before the committee on Tuesday, June 26, in a “gray striped suit; paisley tie; [and] pale blue button-down shirt.” (His glamorous wife Maureen wore a “lemon-yellow safari suit; white neck scarf; [and] pearl earrings.”) The confessions of notorious spook and scripturient spy novelist E. Howard Hunt—who, in a slapstick prelude to the Watergate break-in, burgled then–US military analyst Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in a red fright wig—were likewise supplanted by a laconic account of “beige suit; light- and dark-blue diagonally striped tie; [and] pale-blue shirt.” The perjurious performance of Nixon gatekeeper and avowed “pluperfect SOB” Bob Haldeman (“gray suit; dark-blue tie with white diagonal stripes”); the pro forma denials of blue-blooded former CIA director Richard Helms (“dark-blue suit; dark-blue tie with white dots; pale-blue shirt”); the cracker-barrel witticisms of committee chair and self-styled “country lawyer” Sam Ervin (“blue-gray suit; blue tie with blue checks; pale-blue shirt”): All this and much more were redacted into a stenographic flow of mundane sartorial information
An apogee of 1970s anomie, Watergate was also the perfect object for Levine—a “cheerfully cynical parodist and manipulator of ‘systems,’” per Schjeldahl—who, even before the shoe-leather reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relished his part as the art world’s resident Tricky Dick. If Levine’s multimedia sculptures of the 1960s—with which he had endeavored to turn “the viewer into information” via closed-circuit television—already suggested a predilection for surveillance, several works from 1970 exude an uncannily Nixonian paranoia. See, for instance, Fecaloids, an installation of paper shredders frantically destroying documents; or Wire Tap, a stereo playing a year’s worth of the artist’s bugged phone calls; or the Museum of Mott Art Inc., an intelligence agency–cum–consulting firm set up by Levine as an “art-world version of the RAND Corporation” (coincidentally the same year that Ellsberg left RAND). Mott Art advertised wiretapping services, among other deliverables, to clients and staged recorded “hearings” on the New York art scene featuring prominent artists and critics.
Levine’s cybernetic dandyism could indemnify a rather bleak technological determinism. Jack Burnham’s 1970 Artforum essay on the artist quotes him thus: “In a totally programmed society my art is about packaging.” In Watergate Fashions, Levine made the hearings’ dramatis personae into empty suits—a coup of style over content, televisual medium over ideological message. If this transmission from the fading past immediately conjures the multitudinous scandals and investigations of the Trump White House, its attitude of withdrawn irreverence toward liberal norms and right-wing criminality betrays a deeper disenchantment with the systems of technocratic governance that energize reactionary pseudo-populism in a real-time feedback loop. Some may find Levine’s double negativity, compensatory irony, and “total technical ambience” (in the artist’s words) problematically aloof or exasperatingly glib. Many did. As Burnham wrote, “There are two distinct types: those who detest Les Levine and those who appreciate the negative vibrations which Levine radiates with such effortless ease.” The artist certainly has my vote, but to each their own. It’s a free country, after all.
