Too often confused, “size” is not equivalent to “scale.” Anne
Marie Levine’s art – indeed, her whole approach to artmaking –
demonstrates this. Her artwork is small in size, and capacious,
even vast, in scale. Size, you see, is a simple matter of
physical measurement; by that dint, Levine hews to smaller
sizes. She in fact has downsized a whole aesthetic based on
expansiveness, descended as it did from an (American) ethos of
wide open possibility and from a practice (not to mention
politics) based on the production of murals. But Levine’s small,
sometimes tiny abstractions roil and burgeon no less intensely
than their abstract expressionist forebears; in their scale, to
paraphrase Walt Whitman, they contain multitudes.
Long part of the New York arts scene (if, for the most part, as
a musician and writer), Levine has counted among her friends
some of the most lyrical painters among the abstract
expressionists. Befriending the likes of Robert Motherwell, Adja
Yunkers, Theodoros Stamos, and Mark Rothko, Levine admires their
roomy sense of color, their reconfiguration of color as space,
their ability to elicit a sense not simply of spirit but of
place from the rolling-out of color across canvas. Levine’s own
skill and sensibility orient her toward a more intimate size,
but allows her the embrace of her friends’ “big-sky” dilation.
How does she evoke that breadth in the confines of her
pocket-size – even locket-size – images?
In fact, it is not the images that are pocket-size, but the
objects that bear them. The images themselves loom in the eye
with no less vibrancy, and no less sense of limitlessness, than
those her friends have described in yards and acres of paint.
Originally, Levine explored this compaction through actual
miniaturization – that is, through the fabrication of imaginary
spaces sized to contain her mini-paintings. But if the painting
itself did not outgrow the box, her thinking about the painting
did. Now, when Levine makes a box, it defines and/or occupies
its own, sculptural space. The paintings, meanwhile, have broken
free and hang on “real” walls, permitting them their optical
spaciousness without reliance on illusory scaling.
Perhaps we buy into Levine’s implied vastness because we are so
used to understanding abstract art through reproduction. Here,
for once, is artwork sized (appropriately enough for a writer)
to the page, artwork as ready and able as sentences and as
paintings to take the imagination into the clouds. Levine has in
fact begun to explore the implications of the “page-painting” by
combining word and image – further confounding size and scale.
Her phrases and stanzas, by implication, have become skywriting.
Ironically enough, Levine accomplishes this miniaturization of
the abstract expressionist experience by rendering it not with
oil, acrylic, or any other hand-applied medium, but with
computer-determined strokes and washes. She “paints” at the same
keyboard (appropriately enough for a onetime concert pianist) at
which she writes. Levine fully exploits, even pushes at, the
painterliness current picture-programs allow, forcing the
technology to abet her translation of her friends’ aesthetic
without compromise. Hers is “digital art” only technically; it
may be printed with an inkjet, it may be borne by the page, but
it operates with the same visual language, in the same visual
arena, as action painting and color-field painting. Finally, the
only difference that matters is size. Anne Marie’s “painting”
maintains the scale of the art it extends, but maintains the
size of the eye it excites.