Red Tape: To Engage the University in a Useless Task Which Will Allow It to Expose a Working Model of Its System

In the summer of 1970, the artist Les Levine arrived at the University of Toronto to take part in the installation of site-specific work on the quadrangle in front of the University’s Hart House. The intended piece--construction materials hung from high-tension rope between campus buildings--was quickly stymied as Levine encountered a series of bureaucratic impediments on the part of the University staff. What ensued was played into the conceptual conceit the artist had envisioned for the project. By collating the correspondence, telephone transcripts, and visual documentation of the eventual installation process, Levine used the work to demonstrate how the university itself functioned as a system. Red Tape publishes this project, which had existed only as a dossier in the artist’s archive, for the first time.

?Red Tape is being published on the occasion of the exhibition ＂Les Levine: Bio-Tech Rehearsals 1965-1975,＂ curated by Felicity D. Scott and Mark Wasiuta, at Columbia University’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

Les Levine lives in New York City, and has made over 200 videos and held over 100 solo exhibitions during his career. He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1974 and 1980, and his work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and many others. He has written for Arts, The Village Voice, Art in America, and the Saturday Review.