Heartfelt dispatches from an imaginary Swiss art school

DeWitt Cheng

Artifacts from the SKZ (through March 1 at Municipal Bonds, SF), a multimedia collection of paintings, sculptures, and drawings by the Los Angeles artist Dan Levenson, in his first San Francisco show, is absurd, ironic, elegiac, and even heartfelt. Those are unusual affects for postmodernist art, which often seems affectless and academic. Levenson has been making his pseudo-artifacts, ostensibly relics from a defunct Swiss art school, the State Art Academy, Zurich (SKZ), for years, so his obsessive fascination with the theme is total. Had the body of work been less commanding, the show would still have been memorable, but even skeptics wary of high-concept but marketable art strategies are won over—especially those who took studio classes. Levenson’s practice reminds me of the heroically Sisyphean corpus of On Kawara, who made a black and white painting of the day’s date, every day, for years, until he died.