Rachel Levine: Soft Chaos
Winner of The Skinny Award at RSA New Contemporaries 2014, Rachel Levine describes the "small things, shifts and turns" that have informed her upcoming show at the CCA
The title of Rachel Levine’s upcoming show, Soft Chaos, comes from theorist Sianne Ngai who describes “the soft chaos of non articulated tensions.” For Levine, “it felt as though reading that phrase as staring into the whirling void or some kind vertigo.” What came next was an interest in “these uncathartic feelings we have, like shame, anxiety, paranoia, and how they are seen as unproductive or possibly cutting or blocking a person’s agency to act.” Instead “there is the idea of making an uncathartic aesthetic and that being a political action in itself.” Levine cites Ngai, who came up with the idea of “stuplimity”: a feeling that is equal measures boredom and shock.
Looking forward to the work in CCA's Intermedia, Levine affirms her solid commitment to the medium of sculpture as a means of research into these ideas, as it allows her “a means of accessing the history, the politics and all the constructs of sculpture.” In some ways she sees her emphasis on the small and intermediate feelings as opposed to the “grand gesture of sculpture, and all its maleness, the idea of strong feelings and abrupt violence of the gesture of sheer emotion or sheer beauty.” Yet at the same time, for Levine there’s something that doesn’t last too long in the awe inspired, for example, by Richard Serra’s Steel Arc.”It wears off incredibly quickly, that kind of grand gesture which relies on a historically male aesthetic, that idea of the autonomous object, the singular thing.”
For this reason, Levine’s work has tended towards groups of objects, though she is beginning to recognise the value of “the singular thing.” For example, an interest in casting objects led to a consideration of the single multiple. Instead of engaging fully with a process that was devised to make multiple copies of an artwork, only making one “cuts the agency of this method in some way.” This idea of removing the agency of objects is key to the works she plans for Soft Chaos, which will include objects enlarged by repeated castings, and flattened (almost 2D) representations of objects whose function requires their three dimensionality – for example, roofing tiles.
The work for Soft Chaos comes from an exploration of “feelings that are in a state of tension before they’re polarised into either utopic or dystopic. So it’s the initial point before you then divide everything out into binary oppositions. That could create an affective state that relocates your anxiety to a field of nothingness where it has no object or direct target, so it’s that dizzy chaos that takes in everything and at the same time the nothingness as well.” Soft chaos is therefore “something much more niggling than chaos. It’s more malevolent and incipient. It’s in the spaces of in betweenness.”
This crucially for Levine marks a defined progress from a concern with dialectical thinking in her work to a consideration of the less categorisable feelings, “the intermediate space that works between those things.” A question that now recurs for Levine comes from her time on residency in Canada’s Banff Centre, where she met Céline Kopp, the director of the Triangle Gallery in Marseilles. Kopp questioned “the idea you can represent something, and if you can, is it a good idea to represent it? Why are you representing it, and what materials should you use and what are the convergences and the differences between the representative and the real? If those two trajectories, the real and the represented, were to hit, the artwork is dead already. I find this interesting, but there’s also a moment when these questions put you off making anything at all.”
Most importantly, Levine emphasises a reflective awareness of what might otherwise be considered the mystical decision-making of the artist. “You can be in the studio and in the moment thinking how good something looks or that it works on some level. And that’s fine, but as long as you can extrapolate something else from that. Why, and on what plane is that working. Because otherwise you can also draw into that idea of producing an overly optimistic object that holds aesthetics and values you don’t want to represent.” Citing writer Sara Ahmed’s idea of the 'Happy Object,' Levine describes the alienation these optimistic objects create when an emphasis on “productive and progressive outward optimist” covers up historical injustices.
Speaking in reverse chronology, the soft but definite development of Levine’s practice is revealed. Though she describes the anxious moment when a new idea is capable of casting doubt on the entire enterprise of being an artist, it’s clear that by continually courting these moments of complete self-reflection, Levine allows for an exciting space in her work for a subtle, necessary renewal.