William Leavitt
1941–

William Leavitt arrived in Los Angeles as a graduate student in 1965 and joined a circle of young Conceptual artists, such as Bas Jan Ader, Allen Ruppersberg, and John Baldessari, who were then experimenting with performance and narrative formats. Leavitt developed a polyvalent practice that encompasses sculpture, music, installation, writing, drawing, painting, theater, and photography. Many, and occasionally all, of these elements are present in the stage sets for which he is most widely recognized and which he started making in the early 1970s, as his fascination with the culture and artifice of the film and television industries of Hollywood took hold.

Leavitt conceived of the sets not as vehicles for live performances but as static installations revealing his interest in “the edge between . . . illusion and how it’s supported.” Using a handful of “props”—ersatz contemporary furnishings accessorized with plastic plants and his own oil paintings—Leavitt constructed fictional fragments of suburban LA interiors modeled on those memorialized in countless mid-twentieth-century Hollywood productions, evoking a vapidity that is both familiar and unnerving. On the exposed backs of the stage flats that serve as the sets’ walls, he wrote short texts conjuring opening scenes from fictionalized soap operas.

Later in the decade, Leavitt wrote, directed, and created sets for two plays and embraced the opportunity to generate multiple images of individual props in design drawings, storyboards, and performance photographs. The photomontage Spectral Analysis is related to the same- titled one-act play written by Leavitt and first performed upon a stage set built by him in 1977. The photograph juxtaposes three eerily lit images whose narrative links are obscure: a midcentury starburst light fixture, a woman’s hand bearing a large cocktail ring, and a rainbow-hued curtain. With a layout reminiscent of a filmstrip or storyboard, the photograph begs the viewer to make sense of these disparate images, yet Leavitt never delivers on this promise. With its scientific title, Spectral Analysis merges Leavitt’s interests in the domestic soap opera and the fantastical science fiction, without presenting a consequential plot or action.

Introduction

William Leavitt (born 1941) is a conceptual artist known for paintings, photographs, installations, and performance works that examine "the vernacular culture of L.A. through the filter of the entertainment industry...drawing on 'stock environments' and designs of films as well as the literature of the place." A critical figure in the West Coast conceptual art movement of the late 60s, Leavitt himself has managed to maintain a low profile. "Over the last 40 years, William Leavitt has made a name for himself as an influential artist while staying so far out of fame's spotlight that his hard-to-categorize works have been all but invisible to the public," wrote the LA Times. While his work is collected by high-profile artists such as John Baldessari and Mike Kelley (who donated Leavitt works to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Leavitt himself has eschewed celebrity.

Leavitt received a BFA from University of Colorado, Boulder and a MFA from Claremont Graduate School. Since moving to Los Angeles in 1965 his work evolved, increasingly referencing themes endemic to the city such as the line between reality and fantasy and the nature of illusion.

Leavitt is a contemporary to artists like Allen Ruppersberg, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Bas Jan Ader, Guy de Cointet, and William Wegman, a generation that "distinguished their work from most melancholic Minimal/Conceptual art made in New York and Europe by using deadpan humor, slapstick comedy and the cliche as a way to, as Baldessari put it, 'take conceptual art off of its pedestal, so to speak.'" Leavitt was given a significant survey exhibition by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2011, titled Theater Objects. Despite Leavitt's long history of exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and abroad, the Theater Objects retrospective was described as "a revelation" by art critic Christopher Knight.

Leavitt is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery, New York.