Dan Levenson’s Slippery ‘Artifacts’ at Municipal Bonds

Peering into any archive often elicits this sort of nostalgic wonderment. Here, that wonder is amplified by the cracks in the narrative that begin to show the closer you look. More questions arise. Why do these paintings appear so old? How come I’ve never heard of any of these artists? What was the SKZ, again?

I have answers. Sort of.

You might rightfully be expecting a precis on the school. Hopes dashed. Not because I’m too lazy to summarize an obscure passage of Swiss art history — but because the SKZ never actually existed.

The whole thing is the fictional pursuit of Dan Levenson, a contemporary Los Angeles-based artist, who has dedicated nearly his entire practice to manufacturing relics of the school’s existence.

Levenson’s SKZ project isn’t limited to painting and sculpture. It also includes enrollment records (from which Levenson gets the names attributed to each painting) and the school’s curriculum. Occasionally, he’ll even teach these classes to a live audience, using the classroom objects on display in this exhibition, leading students through painting exercises in artistic “self-determination.”

This slip between imagined and experienced reality is a key to comprehending the overarching project.

On the fauxtina surface, Levenson’s postmodern window-dressing allows him to continue the aesthetic project of modernism, unfettered by contemporary mores. Uncharitably, this could be seen as a post hoc ploy to set his geometric abstractions apart in an oversaturated market of decorative painting, simultaneously dodging the critical backlash that fetishizing antiquated European aesthetics might invite. But I’m more interested in thinking about what it means to be a modernist in the 1990s — or a postmodernist in 2025.

At least in the United States, the 90s were a decade when art became closely associated with identity politics and activism. Back in its day, Bauhaus-era modernism was also trying to solve the world’s problems through art. Levenson’s SKZ imagines a political project for the 90s in which the aspirations of modernism were carried on past the point at which, in real life, they had long-since given way to postmodern pastiche and cynicism.