“But I resent those reactions, although I understand them. I think that what I’m doing is coming at the experience of war from a really different angle. Maybe I should take a lesson from it too? But fiction can sometimes be more valid than history, because history is thought to be the truth, where in fact it depends on who is creating it.”
As noted above, Levitt has acted as an undercover agent in the world of popular culture before, as an artist who finds the counterpoints and subtexts in mainstream images of subcultures. It’s hardly surprising, then, that her spy trilogy is suffused with vintage film images and photographs culled from the sanitized, literally black-and-white world of mid-century and war-era magazines.
Levitt offers us such views of women in war to show us how we prefer to romanticize the work of female soldiers rather than look upon it honestly, and thus to illuminate the stark differences between the dirty grunt work, and even boredom, of espionage and the sleeker, faster (and weirdly chaste yet sexualized) version offered by mass entertainment.
The matte-grey Quonset hut Levitt erected in her second spythemed exhibition played nicely with this dichotomy by juxtaposing stark banality (and there is nothing more banal than a Quonset hut, a structure one step up from a porta-potty) with peekaboo titillation.
Imagery from a war-era docudrama about the training of women spies was projected onto the hut’s entrance. Otherwise, the structure was closed to the viewer except for a series of holes, looking very much like gunshot entry points, poked into the exterior walls. The curious viewer peered into the holes (where the film loop was again visible) perhaps hoping to see a recreated spy lair (which was indeed there, but was positioned so as to remain invisible to the snoop). Secrets breed secrets.
With the hut situated in a darkened room, however, the holes sent out beams of light that created beautiful, starlike dots on the gallery walls. By turning the room into a sparkling night sky, Levitt conflated glamour and the mundane, stars and corrugated steel, and so asked us to assess the real history and the constructed one simultaneously—while perhaps hinting that, flawed as popular culture’s representations of women agents are, they are as vital to our understanding as actual archival materials because they tell us, by omission, what we didn’t want to know.
“At the time these popular representations were made, it was just so hard to imagine that women had brains,” Levitt reminds me, “or skill or perseverance or independence, and I think that women being independent was a threat to people. So a lot of representations of women spies in popular culture were sexualized, to make it easier to digest. In my parents’ era, women didn’t go out alone. They didn’t occupy space.
“For me, the question is: how do we understand a woman working alone in this society? And the only way we could understand that at the time was that she was a kind of sex worker. There are definitely questions raised by women spies about how women occupied public space. But the trope of the sexy spy tells us that the only way women could get information was by fucking, by selling themselves—what else could women possibly do?
“But from what I’ve read, women were incredibly good at blending in, at acting, in occupied areas. It was easier for women to move around than men, because men would be asked why they weren’t in the army or working in a factory. Women spies had this incredible advantage I find fascinating: their social invisibility.
“And I do have a kind of romantic relationship with these spies. I’m not ashamed to say that I think what these women did was bloody incredible.”
For her final exhibition, Levitt revisited (and then reconstructed) the core practical (and ideological) components of the historical space that kick-started her trilogy: the legendary Camp X.
“For these works, there’s something that I connect with very deeply, in terms of the spies being trained to pass for something other than what they were. I have a connection to passing, as a lesbian artist, because it’s what gays and lesbians used to have to do. “I dug into the research, but I also let accidents happen. I absolutely love it when I find something by accident! That’s always been how I work: I start with a subject, zero in on an archive or a collection and then just dive in and see what I find. I love doing that in libraries, I love the treasure hunt.”
Along with the familiar Quonset hut, Levitt erected four scaleddown metal radio towers, three inside the gallery proper and one very tall work lumbering over the gallery foyer, like a giant stick man. As Camp X was used as a relay station—messages were sent there from the United States, scrambled, then sent to Britain— Levitt also simulated a relay within the gallery, with messages being sent from tower to tower.
Made of plain metal and joined with rough bolts, the ominous towers were nevertheless curiously delicate, thus conveying the unique combination of strength and transparency, durability and temporality, we associate with spiderwebs or fancy lace. And, ofcourse, with the edifice of History itself: a construction and a conceit always ready to be dismantled, to topple or reconfigure itself, because it is both real and illusory, material and transitory.
“I’ve listened to hundreds of sound recordings,” says Levitt, “and my work is often sparked by single recordings, or even moments in recordings, as much as it is by single images. When I started considering the radio towers, I also began to think about the obsolescence of all that technology, of how people used to know how to make radios and transmitters by hand, and how all that is gone, despite the fact that it played such an important role in the war, and in world history.”
Despite her fascination with history, Levitt’s immediate future is much on her mind these days. Without going into too much personal or medical detail—though always up for a laugh, Levitt is at heart a reserved sort of person, as are many who delve into the lives of others and therefore understand the pitfalls of biography—the artist is in danger of losing her sight.
A series of operations and consultations over two years have left her to ponder the possibility of making art with little or no ability to see. So far, the “results are inconclusive,” as doctors love to say, but Levitt, ever practical (she’s learned a few tricks from her lady-agent heroes), is undaunted.
“If you’re asking me where I am in this work, well, you know, I would ask people who know me instead. I’m just too close to what I’m doing to really know the answer. Somebody said to me recently that they thought it was really interesting that I was making work that was hard to look at, that you had to work to see, because of my eyes. I mean, I didn’t really plan that…but people might read that into the act of having to peer into holes.
“Basically, my eyesight situation is shitty. You know when you get drops at the eye doctor, and you can’t see properly? That’s what my daily life is like. You’re pretty blurry right now, Richard, and you’re, what, two feet away?
“But I don’t think I’ve changed the way I make work. I do still have eyesight. But I can’t tell if an image is sharp or not, and for somebody who comes from photography and video, that’s a pain in the ass. There are some things I just can’t do, but I have assistants.”
The irony of losing one’s sight while spending a decade making art about women who attempted to become invisible, and whose histories remain opaque, is hardly lost on Levitt.
“Well, sure, but I have been making this work since 2001, so the irony is not a neat one. But, you know, invisibility, the concept, and the invisibility of women…well, it ain’t going away.”
Postscript: Since our first interview, Levitt has undergone surgery for her eyes and her vision is vastly improved. “I have a bionic eye,” Levitt tells me. “I asked for X-ray vision too, but no luck.” I rather doubt she needs it.
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