A decisive figure of the Los Angeles art scene, William Leavitt (born 1941 in Washington, D.C.) has developed a singular body of work participating, on the one hand, in
Conceptual art—whose important representatives, such as Douglas Huebler and
John Baldessari, were also based in Los Angeles—and, on the other hand, resembling the "Narrative art" movement that emerged in the early 1970s. He is part of the same
Californian artistic milieu as
Allen Ruppersberg,
Guy de Cointet, and
Bas Jan Ader—with whom he edited the magazine
Landslide in 1969–1970.
Through his installations and videos, drawings and paintings, play and sound performances, Leavitt re-examines the production of the Western imaginary, as imposed, since the end of World War II, by the "Hollywood factory." Through a selection of parts of stage sets, the isolation and recombination of fragments coming from everyday culture, which often conceals a conservative social order and politics, he turns these representations inside out: he makes us see them as so many conceptual frameworks in which stories (fictional ones or from our own lives) can be set. Also at play in Leavitt's continuing exploration of "the theater of the ordinary" is the coexistence of nature and artifice, exemplified by such landmark works as
Forest Sound (1970) and
California Patio (1972). His presentations of vernacular culture are often infused with deadpan humor, achieved either through the seemingly random juxtapositions of figurative elements in his two-dimensional works or via the sly stories that unfold in his installations, plays, and videos.
