Before last week, I had never heard of the State Art Academy in Zürich. Then, I saw the exhibition Artifacts from the SKZ, on view at Municipal Bonds in the Dogpatch, featuring student work from the now-defunct art school, alongside drawing horses, tables, easels and smocks once utilized in its classrooms. Since that visit, I can’t stop thinking about it.
The SKZ was founded in 1990 and trained roughly 27,000 students before shuttering in 1999. It would appear that the school modeled itself on the once-radical principles popularized by the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 30s, promoting modernist ideals of geometric abstraction with the goal of creating an objective utopia through accessible and affordable art and design.
The resulting paintings, each titled for the student signature scrawled across the bottom of the canvas, are easy on the eye, if a little dated-looking, even for a 1990s curriculum. The craquelure quality of the monochrome forms, often contrasting or complementing each other on the same canvas, makes them seem far older than that, closer to the period of the Bauhaus aesthetic they emulate.
It’s Mondrian with an Ellsworth Kelly twist, at once delightfully and reproachfully minimal. The paintings raise the question: Is there anything here?
The classroom detritus, reminiscent of Swiss artist Dieter Roth’s sculptural installations of segments of his studio floor, made me wistful for my days at the also-defunct San Francisco Art Institute. There’s a gossamer magic to the accumulation of marks made on these sorts of shared surfaces — a communal yet anonymous experience of meaning-making. Put a pin in that.
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.
But postmodernism gets a bad rap. It isn’t all heartless sarcasm and smarty-pants parody. At its best, postmodernism is a revelatory admission of the discursive and derivative nature of all cultural production, a mode of art making that doesn’t shy away from the complexities and contradictions of subjective experience. Less “gotcha” and more “get it?”
Levenson’s charade operates in this register. There’s no snark here, but rather an earnest inquiry into the subjective experience of art making and art viewing. Is style a statement of authenticity or a concession of one’s freedom? Are the projects of historical documentation and criticism about celebrating individual genius or manufacturing cohesive narratives? How do both the academy and the art market require forms of standardization from their subjects?
Perhaps accepting the subjectivity inherent to experience is the only route to realizing modernism’s celebration of objective truth. And perhaps unity will be found not in the uniform, but in and in spite of difference and individuation. That kind of collective utopia needn’t be a vision of the past.
‘Artifacts from the SKZ’ is on view at Municipal Bonds (1275 Minnesota St., San Francisco) through Mar. 1, 2025.