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More information about: The History of Art Department's Faculty Member - Greg Levine |
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Gregory Levine Professor Asian Art
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| Photo left: The “Great White Buddha,” constructed in what is now
Muir Woods National Monument by the San Francisco
Bohemian Club for its mid-summer encampment, 1892.
The statue, made of wood and plaster coated burlap, was
dismantled after the event or left to deteriorate, leaving
no above-ground traces. Photograph: Collection of the
Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley. Photo center: Greg Levine at Storm King Art Center, New York. Photo right: At the Buddhist temple Korin'in, within the monastery Daitokuji, Kyoto. Left to right: Yueni Zhong, Carl Gellert, Kristopher Kersey, Michelle Wang, Namiko Kunimoto, Rosaline Kyo, and Yurika Wakamatsu (now at Harvard). Photo: Greg Levine. |
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| BIO Gregory Levine is Associate Professor of the art and architecture of Japan and Buddhist visual cultures in the Department of History of Art and a member of the Groups in Buddhist Studies and Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright Hayes Fellowship, and other awards. His first book, Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (2005), was a finalist in 2007 for the Charles Rufus Morey Prize ("for an especially distinguished book in art history") awarded by the College Art Association. He was co-curator with Yukio Lippit of the exhibition Awakenings: Zen Figure Paintings from Medieval Japan (Japan Society, 2007) and catalogue co-editor and contributor. He is also co-editor of the forthcoming Friends at a Brushwood Gate: Essays in Honor of Yoshiaki Shimizu and conference proceeding volume, Re-presenting Emptiness: Essays on Zen and Art (both P.Y. and Kinmay W. Tang Center for East Asian Art and Princeton University Press). Forthcoming publications include an essay on André Malraux and Afghan Buddhist sculpture (Blackwell Companion to Asian Art, spring 2011) and "Zen Art: Pure Gesture, Nationalist Aesthetic, or Nothing at All?" (Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Religions, Brill 2011). He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of Art Historiography and Monumenta Nipponica and has reviewed manuscripts for the University of Washington Press; University of Hawai'i Press; The Art Bulletin; Artibus Asiae; and other publishers. He has taught graduate seminars on topics such as Daitokuji; Kan'ei-era visual culture; portraiture in Japan; Shōhekiga (Wall and Sliding Door paintings); art, forgery, and authenticity; iconoclasm; the fragment and ruin in art; and historiography/methodology in Japanese art history. In fall 2008 he led the History of Art department's Judith Stronach Graduate Travel Seminar in Art History (in Japan). His lecture courses include surveys of the art and architecture of Japan and specialized courses on Buddhist art and architecture; Buddhist images in the modern-contemporary world; and painting and print cultures in Japan. Recent undergraduate seminars have focused on Zen painting and calligraphy; the collecting of Japanese art in the West; and the antiquities trade, art market, and art history. Prospective applicants for graduate study in the art/visual culture of Japan who lack advanced training in modern Japanese language (at least 4 years, preferably with experience studying, living in Japan), Asian Studies, or Art History should consider applying instead to MA programs at Berkeley (Group in Asian Studies) or other Universities. | |
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Recent Activities As of May 2011, toward the end of his Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Greg Levine’s book manuscript— Legend of the Colfax Buddha Heads: Landscape, Race, and the Visual Cultures of Buddhist Modernism — is three quarters written but resisting swift resolution. This is a good thing, he says, but it also means unexpected chapters. The book takes off from the 2006 discovery in the American River near Colfax, north of Sacramento, of hundreds of porcelain objects cast in the shape of the Buddha’s head and proceeds to consider episodes in the history of the visual cultures of Buddhist modernism (a growing subfield). The spring months have brought new discoveries and convergences that deepen the book’s questioning of popularunderstandings of the Buddha’s image as embodying exclusively contemplativeness, non-violence, Asian philosophical concepts, cool-culture exotics, and post-racial community. There is a largely overlooked history in which the Buddha and other Buddhist bodies (deities, monks, nuns, laypeople) appear in both the West and Asia within virulent xenophobia, assertions of empire, and Cold War propaganda. A chapter titled “Evil Buddhas?” takes up some of this imagery as it appears from the late nineteenth century through the Korean war, while another, “Imprisoned Buddhas,” will consider Buddhist sculpture made from found, salvaged materials in conditions of profound alienation by Japanese and Japanese Americans forced into America’s concentration camps. A presumably completed chapter on the colossal (70 foot) but temporary Buddha constructed by San Francisco’s Bohemian Club in 1892, in what is now the Muir Woods National Monument, now happily awaits a possible archaeological survey of the statue’s precise location and material remains. In Fall 2011, Levine will begin teaching his multi-semester survey of Buddhist icons, architectures, and ritual contexts and offer a graduate seminar titled “Deceptive Objects, Nefarious Acts— Forgery, Authenticity, and Art.” Levine continues to be active in the faculty organization SAVE the University and is an appointed board member of the Berkeley Faculty Association. 2011 started off with a co-authored Op-Ed protesting the demand of 36 UC deans and executives (dubbed the “Gilded 36”) for higher pension payouts (“Viewpoints: UC Execs’ Pension Plea is Demoralizing,” Sacramento Bee January 6, 2011, 13A). He encourages alumni and friends of History of Art to find out more about what’s actually happening on the ground at Berkeley and how they can help sustain and enhance the department and University’s teaching and research missions. |
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Selected Publications Gregory Levine and Peter Glazer, "Common Ground." Townsend Center for the Humanities Newletter (Mar./Feb., 2010): 25-27. (Download as PDF) Gregory Levine, "Death of a Community." July 17, 2009. (Download as PDF) Gregory Levine. "Silenced by Aesthetics? A Conjectural Poetics of Art History and Ecology." Manuscript under review. (Download as PDF) Gregory Levine, "Two (or More) Truths: Reconsidering Zen Art in the West," in Awakenings: Zen Figure Paintings from Medieval Japan, eds. Gregory Levine, Yukio Lippit (New York: Japan Society; Yale University Press, 2007), 52-63. (Download as PDF) Gregory Levine, "On the Look and Logos of Zen Art," in Re-Presenting Emptiness: Essays on Zen and Art, eds. Gregory Levine, Yukio Lippit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2010). (Download as PDF) “Malraux’s Buddha Heads,” in Blackwell Companion to Asian Art, ed. Deborah Hutton, Rebecca Brown (London: Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming 2010). Gregory Levine, Yukio Lippit, eds. Awakenings: Zen Figure Paintings from Medieval Japan (New York: Japan Society; Yale University Press, 2007). Daitokuji: The Visual Cultures of a Zen Monastery (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005). Review: Andrew Watsky, Chikubushima: Deploying the Sacred Arts in Momoyama Japan. Seattle:University of Washington Press, 2003. Monumenta Nipponica, 59, no. 3 (Autumn, 2004), 421-24. “Rakan in America: Travels of the Daitokuji 500 Luohan,” in Moving Objects: Time, Space, and Context, ed. Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2004), 96-109. “Switching Sites and Identities: The Founder’s Statue at the Japanese Zen Buddhist Temple K?rin’in.” The Art Bulletin Vol. LXXXIII (March 2001): 72-104. Review: Joseph Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336-1573) Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Journal of Asian Studies 58/4 (Nov. 1999): 1150-1153. |
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