Newcity reviews Grunwald's "Intimate Alchemy: Levinthal XXX Polaroids"

The Wolves At Your Door: A Review of “Intimate Alchemy: David Levinthal’s XXX Polaroids” at Grunwald Gallery of Art

I thought about beginning this piece with musings on Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” (2023). Gerwig’s movie is both about dolls and fantasy: the loaded gun, the birth, and the death of getting exactly what you want. These things seem to be in lockstep with photographer David Levinthal’s “XXX” and “Netsuke” series, selections of each of which are now on display in the show “Intimate Alchemy” through the Kinsey Institute at the Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University in Bloomington. However, “Barbie” wears a big-budget plasticine sneer I can’t ignore. The film presents fantasy, what you want, what you long for, what might just scare you, as something simple, something easily obtained and checked off in a capitalist system of to-do lists and completed tasks.

This is a lie.

The premise that fantasy can become a concrete thing like a vagina or a “Dreamhouse”—which once obtained, you never have to think about again—is, simply put, bogus. Getting what you want always contains the seeds of terror, because of what happens next. What happens after the much-wanted thing is obtained? Who are you now?

Instead, I want to talk about wolves.

In Freud’s “Wolf Man” case file, his patient Sergei Pankejeff describes a childhood nightmare. The dream began when Pankejeff was around three, four years old. He dreamt it was night and his bedroom window opened. Upon the boughs of a walnut tree outside the window there perched around six or seven white wolves. Pankejeff recounts feeling a sense of intense anxiety that the wolves would eat him. He screams and wakes up. Under Freud’s analysis, Pankejeff recalls an early memory with his father that Freud goes on to connect to the dream. Around the same time of Pankejeff’s dream, he and his father played a game in which his father teased “I’m going to eat you up.” Now couple this with the knowledge that though Pankejeff would later go on to excel in various artistic endeavors, his childhood was not a happy one; he was riddled with anxiety and possibly exposed to sexual situations in the home much too early. From here Freud comes to a conclusion that the dream presents a repressed memory, the primal scene. The primal scene is the child’s first encounter with sex, usually witnessed between parents, but it’s also the act of witnessing the violence, the pawings, the wantings of sex for the first time; it’s seeing, really seeing, those things that scare you, that you don’t understand, but one day will knock upon your door.

Pankejeff dismissed Freud’s conclusion, as did many others at the time. It doesn’t matter here if you or I think Freud is wrong or right about Pankejeff’s dream. Rather, know this: your first encounter with, or knowledge of, sex creates a rupture. From this rupture springs a menagerie of desires, fears, longings and loathings. This is fantasy, a many-headed hydra. You might want what you hate, what you fear, or what you never had; it’s that feeling that lives with you, within you, that waits by your door. Don’t you too want to be eaten right up?

My what big teeth you have
The better to eat you with my dear

For decades David Levinthal has used miniatures, along with intricate sets and other props, as the raw material of his photographs in order to explore American history and the collective psyche. In Levinthal’s artist talk at the Kinsey Institute earlier in the month, he recounted how the “Netsuke” and “XXX” series both came to be.

A while back Levinthal was working for a jewelry company on a campaign about the idea of fantasy. He went to many miniature trade shows to search for inspiration. At the shows he noticed that there was always an “adult” section with sexually explicit material: figurines in nude or sexually charged poses. In these sections, a popular item for purchase is an unpainted model kit. In a kit, a figurine that’s essentially the “skin” of a nude, usually female, figure can be painted or made up to the purchaser’s specifications. Levinthal began to obtain these kits, which he then brought to various craftspeople to paint and complete. Yet he noticed that when the dolls were returned to him, none looked the same. Some were blondes, brunettes, redheads; some were fair-skinned, some had deeper complexions; some had pubic hair, some were waxed; some were trussed in bondage gear, some were holding flowers in sticky, hyper-feminine lingerie.

Something was happening in the production and proliferation of fantasy; and this fantasy was being held within the bodies of these figurines.

Levinthal has been in conversation with the erotic for decades. His 1980s series “Modern Romance” explores the darker sides of American sexuality through the tropes of film noir: the femme fatale, the broken man; the loneliness of diners and dives, gutters and alleys. Yet, in “XXX” and “Netsuke,” viewers can see how these desires may look different for different people. Though the three x’s of “XXX” are cultural shorthand for sexual, usually hardcore, content, the word netsuke refers to the carved toggles used to fasten bags and cases worn upon the kimono in traditional Japanese dress. Though netsuke soon became more commonly known as intricate miniature sculptures, it is these beginnings as the latches and lids for private, intimate things, that I believe to be the spiritual groundings for Levinthal’s work.

The two series are intimately connected as the twenty-six prints shown in “Intimate Alchemy” from “XXX” are stylized images of the dolls also on display. We can also consider these figurines “netsuke” themselves and I believe Levinthal wants us to make this leap in logic for there are also forty-eight images from the “Netsuke” series that portray closeups of traditional erotic and/or nude figurines. We can think of this history as an “intimate inheritance,” for what is it that these figurines mean, what do they continue to represent? What do they continue to hold, what do we want from them?

Take the doll the Kinsey Institute staff members have affectionately crowned “Big Red,” the name of which is a play on the doll’s luxurious red mane. Red is positioned nude in a classic Raquel Welch fur-bikini, woman-under-waterfall, Barbarella power stance pose in thigh-high leather boots. Behind her there are several Polaroids: one is a closeup on a doll’s torso clad in a delicate space-age-inspired bikini garter combo and another shows a dark-haired doll with her face thrust just out of frame. These images are also of Red. She’s different, but still the same.

This, I’ll call it, uncanny relation lies at the heart of the partnership between the two series. Levinthal’s photography and figurines both play off of and obscure the other. The gallery becomes a hall of mirrors, a magician’s trick. You think something has been revealed, but sleight of hand reveals something entirely unexpected: the body of a woman, one presumed to be sexually available, is revealed to be something frozen, something frigid, something fake. That woman you conjured, she doesn’t exist. Here then in her place is a tiny, perfect facsimile; a figure so perfect it makes you wonder “but what if she does exist?”

True fantasy is terrifying, it is an unabashed look into everything that could and could never happen to you; it’s what you want, what you fear, what you see when Pandora’s box flutters open. Levinthal’s “Netsuke” aren’t just figurines, they’re monkey’s paws and hands of glory. They open you up to things you don’t always want to confront, they’re the wishes you are unsure you want fulfilled. Yet isn’t there always something, an itch, a percolating heat, a magma roar of wildness that compels you to turn the knob and open your door? Perhaps there you’ll find not a wolf looking back but the glassy-eyed otherworld hidden within Levinthal’s “Intimate Alchemy,” those secret things that both scare and entrance you.

“Intimate Alchemy: David Levinthal’s XXX Polaroids” is on view at Grunwald Gallery, 1201 East 7th Street, Bloomington, Indiana, through November 16.