Dissolution

David Levine

Andrew Roth, PPP Editions, and the Broadside Club present David Levine’s Dissolution, a new signed, limited-edition publication that accompanies Levine's volumetric film of the same name (shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2022 and at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in 2023). Dissolution features a narrator who seems to have been forcibly removed from a glamorous, hedonistic life and trapped—as pure dematerialized consciousness—inside a strange and somewhat sinister digital realm. Dissolution is projected on a holographic display, viewable in the round, as an endlessly looping twenty-minute film whose acerbic narrator, Vox, mulls over questions of cultural value, political efficacy, and the utility of art in our technologically mediated era. Vox's soliloquy hopscotches from fantasias of violent encounters in a contemporary art museum to a description of the Classical sculpture Laocoön and His Sons to a vivid image of an octopus mining cryptocurrency through its tentacles. Provocative and withering by turns, the script of Vox's monologue is reprinted in full in the broadside, accompanied by documentation stills of Dissolution's three-dimensional projection.

Dissolution is the fourth publication in an ongoing series of broadsides. It follows Alissa Bennett's John and Judy (2022), Levine’s Some of the People, All of the Time (2019), and Leigh Ledare’s Between a punk and Picasso 2019/1998 (2019). The Broadside Club takes its inspiration and exact format from INSTEAD, an artist-produced broadside series from the late 1940s.

PPP Editions, 2023

Limited edition of 75 copies plus 25 APs, signed and numbered.

Vertical oblong folio, 13-1/2 x 5-1/4 inches (folded), 27 x 20 inches (unfolded); printed digitally on an Indigo press, recto and verso; housed in an illustrated, stiff-envelope with wafer and string closure.