ABSTRACT

In expert and dashing form, James Bond spins into a karate-chopping act of masterful elimination of his always under-prepared, yet seemingly deadly opponent. In her installation Thin Air, held at the Koffler Gallery, 2008, artist Nina Levitt presents the everyday and the heroic, a display of the vestiges of many silent and invisible itineraries fought in the shadows by women spies during World War II. Women spies are virtually non-existent. Women, instead, are portrayed as merely ornamental, and the subject of Bond's endless and insatiable pursuit of recreation while on a mission. Nina Levitt's work overall targets this mythology in an effort to uncover some of these secrets by exposing what is never revealed in popular spy novels and movies: the archival documentation that could possibly tell stories publicly and get at the covertness of the tales. Levitt's spies are women whose mission it was to accomplish operations equally daring and heroic as those undertaken by their male counterparts.