Dia: Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, NY, 845 440 0100

“Isn’t she so kind and warm?” Dia’s PR staff swooned as they took turns leaning into me. I watched the artist and host Isabel Lewis float past her guests while circling her wrists into widening arcs. “Hi, welcome.” Lewis cooed as she spun around and drifted through the clusters of curious people sipping their Summer Ale, lovingly provided by Brooklyn Brewery. I myself held an eco-friendly carton of water, which I had plucked out from one of the ice buckets scattered around the back of the immense space.

I was at Dia: Chelsea’s garage party loft, like one of those factory-turned-nightclubs in Williamsburg where you are a minority if you don’t have a tattoo. The music, interior, and vibes felt hip, too. Chic white couches were scattered throughout the space where exotic plants (Spanish moss and air plants) hung from the ceiling or sat on top of the furniture. Some visitors clutched their beers around the round tables with wiry legs. Mysterious speaker-like boxes emitted a faint scent concocted by the artist’s collaborator Sissel Tolaas, a Norwegian chemist and olfactory researcher. The bass-heavy music (composed by Lewis herself) began as quiet pulses and escalated into mobilizing booms. A few couples got up from the long white couches to step to increasingly dance-friendly beats. I declined to take from a plate of vegan hors d’oeuvres; pickled vegetables, said one of the PR staff flanking me. The air felt sultry after the rainstorm had passed — the lingering humidity fit the environment created by the artist.

Berlin-based artist Isabel Lewis comes from a background in choreography and literary criticism. While she lived in New York City from 2004 to 2009, she presented her dance works at major hot spots such as Dance Theater Workshop, the Kitchen, and New Museum. She has created and presented site-specific “occasions,” such as this one commissioned by Dia, to choreograph not just the movements of people’s bodies, but also their olfactory, visual, auditory, and gustatory experiences.

At first I was skeptical. Wasn’t this just another party with some pretentious art people? The hostess and DJ happened to be an artist, but this Friday night “occurrence” didn’t seem so different from other exhibition openings, aside from the original music and some interrupting philosophical lectures. Surely this work is a reference to the happenings of the 1950s and ‘60s. But Allan Kaprow did weird things like throw tires; nothing seemed weird in Lewis’s occurrence at all.

Shortsighted judgment. Nothing weird is precisely the point of Lewis’s work. The artist had created a modern-day happening in a way that addressed our contemporary climate and needs. In the late 1950s and ‘60s, throwing hundreds of tires into a room made sense because it radically merged mundane everyday life with so-called elevated art. On the other hand, strange acts now do not merge the everyday and “high” art, but rather create a greater disparity between real life and the mysterious luxury called art. This is now truer than ever with the post-1980s art market and celebrity culture surrounding a select number of big-shot artists. Art is an inaccessible luxury of the 1% who can afford to visit a gallery or museum during work hours. Art is an inaccessible language spoken and understood by a select few — the more cryptic and exclusive that language, the better and truer the art it refers to.

Lewis brings art back to the rest of us. She understands the function and purpose of art to be a connector — among ourselves and between us and the cosmos. I agree. Art was once a practical necessity for survival. Art not only helped the people of the pre-writing age pass down wisdom, but also brought a community together through collective sensory experience.

During one of her lecture interruptions on the Friday night occasion, Lewis spoke of “erotic sociability,” a concept articulated by scholar Roslyn W. Bologh in Love or Greatness (1990). To the artist, erotic sociability can guide us back to where art should take us, but often no longer does. She invites the rest of us — the ones with full-time jobs to support ourselves and our families — to unwind after another day when we had to sacrifice true connection in the name of practical survival. She invites the rest of us to follow her on a short escape from the city to a languid waterside upstate, where we are allowed quiet contemplation and a return to the larger universe where we all belong.

The artist prepared an aperitif for our one-and-a-half-hour trip to Beacon. On the way to the occasion, Lewis primed us with a streamable mixtape with tracks that correspond with each stop, beginning at Grand Central Terminal. The mixtape is meant to be a companion to her occasions, and was a collaboration between the artist, Dia, and the MTA. The tracks begin with voices and familiar sounds of the city but slowly ease into a gentle rhythmic beat that continues at the site up north. At Scenic Hudson’s Long Dock Park in Beacon, the host didn’t work the room like on Friday, but stepped back after providing the tools for each of us to fulfill our private but neglected tasks of connecting to the cosmos, the natural world.

Lewis, leading us from the city to upstate, brings us back to where we must return, a place to meditate and to connect back to each other and the world. In the midst of human priorities, we often forget the importance of true connection to each other and to the natural world, so much that we become blind to the destruction that our oblivion and negligence has caused to ourselves. In a contemporary society in which screens and devices increasingly distance us from each other, feigned connections destroy genuine empathy and lead to destructive hatred. Lewis — as host, as choreographer — directed us to that place where she waited with music that beat to the splash of waves. She directed us to a place where 15 dancers came and went, swaying with their eyes closed as though they were intoxicated from the salty air and regular beat under the sound of water.

Lewis’s background as a choreographer is clear in her latest work at Dia: her aim is to direct people’s movements into a carefully drafted trajectory. And she succeeds. She does for us what we need from art. We often forget one of art’s most important functions, which is to unite us through a collective sensory experience. She provides us this platform, not through years of expensive art education or through knowing all the right people, but through something all of us do — eat, drink, dance, talk, and play — at a time when most of us can be there to do it together. Lewis gives us what is usually a luxury for the few who can afford not to work during gallery or museum hours: art that the rest of us can partake in too.

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Comedian Louis CK points out, with his characteristic ethical generosity and pragmatism, “A lot of people wonder what happens after you die. Lots of things happen after you die — just none of them include you.” The recent death of On Kawara ends the brief but significant line of a life and of an exceptionally powerful artistic contribution. Human life is a rarer accomplishment than most of us, living day-to-day, sometimes remember. Most of the world is uninhabitable. Probably far greater than 99% of the entire Universe is completely inhospitable to life. Figuring out how to organize the mind and the body into some kind of harmonious, eudaimonic state is an ongoing struggle. Just getting up each day can feel like a victory. And, after any life extends for its short span, it ends. Thereafter everything else continues in its absence. That someone lives and is known at all, is momentous.

Kawara was 81 years old. Born in Japan in the midst of the 20th Century’s great upheavals, he moved to New York in 1965 where he remained until his death last month. Early in his career he showed figurative paintings, but moved toward conceptual art by the early 1960s. He exhibited his work regularly at Paula Cooper in New York, Yvon Lambert in Paris, and other galleries from the late 1960s onward and was included in one of the first large surveys of conceptual art, “Information,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. There’s a permanent installation of his work at Dia:Beacon and a large retrospective to be exhibited at the Guggenheim early next year. His New York gallery, David Zwirner, announced his death on Thursday.

Kawara had a group of friends and colleagues, but he was known for being retiring. He emerged alongside conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth, a close friend. Kawara shared their interest in language and its ability to frame or shape human perception, to describe and to conceal. Only bits and pieces of his life are available, recounted by those who knew him and as documented in works such as his postcards and telegrams. It is likely that he was influenced by American and Japanese fluxus artists who helped develop and formalize (if that’s the right word) mail art in the 1950s and ‘60s. Correspondence evinces his familiarity with John Baldessari, John Evans, Sol LeWitt, Michael Sesteer, numerous curators and dealers in Minimalist and conceptual art of his era, and collectors. But such connections connote only a very hazy portrait of Kawara.

In his best-known series, Today, he documented every day of his life from January 4, 1966 (two days after his 33^rd birthday) until, perhaps, very recently. This project highlights the impossibility of notating one’s life adequately. Even as recording technology has improved and expanded the personal and professional archives of those living in the developed world, when a person dies that’s essentially it. Kawara never published any statements about his work, didn’t grant interviews, never gave speeches, never sat on public panel discussions, wasn’t photographed. And yet with the Today series he recorded his existence by making one painting for every day, consisting solely of a complete date, rendered in white on a monochromatic background. It’s a simple act that gets straight to the heart of a lot of complicated stuff about our existence, experience and finitude. The sum of his archive is paltry in comparison to any person’s life, to Kawara’s life indeed, with a minimum of context provided for each date: a newspaper clipping stored with the painting and a record in a diaristic calendar. But it’s a rich testimony. It was as fleetingly temporal as anything, though it remains.

A parallel to the Today series, Kawara’s One Million Years (1969) is comprised of a 20-volume book that lists the million years that preceded the work’s inception, as well as the million years that are in the process of succeeding 1996 A.D. The subtitle for the first set of volumes reads “For all those who have lived and died.” This is a small addition to the annals of billions of people, long lines of humanity stretching over horizons of space and time, the known and the unknown. And barely overlapping those two dates lays an infinitesimally small span of time — the life of Kawara himself. It was carefully cordoned off and diligently recorded, until it’s not there anymore.

In another series, Kawara sent telegrams to friends and acquaintances, simply proclaiming, “I AM STILL ALIVE.” That affirmation, in the face of the difficulty of being a person, both ontologically and just physically, is deeply affecting. They are messages filled with love and tenderness, a recognition that something mundane and approaching the miraculous has happened, again. Finitude, and our resistance to it at each moment, is something that Kawara noted with exceptional concision and dignity. That is now finished. His death marks both the succinctness of his work, and serves as its ultimate frame. It was the only trajectory the work could have ever taken, but that doesn’t make its sting any less acute. He was alive. That’s important. The world preceded him and time continues. We (other people) continue — an equally valuable recognition. But he will be missed.

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Agnes Martin: An Homage to Life
April 19 – June 30th, 2004
PaceWildenstein
32 East 57th Street
New York

Agnes Martin arrived at her signature style in the 1970s, when she was nearly 60. Within the narrow parameters she set for herself, a square format (72 inches x 72 inches until 1995, when she changed to 60 inches x 60 inches), thin washes of color, and straight graphite lines, the paintings were endlessly varied and beautiful. Reams of serious criticism have been written about them; her monastic lifestyle fascinates interviewers. Martin is now 92. Two concurrent exhibitions bracket some 30 years of her production with rarely seen paintings that preceded it, up at Dia:Beacon, and Martin’s most recent work at PaceWildenstein uptown.

“….going forward into unknown territory…Agnes Martin’s Early Paintings 1957 – 1967” at Dia:Beacon features an exploratory phase during the decade she lived in New York. Three linked galleries were specially constructed to display the 21 paintings on view in roughly three stages of chronological time and formal development. Martin moved to New York from the southwest in 1957 to join Betty Parson’s abstract expressionist gallery at Parson’s invitation. She settled into a loft on Coenties Slip near the Brooklyn Bridge in downtown Manhattan. Many paintings did not survive the artist’s severe editing, so what still exists is what passed muster, or was out of her reach. The latest painting in the show is dated 1965. Martin left New York in 1967, eventually relocating in New Mexico where she lives today.

The seven works from 1957 – 1959 in the first gallery straddle late abstract expressionism and color field painting. Drained of saturated hues, they’re like lunar reflections of these late modernist modes. “The Spring,” dating from 1958 and measuring 50 inches x 50 inches, salutes the planes and horizontal bands of Mark Rothko in shades of gray and white. Perhaps in an effort to find a color language without referring to modernist color, Martin established at this time a reductive palette of black and neutral tones in gray, yellow, and white oil paint brushed on thinly or applied with a knife. Aspects of Martin’s mature style were emerging in other ways. Her preference for the square format had come into place, from small sizes at 25 inches x 25 inches up to 65 inches x 65 inches, about the size she would eventually use consistently. Geometrical motifs, circles, triangles, and rectangular forms echo the Native American culture she had absorbed while teaching in the southwest. These motifs adapted well to the influence of Martin’s mentor at Betty Parsons Gallery, Barnett Newman. “Untitled,” from 1957, is a composition with a central white strip separating two equal black diamond shapes. Tonal modulation is evident in Martin’s underpainting and scumble, techniques she later discarded for acrylic washes. In “Window,” (1957), a pale ground surrounds four rectangles, two in gray set above two in pale yellow , as if to compress sky and earth into four congruent parcels of pigment.

In the second gallery, seven more paintings from 1959 to 1960 accentuate geometric form and introduce pencil line. The artistic milieu where Martin moved was keenly interested in eastern philosophy. Ancient Taoist writings of Lao Tse and Chuang Tzu inspired her with the lasting idea that inspiration comes from within. “Earth” (1959, 49 3/4 inches x 49 3/4 inches) has bands at the high and low extremities of the picture plane while a deep and uniform umber holds several rows of black dots. Delicate white pencil rims distinguish them upon close view. In “Untitled,” (1960) the vertical, bilateral symmetry Newman often used is rotated into a horizontal composition where the energy and speed of the vertical translate to an analog for planetary rotational movement, perhaps another allusion to southwestern landscape, Native American thought and culture. The pale circles at top and bottom could be a meditational motif from Tantric art.

“Untitled” (1959) uses the most pared down of painterly means to delineate simple forms. Here, twin white rectangles sit in tension within a dimmer field of white. Two smallish vertical paintings from 1959 are more like cuneiform tablets than picture planes. Their unusually thick surfaces in a creamy bone color are incised with graphite lines trailing through wet oil paint. One canvas is divided into a wide spaced grid that is regular yet handmade, while the other is segmented by horizontal lines interspersed with triangular outlines.

The third gallery contains the first grid paintings, dating from 1961 to 1965. Underpainting appears for the last time in “Night Sea,” from 1963, wherein gold leaf line peeks up between regular brush strokes in two shades of blue. “Flower in the Wind,” also from 1963, has a rose-tinted field with lots of vertical graphite lines activating the surface. “The Islands” (fig 4) is painted only with touches of white inside a graphite grid that leaves a border of plain canvas all around it. The natural color of flax threads pulled taut in the canvas weave plays its own part in the painting’s structure, surface, texture, and tone. Two gorgeous blue wash paintings with graphite lines from 1964 look similar except for an important switch: “The Peach” was done in oil, but “The Beach” initiates Martin’s use of acrylic paint.

Martin’s engagement with the grid, a motif that came to figure prominently in the art of the 1960s and 1970s was, for her, a “classical” ideal more in line with Chinese, Greek, Coptic, and Egyptian art than the Minimalist aesthetic emerging at the time. Curator Lynne Cooke’s excellent essay for “…going forward into unknown territory…” provides an insightful mix of historical background and visual analysis to ground the exhibition in its present context. She draws on previous critical writings on the artist’s work and includes a selected bibliography so one can always seek out other sources. Cooke is careful to point out that Martin did not think of herself as a Minimalist, but as a participant in late abstract expressionism. Martin entered the dialogue in her mid forties in 1957, rather late in the game for ab-ex, but she feels that that was her generation – no matter what anyone else thinks.

Critical tides shift, and as time goes on Martin’s work looks transitional in significant ways. It’s very interesting to see these early paintings exactly where they are right now at Dia:Beacon’s ground floor permanent galleries, around the corner from work of the 1960s and 70s that was attuned to the viewer in very specific ways. Martin’s graphite lines are echoed in Fred Sandback’s taut yarn sculptures tethered to wall, floor, and ceiling boundaries. As graphic surface, a Martin grid painting compares to Sol le Witt’s drawing installations, without their rational mathematical permutations. For both Heizer and Martin, the landscape of the American southwest held the inspiration of sublime infinities of light, space, and time. Martin’s paintings concentrate the viewer’s attention on proportion, linear exactitude, and laborious patience as surely as Michael Heizer’s plummeting, steel lined cavities set in the gallery floor impel a visitor to keep alert. By leaving Coenties Slip at the threshold of fame to settle back in New Mexico, she was painting in the lap of Earthworks territory.

In hindsight, the phenomenological aspect of art in this era mirrors the dilemma of real figures in the landscape who had to contend with the Vietnam War, FBI surveillance of private citizens protesting for civil rights, the Weather Underground’s bombs in American cities, political opacity. Perhaps the exponential growth in the scale and ambition of art had something to do with NASA and the exploration of outer space. Thought itself was getting bigger. These days, as natural light spreads through Dia:Beacon’s long exterior skylights during the approach of summer solstice, the works seem to accentuate human sensation, nature, and geometry as they might interact with unbounded landscapes. Martin’s sensibility is congruent with this sense of astronomical scale and distance.

Return now to earth, and from Dia:Beacon to PaceWildenstein where Martin’s most recent work is on view . In “An Homage to Life,” Martin recapitulates some of her least known past motifs and imbues them with fresh ideas. The 1957 motif of a double black diamond around a central axis rotates 90 degrees into side by side twin black triangles lit up with bright yellow green tips. Unusually dark graphite lines tether the pair against an energetically brushed gray wash ground. If this ancient masonic iconography looks familiar, look at the back of an American dollar bill, and on the left you will see an eye levitating over the top of an Egyptian pyramid. Martin has given away much of the money her paintings have earned over the years to a charity for abused adolescents.
Other paintings in this new series place strong, thickly painted black geometric figures

within wash grounds. In one, double black squares which at first glance look regular and symmetrical but are not hover in a a reddish orange wash. In another, a single obdurate and thickly painted trapezoid rests on a gray wash, again applied with energetic strokes. This same thick black paint is used to make one of Martin’s signature grids in reverse; lines created by the absence of black paint are so fine that they seem to bare a single thread of the canvas weave. Elsewhere, the familiar pale washes in blue, yellow, gray, with graphite line, return in unpredictable new combinations. Martin has often said that she paints what she sees in her mind. We may be sure that these departures from her best known work and recapitulations of her earliest themes are true to her classical ideal of innocence, happiness, and love.

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