March 15 to May 27 2016
45 East 78th Street (between Madison and Park avenues)
New York, 212 861 0020

The fiction of the facts assumes innocence, ignorance, lack of intention, misdirection; the necessary conditions of a certain time and place.

Have you seen their faces?

–Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (2014)

“Prankster” is a word that comes up repeatedly in discussions of artist David Hammons and his work. Much has been made of his evasiveness, of the fact that he has spent his career flouting the art world’s propriety: his continual refusal to settle on a dealer; the propensity to make himself unavailable to curators even in the midst of show preparations; to stage exhibitions, performances, and installations with no prior announcement. Then there are the works themselves, from alluring abstract canvases you will never really see, as they’ve been shrouded with trashed vinyl tarps, to sculptures that cull beauty from empty bottles of $1.99 wine. But to seize and insist upon the perceived jokey qualities of Hammons’s art and persona resists the deeper significance of his output over the past 50 years. “David Hammons: Five Decades,” currently on view at Mnuchin Gallery, offers a corrective to this narrative. Comprised of 35 works spanning from the late 1960s to the present, it’s a crystalline show that helps to elucidate the long view of an artist who has made a career of otherwise obfuscating it.

This is the third show of Hammons’s work presented by Mnuchin (formerly L&M Arts), and though much care has been taken to note that the gallery does not strictly represent the artist, it seems clear that Hammons finds satisfaction in the contrast of having his work — frequently made from lowbrow or dilapidated materials — showcased in the refined and august premises of the Upper East Side townhouse. It also eschews the sterility of the White Cube, of which Hammons has in the past proclaimed his disdain. Notably, just prior to this exhibition’s opening, Hammons arrived unexpectedly at Mnuchin and upended the nearly complete installation: rearranging, removing several works, and adding new ones. The entirety of this show at Mnuchin, as organized by Hammons, becomes its own distinct work of art, a complete whole made from its heterogenous parts.

Shrouds abound in the exhibition. Two large paintings, both untitled (2008–14 and 2015, respectively) are almost entirely obscured by ragged tarps that dangle across their faces. With two large sculptural works, also both untitled (2013 and 2014, respectively), Hammons has concealed ornate, gilded floor-to-ceiling wall mirrors, one with a black cloth and one with large sheets of galvanized steel. Aside from the more apparent association of this shrouding as a manifestation of Hammons’s own mystique, it also brings to mind the Jewish tradition of covering the mirrors in a house after the death of a beloved. One wonders whether these works, all made within the last few years, are indicative of an artist reflecting on his legacy in his elder years.

With the inclusion of the diminutive but potent In the Hood (1993), a shroud of another sort takes on a more politically foreboding tone. The work consists simply of the hood of a sweatshirt severed from the shirt itself, and hung on one wall. The dark void at the center of the hood, where a head should be, conjures the familiar image of the Grim Reaper, and when considering its high placement on the wall one can’t help but be reminded of the deplorable chronicle which pollutes American history — that of the scores of African-Americans lynched at the hands of whites through the decades. And at nearly a quarter-century old, In the Hood seems remarkably prescient as an object, anticipating the outsize symbolism of racial inequity in American culture that the “hoodie” has taken on — especially acute in recent years.

So loaded has that article of clothing become that poet Claudia Rankine selected In the Hood as the cover image of her award-winning 2014 book of prose poetry, Citizen: An American Lyric, which reflects on black life and systemic injustice in the United States and whose pages are peppered with reproductions of artworks by prominent black artists. It also includes a passage dedicated to the memory of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed teenager shot and killed by George Zimmerman in 2012. Zimmerman claimed Martin was suspicious in part because of the dark hoodie he wore as he walked down the street of a private community. The point is underscored by several black-and-white prints from the late 1960s and early 1970s Hammons has hung in the same gallery, whereby the artist pressed his own body to the page and then added charged imagery like the American flag, or the spades of a playing card.

Robert Storr says of Hammons, in an essay included in the exhibition’s catalogue, “From the very start it is plain that he has set his higher goals as high as they come. Specifically that has meant escaping the sorry fate of ghettoization while slipping the noose of becoming a token ‘black’ artist in a predominantly ‘white’ art world.” Considering Hammons’s work solely through the lens of race runs the risk of reducing his conceptual athleticism to a single note. As an object, In the Hood is a descendant of Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), down to the conscious, unexpected placement of the work. The viewer garners a solid sense of the roots Hammons shares with artists like Piero Manzoni or Joseph Kosuth, who were thumbing their noses at artistic conventions in the early 1960s. By being able to see the long trajectory of Hammons’s output gathered together in this mini-retrospective, we can also understand how the disparate parts align.

In the last gallery, a taxidermied cat curls up on a wooden drum stool. Called Standing Room Only (1996), it has been placed in the corner, the cat’s sleeping face pointed towards the window instead of towards the center of the room. A creature known for its cunning and detachment, the cat might be Hammons’s spirit animal. Aloof and mysterious, with his back to the world, we revere the cat for what he is able to pull off — living freely, and purely on his own terms.

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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.

The post On Kawara: January 2, 1933 – June 27, 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

March 30 – April 30, 2011
528 West 29th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 239-1181

In his essay Art After Philosophy, Part One (1969), Joseph Kosuth argued that when art is reduced to ideas, the function of art displaces the necessity of making a conventional art object, and therefore the context in which the idea is placed becomes all-important.  For much of the work designated as “conceptual art” over the years, this has become standard practice.  For Kosuth (among others), who valued the earlier ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, the context of the idea was ultimately more important than its material form.  At the outset of his career in the late 1960s, when still in his twenties, Kosuth fabricated neon word installations, leaning plates of glass, and dictionary definitions printed as negative Photostats as a means to emphasize ideas. The transmission of these ideas is largely dependent on language — as revealed in a recent exhibition at Sean Kelly — and relies heavily on the manner in which language is appropriated and integrated into work.  Ironically, the quality of design and craft — often discounted in conceptual art — in Kosuth’s work appears aesthetically seamless as shown in a recent installation of texts by Samuel Beckett, and in another earlier series of time-based phrases taken from James Joyce’s Ulysses (1998).  In both works, neon light effectively transmits the language embedded within each installation.  Also included in the exhibition were a series of the artist’s iconic dictionary definitions, titled Nothing (1968), which hung in a conventional side-by-side display directly on the wall.  Whereas the original Los Angeles exhibition used inexpensive Photostats of the various definitions of the word “nothing,” the work was later refabricated on canvas to ensure preservation.  And, as it was later discovered, a motivating factor for doing this work related to his reading of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, which was published by Grove Press in English in 1967.

While, in recent years, some of Kosuth’s installations have tended toward repetition through systematic overdetermination, occasionally something exceptional will appear on the Heideggerian horizon that reaches beyond the predictable. The current work, titled “Texts (Waiting for–) for Nothing,” Samuel Becket in play, is one of these occasions.  In this unusually reflective conceptual opus, the artist has formulated a strategic core that pulls together relevant aspects from two earlier works.  Typically dense in its literary, philosophical, and semiotic references, Kosuth’s tripartite installation manages to make all the elements appear as simple as pie (or as dense as pi).  In his dialectically reductive black and white installation — a quality willfully apparent from the beginning — Kosuth reaches a kind of apotheosis in this homage to Beckett.  This suggests a subtle turnabout in artist’s thinking.  Traditionally adverse to hermeneutic or metaphysical concerns in art, it would appear that he has extended his purely linguistic connection ascribed to his modus operandi of the 1980s into a poignantly dark and light theatrical presentation.

Here Kosuth appropriates texts from two early works by Samuel Beckett, titled Texts for Nothing (1950-52) and Waiting for Godot (1948-49).  The first is a group of abstract narratives or ruminations, while the second is a well-known play first performed in Paris, 1953.  In combining the two works by Beckett, Kosuth offered a trace of potential meaning – a  quality often exempt or eliminated in his work.  Given the slow, steady, dramatic incantation of the words traveling laterally across the upper reaches of the four walls close to the ceiling — using a technology known as “cancelled warm neon light”—I found the work illuminating from a phenomenological point of view as it moved to the core of  “meaning” in Beckett’s work without jargon.  The intensity of this kinetic operation was further augmented by a small black and white framed reproduction of a painting by German Romantic painter, Casper David Friedrich, in which two figures are poised by a tree, thus echoing an affinity with the original stage set designed by Sergio Gerstein in Paris. As Beckett’s word fragments merged – appearing and then slowly dissolving into the dark void – I felt the sensation of entering a simulation of descending twilight along with Beckett’s two main characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who – in the play – speak to one another using a hesitant metaphysical phraseology while stranded in a barren landscape.  (I once performed the cameo role of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, while a student in Boston, during my rather short-lived theatrical career.)

However, the metaphysical words of the Beckettian characters perpetually end without any perceptible resolution, that is to say, they perpetually end in/with nothing.  Somehow this nothingness is emotionally moving in the context of Kosuth’s opus – and not merely because it happens to coincide with the concluding proposition in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, for which the artist was formatively aligned.  Nevertheless, the intersection between Beckett and Wittgenstein — not to mention the obsession with relativist time in James Joyce, for whom Beckett served as a personal secretary during his apprenticeship years – intuits on some level the commitment of Kosuth in maintaining his focus on the foregrounding language in art. While he may ignore the potential significance of a critical contextualization coming from the outside as he continues to function within the context of language, he remains at his best when he allows “nothing” to stand in the way. This work is amazing without reprieve, a masterwork that carries the original intent of how conceptual art functions at its best and therefore achieves validity. It is the intersection between art and language, a topic that engaged me over thirty years ago as a doctoral student, nearly as much as it does today – particularly when confronted with works of this caliber.

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