Walter Liedtke, the Curator of Dutch and Flemish Painting at the Metropolitan Museum who was responsible for highly significant exhibitions and scholarship within his field, was killed in yesterday’s Metro-North train crash in Valhalla, New York. I had the honor of meeting Walter several times, at press views of exhibitions at the Met, for instance, and when he lectured at the New York Studio School. He was the quintessence of a gentleman, an impeccably dapper man, and no less warm and generous for it with his time and with his enthusiasm. And he was all one would want from a museum curator, an impassioned scholar, a natural communicator, a responsible but also courageous thinker in his field. Employed at the Met for over 30 years, he was responsible for several ground-breaking shows, including The Age of Rembrandt, reviewed in these pages in 2007 by Drew Lowenstein.

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I first met Claude Simard in 1989, a year before I joined the gallery, when it was on the second floor of 560 Broadway. He was a strapping, beautiful and exotic looking man, like some sort of First Nations prince. Over the 24+ years I have known Claude, three qualities have come to identify him most profoundly in my mind: connoisseurship, generosity and passion.

About his connoisseurship. Claude had an extraordinary eye that was supported by a deep intellect, an extremely wide base of knowledge and catholic tastes. He travelled often and far, seeking out art and artifacts for the gallery and for himself, as he was voracious collector of everything from antique Indian jewelry and African mud-cloths, to modern and contemporary art. He and Jack shared a deep love for the formal qualities in a work of art that make it above all, a thing of beauty to behold. As a fine artist, his own work was highly intellectual and conceptually based, but always formally rigorous, exquisitely crafted and beautiful to look at. His eye helped trail-blaze the gallery program, which over the years grew and expanded to reflect a deep appreciation for cultures beyond the Western contemporary cannon, and a preternatural instinct for risks worth taking.

As a person, Claude was exceptionally generous — generous with his time, with his support and with his honesty. Studio visits with him could sometimes be brutal. He was a man of little words, but when he spoke, you knew exactly what he liked and didn’t like. If he knew you were developing a new idea or direction in your work, he would send you a book or give you a piece of art from one of his travels that he thought would inspire you. Some years ago when the Gallery had several artists represented in the Venice Biennale, Claude said to me, “Come with us. You should be part of the ‘international blah blah’.” This cracked me up of course, because it expressed with good humor and clarity his attitude about the contemporary art scene. He knew it was important to be an artist with international reach, but he also understood much of the blah blah that inevitably came with it. I remember being reticent about all the socializing I’d have to do if I went with them, and then being both irritated and greatly relieved when he and Jack went to absolutely no parties. Not out of disdain, but because they worked so hard engaging during the day that all they wanted to do at night was have a good meal and go to bed. On further reflection, this seemed to me an eminently reasonable plan of action.

As for passion, the depth of Claude’s passion seemed almost without bounds. Everything he did was ardent. He took tremendous risks, the limits of which exceeded what most others would consider normal. For the Gallery, those risks more often than not paid off extraordinary dividends. For himself, they seemed driven by an insatiable hunger. When Claude decided to get tattooed, he tattooed his body from heel to neck in virtually one fell swoop. It was an extravagant act that turned his very self into a veritable work of art. His voracious collecting had that same level of hunger and aspect of pathos, almost as if he needed to surround himself with objects that could hold the secret to happiness and fulfillment.

One cannot judge for another what constitutes fulfillment. But I think it’s safe to say that Claude lived a life of extraordinary richness and depth, and that he pursued his passions without reserve. Not many of us can claim that accomplishment, and in that sense his life, while cut short, was well lived. I feel lucky to have known him.

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Jane Wilson, who died January 13 aged 90, will be remembered for majestic, multilayered, shimmering paintings of land, sea and sky inspired by the coastal topography and weather of the East End of Long Island.

Her paintings are a testament to a lifelong engagement with the history and substance of painting, with its potential to simultaneously reflect the world and make a universe entirely of its own. Every inch of her canvases is oxygenated and alive, evoking the experience of sensing undercurrents beneath the surface of a still pond. In Time Change (2011), for instance, Wilson’s characteristic low horizon line anchors the canvas, and we can perceive what she described as “looking for the color behind the color.” Suffused with horizontal bands of peach and pink of varying widths and delicate facture, the painting rewards us for attentive looking, revealing a range of overtones of scumbled color that pulsates and recedes. In paintings that “aim for moments of strong sensation,” as she put it, Wilson belongs to a tradition of transcendental American landscape that includes Albert Pinkham Ryder, Martin Johnson Heade, and Joan Mitchell.

Born in 1924 on a family farm in Iowa, Wilson knew the sequences and consolations of a life lived close to the land. “Growing up on a farm…you lived at the bottom of a sea of weather,” she told landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. She attended the University of Iowa just as visiting artists such as Philip Guston were transforming the art department with the energy of the New York art world. In 1948, with an M.A. in painting, she married fellow student John Gruen, the writer and composer, and they moved to New York. Their daughter, Julia, was born 10 years later.

In 1952 Wilson became a founding member of the Hansa Gallery, one of several artist-run art galleries that opened in the early 1950s in New York City. Endowed with a striking, natural beauty that evoked Modigliani, and that endured to the end of her life, she supported herself as an artist by working as a fashion model. When a dealer told her that she wasn’t handling her career properly by modeling, she responded, “Well, tell people about my years in academia.”

Over the next several years she moved away from an early abstract style influenced by Gorky and others. “I found myself in one of those lucid moments that occurs every twenty years and I realized I wasn’t a second generation Abstract Expressionist,” she told writer Mimi Thompson. “I looked at the ingredients of what I was painting and felt an uncontrollable allegiance to subject matter, and to landscape in particular.”

In 1960, when she joined Tibor de Nagy, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her painting The Open Scene. She and John bought an old carriage house with a hayloft in Water Mill, Long Island, where they found themselves at the fulcrum of a community of artists, composers, and writers. The mercurial ocean light and expansive terrain that had drawn such predecessors as Thomas Moran gave Wilson a mutable subject that she would address for the next forty years. The Water Mill house became a Long Island Rue de Fleurus — a spirited gathering place for some the most important artists and intellectuals of the mid-20th century. A white wicker couch on the patio served as the set for Gruen’s group portraits, whose lively subjects remind me of the civic officers in Frans Hals’ banquet portraits — only tanned and happier — in their Lilly Pulitzer print sundresses and Ban-Lon polo shirts, holding cigarettes and iced beverages. John’s photographs document the halcyon days of camaraderie among creative friends, lovers (and rivals) including Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Stella Adler, Fairfield and Anne Porter, Frank O’Hara, Cornelia and Lukas Foss, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Miriam Shapiro, and Paul Brach. For a while the two Janes painted together — facing each other, each doing her own work — in a bedroom in a rented house on Flying Point Road. Also born in 1924, Freilicher died the month prior to Wilson.

I love Wilson’s deceptively simple titles; they are saturated with meaning, and never contain more than they need to. The titles have a sonic/rhythmic pulse as they play with figures of speech. Call it a Day, Electric Midnight, and Torrid Day signal movement, and sum up twenty-four hours of weather or demanding work in a few choice words.

I worked with Jane Wilson at the National Academy where she served as president from 1992-94 (she was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters). In 2011, at her first exhibition at DC Moore’s downtown space (she had joined the gallery in 1999) I asked her how she felt about seeing her paintings in the bright halogen light of a Chelsea venue. Straightening her back at this question she said, “Well, Rebecca, your paintings have to stand up in any light!” Jane was genuinely interested in my own work and we talked about the challenge of painting things that were fleeting — atmosphere, for example. Now, whenever I pass the Pine Barrens on the Long Island Expressway and turn off at Manorville toward the Montauk Highway, it is forever a Jane Wilson sky.

Rebecca Allan is a painter. She will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Fjord/Mountain/River, at the Herron School of Art at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, April 3–29, 2015. She is represented by Patricia McGrath in Bridgehampton.

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In 1973, Candy Darling invited the photographer Peter Hujar to her hospital room at Columbia University Medical Center. She was dying, and she wanted him to take her picture. The resulting photograph, the last taken before her death, appears very still. The velvety blacks and satin whites of the gelatin silver print render a glamorous woman lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by flowers. It is, in a word, beautiful. After the initial captivation of Darling’s gaze and the sensory pleasure of the photograph loosens its grip, this aesthetic quality, however pure, quickly begins disintegrating into an image saturated with contradictions.

Born in 1944 as James Slattery, her youth was filled with the banal tyranny of the suburbs in Long Island, followed by several experiments with different transsexual identities in New York City, Candy Darling entered the world in the early 1960s. The duality of Darling’s identity gave her no shortage of discrimination and misunderstanding, yet there are countless stories of people overcoming their close-mindedness because of her undeniable beauty and femininity. When Darling’s mother, Theresa, first confronted James about the rumors she heard of him cross-dressing, he left the room and returned fully transformed into Candy Darling. Theresa later recalled, “I knew then… that I couldn’t stop Jimmy. Candy was just too beautiful and talented.”

Through Darling’s early realization that she was destined for something more important and more fantastic than the paths of her bucolic peers, she idolized classical Hollywood starlets. She was fascinated by Kim Novak and her piercing presence; in a home video of Darling reciting Novak’s lines from a scene in the 1955 film Picnic, Darling morphs into the character with total commitment, then says to the others in the room, “She was so strong, that’s what I liked about her. Something stable and so strong… but Kim was also vulnerable.” The combination of strength and vulnerability defined Darling throughout her short life. She filled pages of her diary with manifestos of tenacity: “I will not cease to be myself for foolish people. For foolish people make harsh judgments on me. You must always be yourself, no matter what the price. It is the highest form of morality.” As well as descriptions of her despondence and hardship: “I feel like I’m living in a prison. There are so many things I may not experience. I cannot go swimming. Can’t visit relatives. Can’t get a job. Can’t have a boyfriend. I see so much of life I cannot have. I am living in a veritable prison.”

Despite consistent poverty and frequent homelessness, Darling’s determination carried her to the stardom she so desperately desired, albeit briefly. In the five years during which she starred in several of Andy Warhol’s films, and in Tennessee Williams’ play, Small Craft Warnings (1970), Darling got a taste of the life she always wanted. But it all fell apart when Andy Warhol lost interest in her, claiming he did not want to use “chicks with dicks,” instead, he wanted to use “real women.” When Warhol made his film Heat in 1972, he did not invite Darling to play any roll, which left her devastated. Two years later, Darling was diagnosed with lymphoma. Those close to her suspect it was caused by the hormones she took to grow breasts — at Warhol’s suggestion. In the ultimate tragedy, it may have been her effort to transform into what she believed was her true self that killed her.

As she faced the last days of her life, she received one final, perfect tribute in the photograph, Candy Darling On Her Deathbed (1973) by her friend Peter Hujar. Fran Lebowitz — a friend of both Darling and Hujar — recalled the day they visited Darling in the hospital, and that she was too scared to see her friend so close to death, let alone photograph her. But Hujar was uniquely suited for the act because he had an innate understanding and appreciation for subjects in liminal states of contradiction. Lebowitz said: “No one else could have taken that photograph. Peter never thought of Candy as a freak… I think that’s why Candy responded to Peter. He thought of her in the way that my mother thinks of her best friend or anyone she would meet, the most usual kind of person. Candy loved that.” That was typical of Hujar in both his life and his artistic practice; subjects that existed outside the norms of orthodox culture fascinated him, but they were not abnormal to him. They were mysteries he wanted understand, and knew that the camera could help him reveal their enigmatic secrets. In both his portraits of humans and animals, Hujar captured an unconcerned openness and intimacy; there is an understanding and collaboration between the photographer and his subjects. Candy Darling On Her Deathbed, considered by many to be the apotheosis of Hujar’s career, contains everything that made Darling’s personality and Hujar’s photographs so alluring.

Technically, the photograph is masterful. Hujar expertly rendered the high contrast between the darkened room, Darling’s alabaster skin, her dark shirt, the white hospital bed sheets, and the fluffy white chrysanthemums floating on a darkened back wall, recalling the classic Hollywood glamour she loved so dearly. If the photograph were in color, the sconce above her would cast the room in a sickly florescent light, but in black and white it glows softly. The title of the photograph, despite being purely descriptive, carries a lyrical quality when spoken aloud; it is almost impossible not to sing it. Mirroring the content of the image, the sweetness of the title’s cadence and of Darling’s name fractures with the inclusion of her dying state. In her reclined pose, common to Hujar portraits, Darling looks as though she could be relaxing in her own bed if it were not for the strange sterility of the hospital room décor. With her perfectly applied make up and famously blond hair, Darling looks ready to go to a party, but upon remembering her illness, her dark eye make up and angular physiognomy turn her face into a skull, prophesying her impending death. The image complicates its viewing — continually shifting between seducing with its beauty and repelling with its morbidity. Darling lived and died in that space; when John Waters compared Darling to other transsexuals at the time he said: “The others were freakish and she was beautiful in a way that really put people off and drew them to her because she confused them.”

Hujar captured this confusion of expectation, reality, and fantasy that permeated Darling’s entire life with an eloquence that no one else could have matched. The combination of Hujar’s open-minded inquisitiveness with Darling’s undeniable magnetism infuses the image with a charisma worthy of them both. There is something magical that happens when a photographer and his or her subject share a generosity and willingness to be honest; it’s something ineffable that can only be felt, like the haunting sense of déjà-vu.

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Of the various names of beauty we have touched, hozho is the most comprehensive, which we might explain by saying the Navajo way of life is aesthetic at its base. But we also should simply say that beauty is not, for the Navajo, an aesthetic concept: it’s not primarily about the way things appear — though it includes the universe as a whole. It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all of these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state.
-Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty, 2004.

At her memorial service earlier this month I found myself thinking about Jennifer Wynne Reeves and hozho, with its implicit moral imperative. It struck me that Jennifer lived, made and wrote in a state of hozho.  Minutes after I had this thought the woman with the guitar started to sing a Navajo song about peace all around us which became a singalong to close the beautiful and elegant service to this woman’s singular life and work. The nearest English equivalent would be to say that Reeves lived a life bathed in Grace.

Reeves anthropomorphizes abstraction in an ultimately humane way, abstracting emotion in the way Pina Bausch does in her choreography. The Garden of Gethsemane (2014), with its off-white picket fence, and its multicolored abstract striped figure, reminds me that in the suburbs no one can hear you scream.

Jonah (2012) has a series of lumps of an Autumn palette forming a figure with wire arms in a gesture of either helplessness or praying — the two go together — facing away from the gaping red maw of a giant fish. It is archetypal in its appropriately named biblical theme.

Place (1997) drives home the impasto and materiality of Reeves’ work that does not show up in reproduction on Facebook, where I became one of her followers and a commenter on the long threads accompanying her art and her writing. I didn’t understand her work well on Facebook – it was over my head – but when I went to the opening of her memorial show at BravinLee and saw it for the first time in all its material glory, it went straight to my heart.

Place has a heavily impastoed cake form in black with white frosting accompanied by equally dimensional blobs in sky blue and sea green stacked into a figure. Kym Ghee, my Facebook friend who met me at the show, said all of her paintings were delicious and edible with something uncomfortable taking place underneath. No painting illuminates this principle more than Place.

Klee and Arp were designated the humorous painters of the time by art critics. I would add Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. But their humor is not lacking in gravity. People err when they think of life as pure tragedy, for they will become melancholics, or of life as pure comedy, for they will become clowns. Life is both tragic and comic at the same time. Reeves shares with these artists a sense of the tragicomic.

Among her contemporaries she belongs with Thomas Nozkowski, Stephen Mueller and Jonathan Lasker to the genre of narrative abstraction. Mueller and Lasker the most: Mueller for his spirituality and early Lasker for his symbolism. Lasker was the Forrest Bess of the TV Generation. Reeves’ work shares this spirituality and symbolism.

Come walk in hozho with the work and writing that Jennifer Wynne Reeves has left behind.

BravinLee programs is at 526 West 26th Street #211, New York City, 212 462 4404

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Harun Farocki, who died on July 30^th, was the master of the conceptually precise essay film. An insightful and prescient documentarian with a light touch, he was no editorialist or propagandist, but rather a critical thinker with a deep political commitment. Unlike many other artists born of May ’68, Farocki avoided both Bertolt Brecht’s proscriptive didacticism and Jean-Luc Godard’s love/hate of conventional narrative. Farocki observed, and observed well. Simply by placing a camera where something interesting was occurring — a worker being trained, a TV advertisement being filmed — Farocki was able to give capitalism just enough rope to hang itself. There’s a mirroring of form and content in his work: the films examine freedom and labor, and are constructed in a way that grants the audience an unusual degree of freedom in their construction of meaning. Farocki’s method is the cinematic manifestation of Hemingway’s advice, “Show, don’t tell.” To enjoy a Farocki film is to be the loser in a jiu-jitsu match: it’s not the filmmaker’s efforts, but rather the workings of the viewer’s own intelligence, that lead one to arrive at the filmmaker’s conclusions.

A crucial moment in Farocki’s oeuvre is the opening sequence of his Inextinguishable Fire (1969), an anti-Vietnam War salvo created when he was only 25 years old, having recently been ejected from film academy for his radicalism. The filmmaker is seated at a desk, in the manner of a TV news anchor. He reads to the camera:

“How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you someone with napalm burns, we will hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you will feel like we’d tried napalm on you. We can give you only a hint of how napalm works.”

Then, he stops speaking. How does napalm work? In close-up, we see Farocki press a lit cigarette into the skin of his forearm, without flinching.

Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969)

It’s a visceral demonstration of the uncompromising political commitment that would animate a career spanning over 120 films and installations. (Unlike those who consider clicking a Facebook like-button to be political activism, Farocki clearly “had some skin in the game.”) It’s many other things as well: a declaration of solidarity with victims of the Vietnam War; a critique of the pretense to neutrality of TV news; a work of transcendently masochistic performance art pre-dating both Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.

The “hint of napalm” can be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s entire project. The art arises from the necessity of finding a “hint,” a soft alternative to a reality too harsh to express directly. The artist doesn’t want to hurt the viewer’s feelings, doesn’t want her to close her eyes — thus a new strategy is needed. Jacques Ranciere proposed that political art often fails because the politicized artist presumes he has specialized knowledge that his audience lacks; its tone can’t help but be patronizing. Farocki usually side-stepped this kind of didactic or pedagogical stance: his work is concerned with making its point, but is equally concerned with affirming the audience’s ability to figure things out for themselves. And this occasion for respectful affirmation becomes, in itself, a political act.

One strategy for “hinting” is to focus on the mundane as entry point to the profound. The subject of Zum Vergleich (“In Comparison,” 2009) is, at first glance, “How are bricks manufactured in different parts of the world?” One would assume this is a spectacularly boring topic, but in fact, the film presents nothing less than a feat of time-travel. In Africa, bricks are individually shaped by hand; in India, by plopping handfuls of mud into molds; in Morocco, by simple assembly lines; and in Germany, by massively efficient automated production facilities. Each location represents a distinct moment in the history of capitalist production, from pre- to post-industrial. Besides demonstrating technologies from primitive to complex, the film lets us examine how different the experience of work is for the laborers in each location. Long takes, beautifully composed, give the viewer time to feel the worker’s daily experience. In comparison with the community of joyful women of Burkina Faso, infants strapped to their backs, who sing in unison as they rhythmically mold the raw earth, the lone German factory worker paces aimlessly, at a loss for what to do, as he helplessly oversees the huge machines in their mighty and flawless production. In Farocki’s hands, this lonely figure becomes the tangible embodiment of alienated labor. It is no small feat to make such an abstract and slippery concept so plainly visible.

An excerpt from How to Life in the German Federal Republic (1990), by Harun Farocki

Another of Farocki’s preferred indirect methods is to examine moments of simulation: the play-acting that naturally occurs whenever anyone tries to teach something. When Farocki films, for example, a group of children made to practice crossing an imaginary street, the activity becomes denaturalized; the training appears as the process of the construction of subjectivity. In the absence of the actual, the ideology around what the actual might be becomes foregrounded. While Brecht believed that the conditions of life were revealed when the theater made its mechanisms obvious, Farocki sought the same reveal in the impromptu moments of theater that occur within real life. With a title that jokingly implies the film will explain capitalism to residents of former East Germany, How To Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990) is a compilation of a great many of these bizarre scenarios of dress rehearsal, suggesting a world in constant preparation for a reality that never arrives. Two policemen practice making an arrest, with one assuming the role of the bad guy. As a form of therapy, anorexic women pretend to eat imaginary meals. In one particularly odd sequence, a man coaches a woman on how to perform a strip-tease, his obvious male chauvinism complicated by the way he demonstrates stripper moves. Indoctrination (1987) documents a five-day workshop in which corporate middle-management executives are drilled in the art of self-presentation. These aspiring ladder-climbers rehearse performing a degree of competency they don’t actually possess, so that they may better “sell themselves.” We can tangibly observe ideology spreading contagiously, and that the effect of absorbing an ideology is a variety of contortions within a person’s mode of being.

A trailer for Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), compiled by Spectacle Theater

Whereas Brecht was a firebrand true-believer Communist, and poet-auteur Godard a son of Marx and Coca-Cola, Harun Farocki was simply a deeply intelligent and humble man of the left, whose hopes and fears for our world were born not of dogma, but of a timeless humanitarianism. His profoundly committed artistic and political vision will remain forever inextinguishable.

5 Recommended Films by Harun Farocki:
Videograms of a Revolution (1992) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108489/
Zum Vergleich http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1380817/
Serious Games 1-4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2793502/
How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0277794/
An Image http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360426/

A 2012 interview with Farocki by the Goethe Institute http://vimeo.com/40929381

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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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