Born in 1941, in Sharon, Pa., Leffingwell took art classes as a teenager at the nearby Butler Institute in Youngstown, Ohio, stimulating the interests in art making and museums that would eventually define his life. Arriving in New York in the mid-1960s, he became a regular at Max’s Kansas City and Warhol’s Factory, enthralled by the iconoclastic spirit of Lower Manhattan. His friends at the time ranged from the likes of political activist Abbie Hoffman to Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica, Warhol superstar Ultra Violet to sculptor John Chamberlain (who became a lifelong friend). He was equally at home in the art world of Los Angeles, also spending much time there. In 1978, he returned home to care for his mother and to finish his schooling, earning a B.A. at Youngstown State University in 1982 and an M.A. in art history from the University of Cincinnati in 1984.

In 1983, he presented “Chinese Chance: An American Collection” at the Butler, his first curatorial project, featuring the collection of Mickey Ruskin of Max’s Kansas City, who had recently died of a drug overdose. It was followed by an exhibition by Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner at the University of Cincinnati. In 1985, Leffingwell returned to New York as the program director, then chief curator of P.S. 1, hired by Alanna Heiss, its founding director. Heiss said that Leffingwell preferred artists of “extreme vision” whose work his own vision would make coherent. He curated shows of James Rosenquist, Neil Williams and Michael Tracy. One of his most notable exhibitions for P.S. 1 featured John McCracken, the first comprehensive survey of the Californian minimalist sculptor on the East Coast. Leffingwell often introduced little known artists from California and elsewhere to New York. It seemed natural, then, when in 1988 he was appointed director of the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park. His most ambitious venture for the gallery was “LAX: The Los Angeles Exhibition” in 1992, a seven-venue biennial installed throughout the city, conceived as a model for future exhibitions.  He returned to New York in 1992 after his job was eliminated due to budgetary cuts. In 1997, he curated an important, critically acclaimed exhibition of Jack Smith at P.S. 1, renewing interest in the provocative artist who is now acknowledged as a major influence in the history of performance art, experimental filmmaking and queer cinema.

In 1989, Leffingwell became a contributor to Art in America, writing hundreds of reviews and articles over a 20-year span. He also began to visit Brazil with increasing frequency as his interest in South American art and his love of the country deepened.  He was named the magazine’s corresponding editor from Brazil, reporting on six of the São Paulo biennials and becoming an authority on contemporary Brazilian art. Elizabeth C. Baker, former editor-in-chief of Art in America, credited his curatorial experience and acumen for his ability to write on “an unusually broad range of artists. He brought us things we didn’t know about and he was willing to tackle almost any subject we might suggest.”

He wrote numerous essays and monographs; one of his last published essays was a contribution to AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE (1960-2007), a catalogue documenting more than 40 years of the work of Lawrence Weiner, co-published by LA MOCA and the Whitney Museum in 2007.

For much of the time after he returned to New York from L.A., Ed lived in a tiny walk-up apartment on Sullivan Street, elegantly jam-packed with ornate and curious objects, artworks, books and the memorabilia he had acquired during an eventful, multifaceted life. It was his castle, where he cooked bouillabaisse for friends and entertained them with endless, often digressive, sometimes scandalously humorous anecdotes about the art world—true and not—enjoying himself immensely.

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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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In & Out of Amsterdam: Art & Project Bulletin, 1968-1989
July 15 – November 9, 2009

11 West 53rd Street
New York City, 212 708 9400

Since it emerged in the 1960s, Conceptual art has seldom left viewers on the fence. Detractors are deaf to its dry wit, wary of its subversive cerebral bent.  Often, Conceptual art wasn’t really built to last, but as a movement it most certainly has endured, perhaps because it launched a way of thinking about society, mobility, and culture that subsequently inspired generations of artists. Early proponents foresaw that Conceptual art would alter the status of an art object and impact networks of promotion, distribution, and provenance in the art world at large.

In 2007 MoMA acquired a significant cache of Conceptual art from Geert van Beijeren and Adriaan van Ravesteijn, founders of the Amsterdam gallery Art & Project. Dedicating the gallery to new art of their time, van Beijeren and van Ravesteijn presented exhibitions from 1968 until 2001; they also published the influential Art & Project Bulletin from 1968-1989. Their gift of 230 works to the Modern spans no less than five curatorial departments. Conceptual art thus enters an interesting phase of cross-disciplinary art historical assessment. No doubt this process will burnish the museum’s credibility as one of modern art’s key authorities even as the works themselves add depth to the museum’s holdings.

In & Out of Amsterdam inaugurates MoMA’s 21st-century institutional perspective on Conceptual art.  A two-part exhibition, the 3rd floor Special Exhibitions Gallery features films, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and installations, while the Paul J. Sachs Prints and Illustrated Books Gallery displays the entire run of Art & Project Bulletin. Curator Christophe Cherix, a specialist in printed art of the 1960s and 1970s, joined the museum’s Department of Prints and Illustrated Books in 2007. His judicious choice of works honors the movement’s diverse and combinatory media, including performance.

At the press preview someone asked, Why the focus on artistic activity in Amsterdam?  Cherix, a trim, almost ethereal presence, noted several reasons. Amsterdam had unusually progressive social policies for the times. Government subsidies were available to artists regardless of their nationality. The city itself represented a long tradition of international trade and commerce. But most of all, young artists thrived in an atmosphere of congenial support and inspiration. During the 1960s, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum collaborated with other museums, notably Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to mount pioneering exhibitions of global trends in innovative art. Following their lead, Art & Project played an increasingly influential role in a network of galleries across Europe and America that showcased the cross-fertilization of artistic ideas shared by Conceptual art, Minimalism, Pop Art, Fluxus, and lesser-known movements.

Indeed, the complexity of the period borders on pandemonium. To sort things out, Cherix highlights Conceptual art’s beginnings by narrowing the curatorial focus to ten European and American artists’ activities in this one crucial location. The artists include Bas Jan Ader; Stanley Brouwn; Hanne Darboven; Jan Dibbets; Ger van Elk; Gilbert & George; Sol LeWitt; Charlotte Posenenske; Allen Ruppersberg; and Lawrence Weiner. Because these artists quite literally sought to depart from traditional studio art and conventional modes of presentation in art institutions, the theme of travel unites their disparate approaches. All of them participated in key exhibitions in Amsterdam during the years from 1960 to 1976, no matter where they were based.

Indicating the centrality of Amsterdam’s location for Conceptual artists’ travel routes, Jan Dibbets’s “Project for Art & Project Bulletin 15” from 1969 features four commercially produced maps marked by the artist in ball point pen. From a local city map to increasingly large portions of the world, Dibbets charts routes within Amsterdam as well as between Amsterdam and major capital cities in Europe, then overseas to the USA (Los Angeles as well as New York). Sol LeWitt created map works as well, cutting an irregular polygon of Amsterdam in “Area of Amsterdam between Leidseplein, Jan Dibbets’s House, and Kunstijsbaan Jaapeden” (September 4, 1976). Stanley Brouwn took inspiration from the simple act of walking through the city. In 1960, a work titled “Steps of Pedestrians on Paper” is just that–drawings formed as someone’s shoe left its mark on pieces of plain paper he scattered on the ground. For his series “This Way Brouwn,” the artist would ask pedestrians to draw directions to a nearby destination, then preserve the artifacts as art.

While such works play on the inherent abstraction of maps and diagrams, they also suggest that travel was a rich metaphor for Conceptual artists. In their quest for an unbounded studio practice, they dissolved restrictions on perspective, gravity, time, and space. Sculpture, released from its pedestal, was unconstrained by any sort of plinth. The entire world surface could serve as a ground for performance and time-based works, for social interactions such as those initiated by Brouwn. Gilbert & George conceived of themselves as living sculpture. Charlotte Posenenske’s six films of the Dutch landscape seen from a moving car suggest an ambient blur of agriculture and infrastructure.

Most poignantly, Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea while completing a multi-part piece titled “In Search of the Miraculous”. One learns of the tragedy via wall text in a small room where eighty faded color slides of a small choir click past, accompanied by sweet voices singing sea shanties. Also on display, a thing I truly coveted, was the invitation card for the ill-fated show – a beautifully distressed photolithograph of the artist on his twelve and a half-foot boat. He attempted to sail this fragile yacht across the Atlantic Ocean.

Lawrence Weiner is still one of Conceptual art’s abiding lights. His ubiquitous presence on the international art scene, his bi-continental lifestyle in New York and on his houseboat in Amsterdam, are as legendary as his works. In & Out of Amsterdam features the artist’s ingenious homage to Amsterdam’s open social policies of the 1960s – 1970s. Leading into the exhibition, porthole-like apertures in sheets of opaque mylar are affixed to windows and festooned with the letters “XXX” rendered in the artist’s characteristic graphics. These Xs echo Amsterdam’s ancient logo, the St. Mark’s cross. After Amsterdam legalized the sex industry, “XXX” became indelibly associated with the city’s red light district.

In addition to this installation, Weiner contributes a text “displacement” from 1971. On each of four windows facing East 53rd Street it reads: “IN AND OUT.” “OUT AND IN.” “AND IN AND OUT.” “AND OUT AND IN.” On the acousti-guide, Weiner speaks of this work as an homage to his early life in New York. Viewers of In & Out of Amsterdam should not deny themselves the pleasure of this recording, for Weiner’s voice is deep and hypnotic. The treble-bass purr of his diction adds opulence to his thoughts.

As these mercurial installations, films, and performances indicate, Conceptual art often yielded works of great elegance in novel forms of presentation.  Cherix’s exhibition is eloquent on this point. Sol LeWitt’s subtle “Wall Drawing #109” may evade viewers who pass through the exhibition too quickly. Hanne Darboven’s epic “100 Books 00-00” from 1970 stands out for breadth of conception as well as quiet determination. The nearly blank books, rhythmically opened on plain wooden tabletops supported by sawhorses, allude to forgotten history, landscape, and the mystery of time. Profound or boring? The viewer’s engagement with the work, or not, is the key.

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A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, June 11, 2007 under the title “Pax American in the Serene Republic”

The Venice Biennale has been the Olympics of the visual arts since its inception in 1895. In odd years countries choose their artist representatives for permanent pavilions in the Giardini or in rented spaces around town: scuoli, palazzi, churches, cultural foundations. In addition there are major curated exhibitions that offer overviews of the state of art: in the Italy Pavilion, the largest in the Giardini, which since the demise of fascism has become an international survey; in the Arsenale, where generally hipper talents are showcased in a mammoth, historic rope factory; and in a cornucopia of “collateral” satellite events.

This year, for the first time, the director is an American: Robert Storr, a former Museum of Modern Art curator and recently appointed dean of the Yale Art School. The title he has come up with is “Think with the senses, feel with the mind: Art in the present tense.” While his selections and reasonings reflect a notion of art in troubled times, his generally neat, sober, focused festival is a deal less anarchic and querulous than biennials past. Pax Americana has arrived in the Serene Republic.

Actually, a division between the Giardini and the Arsenale, crudely speaking, is between War and Peace. The rougher, former military-industrial buildings include such meditations on conflict as Mr. Storr’s choices of Italian artists Paolo Canevari, whose “Bouncing Skull” (2007) features a kid kicking around a skull in front of a gutted tower block in the former army HQ in Belgrade, and Gabriele Basilico’s sumptuously ruinous cityscapes, “Beirut 1991” (2003). The mood in the work of both, however, is melancholy and poignant rather than desperate or macabre. Argentine Léon Ferrari, by contrast, went for the jugular with “Western-Christian Civilization” (1965), in which Christ is crucified on an American bomber. The inclusion of this early work at the opening of the exhibit reads as a political apologia by Mr. Storr.

Having, so to speak, atoned for his passport at the Arsenale, the American curator has no qualms in presenting many of his countrymen in the Italia pavilion, which is the heart of the Biennale. There are rooms devoted to Robert Ryman, Ellsworth Kelly, Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois and Sol LeWitt, Biennale familiars all, but also to newer introductions for an international audience such as Elizabeth Murray, Thomas Nozkowski and Raymond Pettibon. Mr. Nozkowski’s thoughtful, quirkily compact little abstractions – loosely intimating specific sources and improvising playfully upon art historical precedents – epitomize Mr. Storr’s thesis of art at the nexus of the sensual and the cerebral.

Two of the largest rooms are given over to German giants of the contemporary scene, Gerhard Richter (whose 2002 MoMA retrospective was organized by Mr. Storr) and Sigmar Polke. But where Mr. Richter might have contributed to the sense of political tension and terrorism with his Baader-Meinhof paintings, and Mr. Polke with his cacophonous, deliberately overloaded referential paintings, they are shown instead here in a serene mode, Mr. Richter with his enigmatically lush smudge paintings and Mr. Polke by a series of arcane, near-monochrome sensual pictures using violet pigments on irregular stretches of fabric, as in “Neo Byzantium” (2005).

With so many Americans elsewhere, the actual American pavilion is given over this year to a deceased Cuban: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996 at age 38. His spare, minimalist heaps of candies and stacks of posters that visitors can take away elegaically symbolize a dispersal of essence. The show offers a welcome moment of quiet and repose amid the clamor of the Biennale.

National pavilions are each chosen by a named commissioner, who is sometimes also that show’s curator. While following their own tastes and local agendas they often respond to the mood set by the Biennale director. The British artist Tracey Emin has played down her carefully cultivated popular persona as the “bad girl” of the British art scene with an elegant, almost prim display. There is nothing like her earlier slept-in bed or tent embroidered with the names of everyone she has slept with. While her imagery continues to play on a harrowing personal mythology of teenage angst – evident in earlier monotypes shown here taken from earlier sketchbooks and delivered in a knowingly pathetic, spindly line – sexual languor does not prevent her paintings from looking like polite salon abstraction riffs on Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.

Next door, in one of the strongest shows in the Giardini, France’s Sophie Calle picks up Ms. Emin’s self-pity and takes it in a totally different direction. When the artist was jolted via e-mail by a boyfriend, she sent his crass missive to over a hundred women chosen for their different professions and skills and asked each to interpret the letter and propose a reply. A statistician analyses the length of 22 sentences in the letter; a clown reads aloud with personal asides, interpreting the letter in positive terms, grasping at straws, feeling the tenderness of his ellipses and parentheses; a pair of Talmudists debate its meaning dialectically; an actress – Miranda Richardson – reads it dramatically and then performs origami.

In harmony with Mr. Storr’s breakdown of dichotomies, there are many shows that elide the personal and the political. Callum Morton is one of three Australians showing in different venues. In the grounds of a private foundation in the Dorso Duro that also hosted shows for Armenia, Latin America, Scotland, and the New Forest in England, Mr. Morton erected a macabre, battle-worn wreck of a modernist breeze-block house. This turns out to have been modeled on his childhood home, built by his architect father, scaled down to two-thirds actual size. The intrepid visitor enters this smoldering ruin through a front door, only to discover an air-conditioned white marble elevator lobby attended by a custodian in a white jacket. Pressing the button actually releases various ominous sound effects.

It so happens that in the blistering Venetian summer any art work that offers creature comforts is guaranteed sympathetic attention. In Singapore’s slick but thoughtful four-person show at the neo-gothic Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, for instance, Zulkifle Mahmod’s “Sonic Dome: An Empire of Thought” (2007) has a huge circular bed visitors lie on to contemplate a halogen star-studded, sound-filled dome, the bed occasionally vibrating in harmony.

The sprawling Arsenale hosted two large areas for places hitherto excluded from the Biennale: the People’s Republic of China and Africa.  The Chinese offered four women installation artists, including Cao Fei a.k.a. China Tracy, who filled an inflated tent with gentle pop music and computer animations, and Kan Xuan, whose video animations of transmogrifying Buddhist sculptures were placed amidst the arsenal’s rusty, pungent gas tanks. Africa was an odd show. A curatorial panel chaired by Mr. Storr borrowed exclusively from one private collection (Luanda-based Sindika Dotolo’s). While it is a step in the right direction to franchise the continent, the inclusion of a white Spaniard, Miguel Barceló; a dead American, Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the British artists Chris Ofili and Yinka Shonibare wastes wall space for deserving, living Africans.

Actually, nationality is often a point of contention at the Biennale, whose organization remains a legacy of 1890s nationalism and imperial power. Often countries chose famous citizens who live abroad, or domiciled foreigners. Newly autonomous regions in Europe, such as Wales or Northern Ireland, now have their own shows. Wales, for instance, out in a former beer warehouse on the Giudecca, includes the sculptor Richard Deacon, who lives in London, and the painter Merlin James, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland, but who were both born in the principality. Their shows – sharing space with a thoughtful photography-and-video-based Lebanese national pavilion (Syria and Egypt also have pavilions, incidentally, as does Israel) – are definitely worth the vaporetto ride. Mr. James, in particular, rivals Mr. Nozkowski as a poster boy for Mr. Storr’s notion of thinking sensually and feeling cerebrally. His self-referential yet authentic seeming paintings are delectably anxious about their own condition.

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