AR: Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Guggenheim

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Originally Posted: April 29th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Guggenheim

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Almost no photos here but it matters little, we know what there is to see: an elegy fitting fragments. For FW time was always at issue, the small moment projecting its largess, say the moment of Einstein's conception, or large waste carving its single momento mori whittled in time's erosion. The Gug needing not expend documentary energy but instead promotion's concision, fragments. The humor of FW's misuse of time, in time, becomes instead its loss. Suddenly not very funny at all.

On Kawara at the Guggenheim

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The poetic in art is the sign's inability to complete its connection, conclude.  The painting's dates point to a specificity that immediately is lost in largess and unknown, a fissure, in the inability to circumscribe a date's entirety, or one man's marking of it. This distending distance between the signifier (the date) and its lost signified (the entirety of a day) is its affective pathos. The weight of this. Kawara's index hypothesizes its accumulation of time and date, one million years, eyeing a library of Babelinian proportions, to feel small in front of this vast empty expanse, sublimely romantic. The desire of viewers to find dates to which they can link "significance" eases the longing for the sign to conclude, to fill with meaning.  Like July 20, 1969, the moon landing's meaninglessness given to mean everything, the largest painting to date.


Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Alejandro Cesarco at Midway Contemporary Art, Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects, Jason Dodge at Franco Noero , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago