Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

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What is contained in a day, what does a date contain, etc. If you pressed anyone on these questions they would admit the hairiness of the situation. But that isn't how we act, when we write press releases the questions themselves are preventatives against answers. This because "raising questions" is, we are told, the power of art. Which makes actually answering its questions a loser's affair - the questions must be kept on life support; Art, for its shareholders, must be eternal. (And thus why thousands of artists continue redeploying On Kawara's essential question. It becomes a mannered tool for evoking, but not answering, a question.) This is one of the worst aberrations of art. There is no critique if that critique never cancels. "Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them."


See too: Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, Sarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of Style, On Kawara at the Guggenheim,

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