I remember David Zwirner Gallery back in the 1990s, before Chelsea, when the New York art world was much smaller and more manageable.
On Kawara
Posted inArt
The 1969 Lunar Landing: One Giant Leap for Art
On July 20, 1969, the world watched, and was transfixed, as American astronaut Neil Armstrong — rendered on television as a ghostly black-and-white figure — descended from the Lunar Module onto the surface of the moon.
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Clearing the Slate: MoMA’s Contemporary Reboot
A few months after having been roundly trounced for The Forever Now: Painting in an Atemporal World, its attempt to assess the current state of painting, the Museum of Modern Art opened a reinstallation of its contemporary collection on the same day as its Björk fiasco.
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On Kawara’s Polite Conceptualism
As my entry into the art world took place just a few years after the Museum of Modern Art’s 1970 Information show, I’ve grown increasingly conscious of an unexpected turn in the positions of several hard-line members of the once aggressively anti-aesthetic conceptual camp.
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The 2015 Armory Show in 23 Superlatives
The 2015 Armory Show delivers pretty much what you’d expect of the 2015 Armory Show: some quite good art, some pretty bad art, and a lot of completely harmless stuff in between.
Posted inIn Brief
Guggenheim Seeks Volunteer Readers for On Kawara Retrospective
If you’ve ever wanted to sit at a table and read dates out loud for an hour — or rather, if you’ve ever wanted to be part of an On Kawara artwork — you’re about to get your chance.
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Conceptual Artist On Kawara Dead at 81
David Zwirner gallery has confirmed Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara has passed away.
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Tom Sachs’s Pointless Americana
PARIS — In a search for art that reacts to the inequalities of globalization, must art lose touch with the sort of grace that exceeds the hand, a grace that couldn’t be anything but artificial and technological?
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Photography at Great Heights
During a particularly arduous training climb on California’s Mt. Baldy, Los Angeles–based creative director and photographer Michael Gabel had an epiphany about the link between an image and the altitude at which it was taken. “I was set on 6,000 vertical feet in six miles and something clicked about tagging photos with the elevation,” he recently explained to Hyperallergic, adding that this solved a key problem: “As a climber and a hiker I love using topographical maps, and naming your photographs is forced and kind of annoying.”
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At MoMA, Drawing as the Politics of Living
Sometimes an exhibition reminds you of why exhibitions exist, those surprising moments when usually dull curatorial exercises become transcendent experiences, reinvigorating overlooked corners of art history. I Am Still Alive at the Museum of Modern Art is one of those exhibitions, defiant and vivacious as anything I’ve seen in New York in the past few years. The show focuses entirely on drawing, demonstrating contemporary drawing’s engagement with the politics of living and everyday life. This is art as struggle and art as achievement, nowhere more reaffirmed than in On Kawara’s telegrams sent to the artist’s dealers and friends simply stating: “I am still alive.” To make art and to fight through problems and conflicts, social or personal, through the medium of art is to be alive.
