BWW Reviews: Life into Art into Thought in ON KAWARA at the Guggenheim

Nothing that the Guggenheim Museum has done in the recent past genuinely prepares the way for On Kawara--Silence. Certainly not extravagant ensemble shows such as Italian Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe and ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, and not even austere solo exhibitions such as Christopher Wool, for Kawara's own austerity is very different in purpose and effect. Born in Japan but eventually based in New York, Kawara documented as much of his life as humanly possible, and did so in a deadpan style that few other artists could have sustained for as long as he did (the mid 1960s to his death in 2014) without breaking form. To ascend through the Guggenheim atrium, surrounded by Kawara's pared-down paintings and small empire of files, is to ascend through a life that is right before you in its essentials but still remains elusive. You will learn how Kawara's art came to be, but perhaps won't comprehend why it needed to exist. You will sense that he was a rigorous artist and almost certainly a great one, but may not detect much of the man behind Kawara's monumental accomplishment.

For all this conceptual bravado, and all this daring paradox, there is still a lot that this show doesn't and probably doesn't want to accomplish. It doesn't make Kawara particularly accessible, and (probably because of this) it doesn't lift him to the level of a Robert Morris, a Sol LeWitt, or a Marina Abramovic--all conceptual artists who are more visible and more entertaining. Yet the entire exhibition renders it impossible to confuse Kawara's paintings with throwaway art like Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs, or like too much of Robert Morris and Marina Abramovic. This correction is long overdue: never before have so many Kawara entries been gathered together in one place, and never again will it be possible to think of Kawara as a piecemeal provocateur. This is an exhibition that speaks loudly, but never panders. After all, its subject never did.

Averse to easy publicity and to self-disclosure generally, Kawara nonetheless took a guiding role in structuring the Guggenheim exhibition that bears his name. After his death, the rest of the planning was overseen by his widow, Hiroko Kawahara. The end product, as curated by Jeffrey Weiss with the assistance of Anne Wheeler and Rachel Nelson, is locked in place by Kawara's Date Paintings--box-like compositions of various sizes, each one declaring the date of its creation in sans serif letters. Many of the Date Paintings generated after 1970 are accompanied by actual storage boxes and by newspaper samples, each sample registering the date of its painting's creation. The tension between the imposing painted form and the passing news of the day was something that Kawara didn't need to play up particularly much, since the invitation to meditate is already there, and could assume variation upon variation without Kawara's intrusion. He had arrived at a motif worth sustaining, as Weiss and his team seem to know well: available in matte blues and grays that bring the date paintings to mind, the catalog for Silence cultivates a boxy substantiality of its own.

But the absolute earliest Kawara paintings are nowhere to be seen. In the late 1950s, he was something of an artistic celebrity in his native country--a state of being that he appeared to detest, and in any case quickly escaped. After he left Japan in the early 1960s, he began creating what are now known as the Paris-New York Drawings. The kind of images that Nam June Paik, in a different life, might have spent an entire career producing, these network- and circuit-like images jitter with irritation but somehow still satisfy--and unlike quite a few of Kawara's other early works, they weren't annihilated by the artist. By 1965, Kawara was creating word and date canvases: he hadn't quite figured out how to make his work as powerfully impersonal as it would be, but he was certainly finding a sense of form that would last. The triptych One Thing, 1965, Viet-nam is evidence of this, a piece of political obviousness executed in a ravishing mulberry hue. In any case, as positioned in the Guggenhiem's lowermost gallery, it is a stirring entry to Kawara's world. From there, the Date Paintings begin their reign--slate gray rows of these in the Guggenheim's bottom levels, and a multi-sized, multi-colored round of them in the museum's upper tier.

Simply put, these are among the strongest selections in Silence. I still am not sure whether setting them out this early was an unhappy inevitability or a boon in disguise. Once that lower gallery and the first Date Paintings are out of the way, the show does indeed lose much of its thrill of discovery; I kept hoping that the irascible lyricism of the Paris-New York Drawings would return in some form or other, only to see my hopes defeated as each new iteration of Date Paintings came into view. There are other contrasts, though, and they do not disappoint. Kawara's One Million Years has been scheduled for live readings on the Guggenheim's ground floor, breaking the silence with yet more information of undeniable presence and unclear significance. Elsewhere, Weiss has allowed Kawara to be as opaque as he wants. At least the Date Paintings reveal a signature style: the closed binders of Kawara's I Read series reveal almost nothing at all.

So how much of Kawara's personality, exactly, is on display at the Guggenheim? The best way to answer that question may be to consider the different series he created; look closely enough at any one of these, and a portrait of Kawara may start to emerge from all that mass of information. The I Got Up series casts Kawara as a man of the world: postcards listing the time Kawara got up document the artist's unpredictable waking hours and prodigious travels. (Keep an eye out for the Guggenheim postcards, which abound.) The print component of the One Million Years series shows Kawara putting technology to energetic use: to create these millennium-spanning lists, he used photocopier format that allowed him to replicate columns of numbers en masse. (Bear in mind that this series was begun before personal computers became ubiquitous.) And the Code series reveals Kawara, perhaps, giving in to the kind of lyrical draughtsmanship he was so set on avoiding elsewhere: found texts are encoded using dashes of colored pencil, which add up to something at once tense and precious. Not all of these are successful. Truth be told, the One Million Years series barely looks like a shadow of an idea when compared to the similar, superior work of Roman Opalka. And Kawara's Journals--which record how each Date Painting after 1966 was composed--are textbook postmodernism of the driest, dullest sort. Didn't he know what he had already accomplished? Those Date Paintings are equally resistant to easy academicism and easy drama: no empty pretenses, and no painterly grandstanding here.

Perhaps to drive this very point home, Kawara's curators decided to forgo the stagey, spectacular ending that the Guggenheim's architecture invites: those famous ascending ramps lead to an airy gallery in the museum's highest reaches, a space that has been used to climactic effect in all the other Guggenheim exhibitions I can remember off the top of my head. Weiss doesn't even try to use this space. The entry is simply sealed off, and that is that. The options are to march determinedly back through the ranks of Date Paintings and postcards, or to find the nearest elevator. Or to look down into the depths of the Frank Lloyd Wright atrium, contemplating the thin barrier between the revolving business of each day and the falling suddenness of death. Kawara's exhibition is as vast, as repetitive, and as wondrous as life itself, and it shuts down as unceremoniously and as definitively as life itself must.

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