Peter Schjeldahl The Art World: A Painting a Day, The New Yorker, February 16, 2015, pp. 74-75.
“On Kawara [1933-2014], the subject of a vast and elegant retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum . . . Starting in 1966, he created nearly three thousand acrylic paintings, feature only the dates on which they were made . . . A frequent traveller, Kawara sent more than fifteen hundred picture-postcards to acquaintances, with no message but a rubber stamp of the time that he had woken up that day . . . He sent more than nine hundred telegrams to people he knew, telling them . . . “I am still alive.” . . .
The madly pertinacious show, curated by Jeffrey Weiss, with assistance from Anne Wheeler, presents a great many bound books and ring binders . . . (far few examples might have been sufficiently informative.) There are more than a thousand postcard mounted in standing Plexiglass panels, for double-sided viewing . . . an archival deluge. I think of the line by Wallace Stevens: “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” . . . [p. 75] In 1964, he settled in New York, with his wife, Hiroko Hiraoka, a neo-Dadaist artist he had known in Japan. They had two children and lived frugally . . . on funds from odd jobs, occasional sales of their work, and . . . Kawara’s winnings from gambling on games, chiefly mah-jongg . . . With his mature work, Karawa joined the newly formed international movement of conceptual art . . . “The idea is a machine that makes art,” Sol Witt declared in Sentences on Conceptual Art (1969). Karawa was soon befriended and esteemed by fellow-paladins of the impersonal, including LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, the creator of One and Three Chairs (1965)—a real chair grouped with a photograph of it and a reproduced dictionary definition of “chair.” . . .
The conceptualists codified an iconoclastic notion taken up . . . since Marcel DuChamp: roughly, that art is all in the head. Of course the head contains a lot else too . . . Albert Camus . . . The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) . . . repetitive actions . . . are always new, while apparently pointless . . . “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
How much you like the Guggenheim show will reflect your susceptibility to the charm of that thought . . . there is a term for the effect that it generates, obliterating relative judgements: the sublime. Kawara’s art evokess a cosmic perspective by which his own life . . . and the lives of all of us [do not register in time ] . . .