It's March 2015 already and time is marching on. That is the very simplistic message of the work of On Kawara. After ten years of going to New York for "Arts Week" (as it is now called), a week full of auction previews, art fairs, gallery and museum exhibitions, the Art Girls have a certain sense of deja-vu - wake up at the same hotel, coffee and bagel, take a walk/run in Central Park, go out to experience art at a gallery, fair, or museum, dine in a lovely restaurant with art people to talk about art. Wash and repeat the next day. During our week of March Art Madness, we viewed the first retrospective of the artist On Kawara who died last year during the preparation of this exhibition. We had all been familiar with his date paintings and his "I Woke Up" postcards but we were not prepared for the overwhelming elegance and, dare I say, obsessive-compulsive nature of the manner in which this enigmatic artist dealt with the idea of time and its passing.
Imagine to document your daily activities over the course of a lifetime, what time you woke up, what you did every day, who you spoke to, and make a painting all in the course of a day. Oh, and, without the snapping of a photo on your phone and posting it on Facebook. You do this every day for 50 years! Now organize all of those beautiful documents in a linear progression, to be viewed as you spiral up the ramp that is the Guggenheim Museum, and there you have the life of a human being all laid out for the world to see - the personal meets the global. It was sort of a beautiful, conceptual "Groundhog Day." We were all deeply moved by this profound and poetic exhibition.
If you want to read more about On Kawara, here is a link to his obituary by Roberta Smith as well as a review of the exhibition from the New York Times:
And if you still can't get enough, click on the Guggenheim's website for a daily dose of On Kawara:
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