exhibitions | The Self in the Practice and Space of Everyday Life (and Art)

What we need is not the Gesamtkunstwerk, alongside and separated from which life flows by, but a synthesis of all the vital impulses spontaneously forming itself into the all-embracing Gesamtwerk (life) which abolishes all isolation, in which all individual accomplishments proceed from a biological necessity and culminate in a universal necessity.  

László Moholy-Nagy

Three seemingly disconnected and unrelated art exhibitions are currently on view in New York: “On Kawara: Silence” at the Guggenheim Museum,  “In the Studio: Photographs” at Gagosian and “Self: Portrait of Artists in Their Absence" at the National Academy Museum. The exhibitions share instead a strong commonality about making art intersecting with living life: the studio is an experiential place and the artist is a maker of artwork impregnated with existential questioning and awareness of self image. Uncannily these three exhibitions are located a few blocks apart from each other in the Manhattan Upper East Side and seem to complement each other in terms of media: photography, video, sculpture, found objects, newspaper clips, installation. 
    The most compelling exhibition is probably the On Kawara retrospective: a recording of the conceptual artist's existence as art practice, explored in many different media, from paintings to mail art, artist books. The exhibition starts with work from 1964, produced in different places across the planet during the artist numerous travels and includes several series:

• date paintings from Today; 
• postcards from I Got Up; 
• telegrams from I Am Still Alive; 
• maps from I Went series; 
• lists of names from I Met;
• newspaper clips from I Read;
• inventory of paintings from Journals; 
• calendars from One Hundred Years and One Million Years.

Walking in the continuous six-floor ramp of the Guggenheim Museum feels like joining On Kawara on his  meditation on living in the awareness of space and time as recording of his existence. Life is recorded with the accuracy of a database. I feel particularly intrigued by this art practice which I experienced in a participatory mode in 2009, as one of the readers for reading for One Million Years 

The three exhibitions made me think of Michel de Certau "The Practice of Everyday Life": a welcomed diversion from many contemporary art exhibitions where often gimmicks camouflage the lack of contents.

Reading at On Kawara Installation

Yesterday, January 23 2009 from 4:05pm to 5:35pm EST, I read 436 numbers in English language, at the On Kawara exhibition, David Zwirner Gallery, 533 West 19th Street, New York, USA. Each number represented a year in the future. I read the even numbers representing each subsequent future year, from the year 47752 AD to the year 48624 AD. Sitting next to me was Robert Ayers, a performing artist, who was reading odd numbers. We were in a sound proof booth, a white box inside the white box of the gallery. Reading numbers ---that is using my voice to say a word without any emotional content--- was a meditative experience. I was focusing on the here and now, almost like recitating a mantra, trying to concentrate only on the reading of numbers, disregarding any external perceptual stimulus, such as the gallery visitors looking at us from the ouside of the booth and hearing us through speakers. The physical perceptual isolation of the booth was matched by the emotional isolation of the performed actions.