333,333 (detail, bottom left corner)
DONE
“On January 4, 1966, Kawara made the first of his “Today” series, of which the work in this collection, April 24, 1990, is an example. Each consists of a neatly hand-lettered canvas commemorating the day of its creation. The canvases are stored in specially made cardboard boxes containing pages from a local newspaper of the same day and from whatever place the peripatetic artist happened to find himself in when he made the painting. Kawara does not paint every day—in the first year of this series, he made 241 such works—nor are all his canvases identical; the background tone varies from grays to reds to blues, and the typeface changes as well….”
-MOMA
I didn’t think much about Today when I spent time at Dia: Beacon back in college, but Kawara’s been on my mind lately. Due to a lifelong interest in personal routines, as well as a recent general listlessness on my part, the “Life’s Work”, whose content is time but whose trajectory will ultimately be curbed by time, strikes my fancy. The growing importance of documentation, and the pervasiveness of new media that facilitate it, has me thinking about why we do it, how we do it, and how it insinuates itself into the very content of everyday life that it claims to represent. Documentation as content.
Eriksen Skajaa - The Monastery, a quiet room in an office space, Oslo 2011. Courtesy of the architects.
Eefje De Coninck
These crates are used to transport fish from the trawlers they are caught oh to the warehouses that store and process them. When I was in Skagaströnd, a few of the residents and I walked over to the harbor, where a big ship was unloading many of these crates, which were full of fish. The smell was overwhelming. I really like the sunbleached color and the shape of these crates.
Richard Aldrich, Reality Painting #1 (My apartment) and Reality Painting #2 (Patricia’s studio), 2009.
I saw these at SFMOMA back in December. They are in a little wing off to the side of the permanent collection. A little bit funny and airy.
Bente Skjøttgaard, White Turquoise Cloud no. 1003
Still from Ben Kinsley’s Street With a View
http://www.streetwithaview.com/
This proliferation of “Google Street View art” has me thinking. On the one hand, Wolf underscores the technology’s paradoxical knack for rendering bodies and neighborhoods ambiguous. The faces of residents caught candidly on the Street View camera are magnified in such a way that the pixel, the typically self-effacing component of visual information in a digital photograph, takes precedence, such that all facial detail is effaced. On the other, Kinsley’s work posits the technology of Google Street View as an arena for simultaneous creation and the assertion of a local identity. In this instance, the surveillance model—a car with a camera attached to it drives down the street and records all viewpoints present along it—presents an optimal platform for micropirating, for working towards an individual (or communal) creative means within an established system. Staged performances, such as impromptu marching bands and parade-style costuming, become incorporated into the information retrieved, which is then organized and transmitted as fact when it is uploaded to Google Street View.
Michael Wolf, Image #3, from the series Street View Portraits
