Titus O.

Let’s keep this short and sweet: I think Ludwig Schwarz is best artist in Dallas. Probably in Texas. At least of his generation. He wuz robbed in that Texas Prize fiasco the other year. If you don’t know his work, he paints often crazed pictures and sometimes quiet pictures, writes music to accompany wacked-out videos about spices, interior decorators, football, and zombies, uses his pets (cat, dog, bird) as muses, and engages in subversively approachable acts of detournement, like years ago turning Angstrom gallery into a Rent-A-Center, or sending snapshots to China to be produced as sofa-size oil paintings. He also makes some mean ribs. Generally, Dallas doesn’t know what to do with him, though the DMA did finally buy a painting last year, thanks in part to some reliable representation by Road Agent gallery .

His wife Marjorie is no slouch either, but with absolutely no desire for your approval, doesn’t show the eclectic products of her home studio very often. You have to sort of luck out (she volunteers at the zoo, and just painted a great series depicting every species in the aviary where she’s been working; and my wife is dying for one of her hand-made purses.) The Schwarz’s recently collaborated on daily cell-phone videos for a show at the Dallas Contemporary .

I got an email today that they’re having a preview reception-deal on the Lower East Side in NYC this week for the jewelry they also co-produce. As the progeny of a jeweler father, Ludwig’s pieces are the decorative equivalent of the food I recently described at Schwa: raucous, smart, tough, sophisticated, funny, and like him, totally defiant of conventional notions of taste. This is not to say they aren’t seductively lust-inducing. In fact, I find them all the more so for the funk-factor. I love how raw the pieces often seem, resembling complex truffle candies left in your car in the Texas summer heat – but just made out of gold, pearls, and diamonds instead of chocolate, cashews, and raisins. The Japanese have a term for this kind of aesthetic: wabi sabi. It translates roughly as the ‘the beauty of the slightly fucked up.’

Check out the Demotionart website , and if you’ve received that IRS check, count this as a suggestion about where to spend it.

A few months ago, I came across this quote in Rolling Stone, from an interview with Dr Drew Pinsky :

“I believe something has shifted. Frankly, something substantial happened when we developed antibiotics and hormonal contraceptives. Before 1950, almost half of American families could expect a child to die. Way more women could expect to die during childbirth. Living past 50 was sort of extraordinary. Now death and dying don’t really exist for us. We don’t need to deal with it. With birth control, sexuality became unhinged from biological reality. Throughout human history, sex carried with it heavy consequences. It could kill you. Suddenly we were unhinged from that, and I think our culture has been rattling ever since. In five hundred years, people will say the biological circumstances of human life changed profoundly, and it took them 150 years to figure it out. They’ll say everyone became narcissistic, obsessed with instant pleasure, they stopped taking care of their children, and all hell broke loose. Listen, in the days of Freud, narcissism was a foot note in psychological journals. Now it is the standard personality of our culture. Nothing but grandiose narcissistic thinking everywhere!”

The culture of narcissism. That’s us, alright. I like how Pinsky ties it in to evolutionary advances in fundamental quality of life. Every stage poses new threats and challenges. What else are we supposed to do when faced with life-spans doubled from a century ago, the luxury of philosophical relativism, and baby-less sex? Party on, that’s what!

It’s not like narcissism is a new thing. We all go through it in the spectrum of development, and hopefully keep attempting to grow beyond its niggling traces into old age. But when its pathological, ie the primary personality characteristic of anyone beyond age 4, then we have a problem. There’re generational flavors to it. Before WWII, it almost wasn’t an issue – life was too tough, and you were dead by 50. But then there was the Boom, and subsequently, we contracted Boomeritis from the seething millions of LSD-initiated, joint-toking, bell-bottom-slapping children of the revolution, who took it to a whole other, nauseatingly self-absorbed level (had enough of the Clinton’s and the Rolling Stones, anyone?)

There’s the shoe and navel gazing of my own generation, X (we got the coolest tag.) I think we were on the whole more introverted about it, so embarrassed were we by our parent’s behavior, and not yet raised to think we were each god’s gift to the universe (the folks were too busy doing est and swinging). Which brings up the Gen Y, each child raised to be a special flower and get a trophy just for showing up. Their apparent motto is “hey, why ain’t I famous already?”

You can track it in the galleries. One example that comes to mind is that Kristin Lucas show a few months back at And/Or, which looked super artsy good (light box: check. Floor projector: check. rough-hewn materials: check. Rainbow-array-background portraits: check), but read as the most grandiose concoction of fruity-flavored me-ness west of Williamsburg. But it didn’t have that kind of pathetic “I suck so much I’m great”-ness of most Gen X stars — think about it: Sean Landers, Radiohead (“I’m a creep”), Beck (“I’m a loser”), Cobain (“I hate myself for being white, for being male, for being successful”), and a slew of YBA’s. No, there’s a new kind of me-ness on display these days.

In their CADD Fair booth, And/Or re-presented the transcript of Lucas’ court case, where she changed her name from “Kristin Lucas” to “Kristin Lucas.” Ha ha, funny, right? Well, yeah, until you read her precious, wince-worthy preamble to the judge (who’s repsonses are hilarious, and as grounded as she was dizzyingly etheric.) To paraphrase, she said that she was experiencing a rebirth in her sense of self, she was new and re-freshed and raw and just felt so really very freeee that she wanted to document it and have it acknowledged by the state (leaving the judge to rightfully question why she would make this the state’s job.) And by all of her artist pals, who made portraits before and after her transformation (erp. That’s me swallowing back lunch.)

Isn’t that almost the definition of narcissism? And then, to assert the whole embellished farce as art? It’s a pile-on of sticky self-promotion, that I’d probably like better if she just weren’t being so coy, and cloyingly sincere about it all. I really don’t want to harsh on her mellow of self-discovery. It just neatly sums up my annoyance with a lot of new art.

It’s not that I doubt the artist’s belief – it’s just that sincerity isn’t enough. I’m not that interested in wading around in the products of some kid’s messy individuation, as profound and special as it may seem to them at the time; no matter how well it’s presented.

Post-modern relativism has done a nice job opening up the territory for everybody to do their thang. I guess personally, I’m just drawn to work that acts more as counterweight to cultural pathologies, and not just as a clever repackaging of them. I remember kinda feeling that way about Landers too, actually.

Pinsky’s talking about a whole level of weirdness in LA that doesn’t exactly apply to most of our lives (well, then there’s Loveline; he really does know of what he speaks)– but as the line between art and entertainment is danced around, and a certain class of visible artists live like rock stars while making art about living like rock stars, it’s just food for thought. Exceptions abound – so do examples. Feel free to share them.

July 16, 1969
Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., Michael Collins
© On Kawara, courtesy of the artist and
David Zwirner, New York

A lifetime: what does it amount to? The body moves here, the body moves there, it encounters other bodies, perhaps even producing a couple more. Years scroll by and fin, exit, stage left. Sure, maybe those motions are spectacular enough to land you a one-hour stint on the Biography Channel (where it seems to help if you’ve committed some heinous acts, be they murderous or musical). But isn’t most of that just whistling past the graveyard? Doesn’t so much of what passes for memoir end up reducing the impenetrable mystery of our true nature to just so many facts, and dramas diminished by interpretation?

I get a little queasy when I hear those tributes in the media to fallen heroes, whether at the World Trade Center, or recently blown up in Iraq, or crushed by a drunk driver heading home on I-35. Loving father, mother, brother, spouse; funny, sweet, courageous, loving. Aren’t we all really so much more – and so much less?

On Kawara has now spent over 40 years documenting the brutally/poetically mundane base parameters of life on earth, meat-body bound. A selection of his works is on view at the Dallas Museum of Art in On Kawara: 10 Tableaux and 16,952 Pages.

Kawara’s I Met 1968-1979 is a series of black volumes distinguished from each other only by the year, in silver numbers, on their spines. Their pages simply list the people the artist encountered each day – sometimes it’s just the same individual for an entire week. Lover, spouse, cellmate? Questions arise but remain unanswerable. Occasionally, you come across a recognizable art world luminary, but mostly, the names are unknown to us, blank indicators of personal connections that remain unexplained and unknown.

On Kawara
I Went ‘Dallas,’ 1968–79
binders, ink on printed paper, and plastic sleeves
collection of the artist, courtesy of the artist and
David Zwirner, New York
photo courtesy of David Zwirner

Similar annual tomes, titled I Went, are filled with red-inked maps, one for each day, showing the methodical movements of a being traversing a city’s labyrinth; the planet’s surface. Trips to the post office, the store, a gallery, or often enough, nowhere at all – just a static dot on a page, presumably indicating an artist hard at work, making maps and books.

Kawara has produced one of the most convincing and consistent testaments to the conceptual art revolution of the 1960s, but he made a smart, early decision to maintain a conversation with the historical language of painting. That production is now documented on one small, framed calendar chart, showing every year of his life and then some. A green ink dot indicates if a painting was completed; a red one signifies if it was bigger than the average; yellow simply shows if the artist managed to just survive another 24 hours.

Begun in 1966, the paintings tersely record the date in an unchanging font and format, and have become the artist’s signature works. Early on, Kawara made them every day, but the calendar reveals the eventual ebb and flow of their production. As easy as it would make it to just silkscreen them, Kawara instead crafts each by hand in a laborious day-long process. Composed simply of a few numbers, some letters, a canvas and some paint, they nonetheless bear a marked, if oblique, relationship to the landscape tradition (both Asian and European), but allude to vistas more esoteric than terrestrial, remaining retinal in only the most utilitarian way.

July 21, 1969
Apollo 11 at the Distance of 238,857 Miles
from the Earth
© On Kawara, courtesy of the artist and
David Zwirner, New York

Kawara is apparently an avid reader of daily newspapers. Selected leftovers are boxed and labeled, silhouetting the individual against a background of dramatic happenstance. Humanity’s tragedies and triumphs aren’t editorialized upon, not in a way we can clearly discern – except in their re-presentation. Kawara’s emphasis on certain dates, specified by the increased scale of some paintings, is sometimes clear – like on the day of the first lunar landing, paired here with dramatic newspaper headlines – but the significance of other days remains unfathomable.

These human-scaled histories are drops in the proverbial ocean of Kawara’s catalogued eons. A million years BC fill five volumes, a million years AD fill another five. Years are listed individually, column after column, page after page, book after book, coolly laid out in glass cases, reinforcing an eerie objectivity. What was going on in year 368,937 BC? You’re left absurdly considering the specificities of a year in the life of a wooly mammoth, or of some hairy hominid predecessor walking a savannah far away in time and space. And where will humanity be in 237,635 AD? It all helps keep your home foreclosure in some kind of proper context.

Kawara’s operation is essentially a series of these perspective-altering mechanisms, generating questions from the cosmic to the intimately personal. Kawara mostly documents his own life but, because he reveals nothing of his internal experience, it all points directly at you. What would the map of my day look like? What was I doing that particular year? Am I any more than the objective markers of my passage through time and space? Meanwhile, the percentage of us born after the earliest of his date paintings increases, and death will find us all long before his art stops addressing the earth’s rotation around the sun. Time is against us. In Kawara’s boundary-less art, we all become bit players in a universal theater; sand in his hourglass.

The One Million Years Project (detail)
© On Kawara, courtesy of the artist and
David Zwirner, New York

It’s staggering to imagine Kawara setting up the basic parameters of his artistic inquiry more than 40 years ago and working within them since, maintaining this kind of fetishistic intensity. This is the genius of his achievement. It’s reminiscent of the Mayan Day Keepers, who believe their calendrical rituals keep the world itself spinning; or the Hopi, who believe their precisely scheduled dances keep the desert rains coming and the sun on its track. I doubt Kawara has such a grandiose faith. But if finding meaning is the bedrock of existential satisfaction, the artist’s dedication to this austerely minimal program paradoxically indicates complex webs of connection, and underscores the intrinsic richness of the very act of being. Even the most useless of days is worth attending to and documenting – and even the most dramatic will slide quickly past in the endless stream. Life’s a killer, and time the great equalizer.

What am I? What constitutes the self? What does it all amount to? Much of what we witness in the news and in the tumult of our daily lives are simply symptoms of the fitful ways in which humans go about trying to seek answers to these kinds of questions. Kawara confronts us with fundamental issues, devoid of didactic threads of interpretation. Stripped clean from any conventional idea of expression, narrative, or aesthetic manipulation, he just gently keeps redirecting our attention to the biggest, most distressing, and in the end most liberating of themes. You are not (just) your name, your resume, or even those conflicted ideas battling for supremacy for an egoic identity. Instead, we’re each one of us a loaded, double-barreled question. And at the same time, the targeted answer. I am, not because I think it so; but simply because I Am.

Our individual life spans are so relatively insignificant, and yet so rich with desire, poignancy, affection and hope. As I meandered through this exhibition, its installation as spare as the mind after a week on a mountain, a poem by the late Korean Zen master Seung Sahn echoed through my head. Kawara’s dedicated, lifelong effort embodies and generates the same kinds of questions, forcefully demonstrating ways for art to continue to transcend the market, fashion, academic specialization and tenacious yet outmoded notions of taste.
Coming empty-handed, going empty-handed – that is human.
When you are born, where do you come from?
When you die, where do you go?
Life is like a floating cloud which appears.
Death is like a floating cloud which disappears.
The floating cloud itself originally does not exist.
Life and death, coming and going, are also like that.
But there is one thing which always remains clear.
It is pure and clear, not depending on life and death.

Then what is this one pure and clear thing?

On Kawara: 10 Tableaux and 16,952 Pages
Dallas Museum of Art
May 18 – August 24

I just returned from another fact-finding, job/home-hunting mission to Chicago (happy to report SAIC took pity and gave me a teaching job.) I like Chicago, and maybe Chicago likes me. Somebody lock me up in a cage with a bratwurst and a stack of Tribunes already…

Feeling the need to go up on my own and get to work, I got up the other morning and half asleep, started gambling on Priceline. Dangerous. The next thing you know I’m staring incredulous at a page telling me I have $140 roundtrip, non-stop tickets to O’Hare in a week. Shit, I thought: looks like I’m going back to Chicago.

It worked out ok though – the first night I rode some friend’s coattails to Schwa, a tiny, currently much ballyhooed avant-cuisine BYOB in Wickerpark. It seats about 25, and I guess takes booking weeks in advance to get into. I humbly suggest that they redesign their website, which gives the impression you’re heading to a light-filled health spa café in Sedona. Instead, the front is a nondescript recently graffiti-d featureless grey slab. We walked in the plastic black door to blaring Norwegian black metal, handing off our copious booze stash only when I managed to get someone’s attention in the kitchen (all of about 8 steps.) The staff was about 6 guys, none seeming over 30. The tattooed, um, somewhat fragrant and frazzled waiter turned out to be the head chef and owner. The food was nothing short of profound, a series of masticatory mash ups that ran from the riotous to sublime.

I maybe liked some things better than others, but the food went beyond my puny ideas of taste. Sea urchin ice cream cone? Yeah, it works, bitches! Jelly fish tentacle pad thai? Ha! the tamest thing on the nine-course fixed menu – which really was about 13 courses, because they just kept sending out experiments du jour to blow our minds. Like a personal welcome party, accompanied by hardcore rap, we were served some Texan antelope – recently “helicopter shot by sniper rifle” we were informed. I knew I was at home. It was, quite simply, art – in my mouth. And I say that affectionately.

I did finally balk at the deep fried sweetbreads on mango glace for desert. I was like, come on, can’t I just get a refreshing key lime foam with essence of lotus blossom or something? I needed a break. But no, there will be no relief for you. You will be punished for your insolence! Your flaccid Texan tastebuds must be disciplined until they learn! This is Chicago, and we are Schwa!

Friday I met art critic Jim Yood at the MCA for the press preview of the Jeff Koons retrospective. Kind of like the food at Schwa, I feel incapable of really judging it. I said to Aaron Baker, who was also there, “Whatever your qualms with this or that piece…” “It’s undeniable,” he responded. And that’s it, completely.

(Curator/Robert Storr nemesis Francesco Bonami docenting the press)

Koons was there, and spoke briefly to assembled crowd of press crews, critics, and the curious who’d got in by hook or crook. Typically seamless and smoothly optimistic, he gave his usual polished spiel , saying he hoped that his art can give hope and “help people suspend judgment so that they can see beauty in all around them, and know that they are perfect, just as they are.” “I love Chicago,” he said later. “I went to a Bull’s game with my kids. It was wonderful – all the lights. All those big guys, running around…”

It was audaciously bland and platitudanal, and I sort of loved it. He’s truly in a tradition of grand American raconteurs; boldly unafflicted by self-censorship, and eerily, pathologically sincere (like most good serial killers), he will inarguably go down as the singular artist of the post-Warhol era. He’s a man for our time.

I didn’t go thinking that I’d even much care. Koons shmoons, I thought; been there, done that. But seeing all of his signature pieces at once like this – there are so damn many of them, most surprisingly affecting. They convincingly transcend their respective moments, just as they were meant to, and they are going to keep telling stranger and stranger stories as they carry on into the future. He always says he’s talking about love, and beauty, and faith – which is so weird, because everyone generally thinks he’s pedaling emptiness, stupidity, and death. All of the mirrored surfaces of his pieces had me literally reflecting: is there any substantive difference between these supposed poles?

Is Jeff Koons my new Zen master?

Maybe. Good is bad; bad is good. They lose their sense completely; taste short-circuited, I was left hovering, aesthetically weightless, not a little dumb-founded. Shiny, pretty, happy…it all really did sort of make me feel good, despite myself. Even the close-up of Ilona’s head-sized, star-like anus, pudendum penetrated by Koons’ tree-scaled cock, seems culturally prophetic (from its origin nearly 20 years ago,) rich with meaning and conceptual/aesthetic sophistication. How’d he do that?

Koons himself was being kept separate from the crowd, always in another gallery, behind closed doors. I went to the front and asked for a free catalog – which the staff happily handed over – and I walked back, fearlessly passing the entourage, to where Koons was being photographed. Or so I thought. He was archly posing, hand on chin, looking as if in deep contemplation upon one of his newest sculptures of cast steel animal beach toys suspended from the ceiling. I looked around – nobody was actually taking any shots, or even watching. I walked up, congratulated him on a great show, and asked him to sign my catalog. He graciously assented, and we chatted while he took five minutes to complete an odd drawing of a waterfall cascading over rocks. “It’s very 19^th century,” he said cryptically, handing the book over, gazing past me, smiling coolly, permanently unfazed.