The Painter of Dematerialization

Medium, Specificity, Law

Rosalind Krauss says of the Portapak, an early portable video camera first introduced to the American consumer market by Sony in 1967, that it ‘shattered the modernist dream’, by which she means that it finally severed the long and, to her mind, productive modernist genealogy of medium-based aesthetic thought (Krauss, 1999: 30). In other words, the Portapak forced a reconfiguration of a previously productive relationship between materiality and value (for Krauss, understood as meaning). With an equal sense of epistemic drama, Benjamin Buchloh describes Conceptual art’s re-organization of the materiality of art, its erosion of the traditional aesthetic bases of modernist art accomplished first naïvely in the aesthetic of administration and then self-reflexively in the critique of institutions. Thus, Buchloh figures Conceptualism as the endpoint of modernism’s productive dialectic progress – that is, as the end of medium-based aesthetics (Buchloh, 1990). In both stories of decline, something in the relationship between materiality and economy shifts around. This shift occurs in both the commodity landscape (e.g. the Portapak for Krauss; the new labor of middle management for Buchloh) and in the art world (i.e. Conceptualism in both cases), and it changes the accounting of value, the work of assessment, within and across both spheres.

In the case of the Portapak and the video tape recorder (VTR), however, the first cry of a bad break in the order of things came, in fact, not from cultural critics like Krauss and Buchloh but from Universal City Studios and the MPAA, who in 1976 sued Sony Corporation of America for copyright infringements allegedly perpetrated by Sony’s new device – by the mere existence of that device, as well as the specific uses that consumers had found for it. ⁶ Their criticism of the ‘savagery’ done to their media products by new recording technologies ultimately reached the Supreme Court of the United States in 1983 and, just prior to that, produced the striking testimony by MPAA president Jack Valenti quoted above. ⁷ While Buchloh and Krauss are more ambivalent than Valenti, and so more open to the potentials opened in that moment of dematerialization, all of the critical voices above agree on the basics of the process they decry: new technologies of making and distribution get introduced to the culture; those technologies change what was profitable and productive about the past; this change, understood as a reorganization of the specific physical qualities of a medium, thrusts us into a new and uncertain future in which value must be secured again through other means and against that which would erode it.

The diagnoses differ, as do the modes of redress, but stated in the Conceptualist vocabulary of the time, all parties were responding to a problem of dematerialization. Lucy Lippard’s and John Chandler’s term, positioned here between aesthetics and the law, comes into renewed importance and also needs to be turned against its common use. In that understanding, Conceptualism arrived on the scene to undo the objecthood of objects, to undo, thereby, the way that objecthood supported, as ground, an expressive practice of self that could be inscribed upon that ground. Art thereby becomes language, concept, idea, all things that, under the work of the ‘de-’, would cease to provide ground for expressive practices. That story finds its authority in Lippard and Chandler’s original essay itself (published in 1968), with its attack on the anti-intellectualism of expressive painting in favor of an ‘ultra-Conceptualism’ that replaced romantic subjects with rational workers.

But the essay often speaks in terms of tendencies rather than finalities. Dematerialization was a process whose end, as the authors emphasize at the conclusion of their short essay, could not be foreseen (Lippard and Chandler, 1968: 50). The ‘de-’ never ceased to do its work of undoing, and so might not, as I’ve been suggesting, rest or end once a particular form of physicality had been supplanted (Lippard, 1973: 5; Lippard and Chandler, 1968). While Lippard and Chandler’s aim was to provide a critical and largely synchronic assessment of some trends in the art world, their description – seen in a wider historical framing in which materiality gets repeatedly eroded then re-formed around new material bases and new practices – might now ramify across a far wider and more diachronic field. Lippard’s later book Six Years (1973) hints at such a reconceptualization. In that sense, dematerialization starts to look like a tendential process that disembeds sources of value from the media of their former propagation and preservation, opening the door to new materializations of value that might be good for aesthetics and/or capitalism, or might not. The instability that follows in the wake of dematerialization is why the process, again and again, produces such dramatic, epistemic responses.

When, at roughly the same time as the publication of Lippard and Chandler’s essay, Universal City Studios began to see signs of the dematerialization of their industry’s valuable products – television shows and movies that were once secured in the media of broadcast and cinematic projection, now transcoded into the recordable, tradable, collectible media of the videocassette tape – it appealed to the law, as many companies in a similar position have done. Medium-specificity, seen as a set of knowable, controllable physical properties, anchored and secured a profit stream for the makers of television. This was exactly the understanding of medium from which Krauss, responding to exactly the same transformations, was beginning to distance herself in ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’ in 1999. But the media industries clung (cynically, maybe; instrumentally, certainly) to the idea of a medium as rooted in specific physical properties, even as they were looking ahead to new material forms of profit that partook, in their own ways, of the procedural, recursive understanding of medium-specificity that Krauss conceived in that moment (specificity not as specific materials but as the procedure of specifying, whatever the materials).

The broadcast signals that delivered television were ephemeral, and were certainly not receivable on their own by human senses – that was their materiality, not their lack of it. And this is precisely how they were propriety, controllable. The Portapak and VCR, with their capacity to record, threatened that profit stream, based as it was on a set of predictable physical properties. ⁸ If medium-specificity in this sense could no longer guarantee that the media industries would continue to profit, and profit exclusively, from controlling the materialization and dissemination of their products, then copyright law would provide a prosthesis of control – control over the very idea of those products.

Seth Sieglaub, famous curator of the early Conceptualists, was also quick to supplement the dematerialized art objects he worked so hard to promote with a legal prosthesis: the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement (1971), or Artist’s Contract (Siegelaub, 1973). Broadly supported by the artists with whom Sieglaub was in dialogue, including Dan Graham, Ed Rusha and Sol LeWitt, the contract tried to secure for artists some control over their work after it was sold, including royalties on every subsequent sale and exhibition as well as on books about their art. It is as if the law would instantly rematerialize or respecify the art object at precisely the moment it had, in some crucial respects, been dematerialized.

When dematerialization of a medium occurs, as it did with both Conceptualism and the VCR, stable structures (of production, of distribution, of monetization) get destabilized and a competition occurs on that site to capitalize on that which has been set loose: Krauss’s reconceptualization of medium specificity to be less physical than procedural, Buchloh’s reassessment of Conceptualist practices, the time-shifting practices of VCR users, and the lawsuits on behalf of the culture industries are all participants in this conflict. The uncertainty that opens up, if ever only briefly, establishes dematerialization as a site of political struggle involving and instantiating a relationship between aesthetics on the one hand (configurations of matter and value) and the law as materiality’s capitalist supplement on the other. The property industries have had two main strategies for responding to dematerialization, each of which is mirrored by certain conceptual and curatorial framings of Conceptualist practice. In the first, copyright law attempts to maintain a profit stream from existing forms of materiality (call this tradition or the history of the medium). At the same time, copyright law is also used to try to ensure a future profit stream from the new or reconfigured forms of materiality presaged by any particular dematerialization process. This latter strategy has tried, at least since the Sixties and the VCR, to re-code, as violations of property rights, not just the offending technologies but the practices invented in the wake of dematerialization: time shifting, guerrilla documentary, video art, file sharing, etc. This attempt to capture practice has been crucial to copyright activism around the dematerializations of digital culture but in fact beginning much earlier.

Intellectual property law, faced in the Seventies with the VCR, in the Nineties with digital reproduction and the cultures it was beginning to spawn, and in the Noughts with a range of technologies for reproducing and sharing digital files at the scale of a distributed network, was incited by the culture industries to invent a suite of responses, all of which are well documented in the legal literature on digital copyright law. Relying on that literature’s descriptive work (if not always its political responses), I simply enumerate the main responses here (I trust that some of their echoes in Conceptualist rhetoric will be apparent):

In order to shore up the property values that industry has come to rely on, and in the face of dematerializing forces that erode the material specificity that once protected that value, the law in all of the above responses aspires to organize life itself, to bring life itself (practices, adaptations, appropriations, circulations, exchanges) under the governmental regulation of copyright. So, for instance, it is now not just digital files that are subject to the regulation of copyright, it is the uses to which those files might be put – this is the work of DRM technologies. And it is not just the idea for a particular medicine or formulation that can now be brought under the regulatory power of copyright, it is the very plant life from which that medicine is adapted (Winickoff, 2003). And when copyright is violated, it is now prosecuted as an individualized, moral failing, as a problem at the scale of life and practice, not a civic concern.

These transformations of copyright law are well documented (although not yet well resisted). And they are a large part of the reason that people feel, and rightly, that the internet has been commoditized: not just because the most popular social media sites are distributed commodities run by massive corporations, but because precisely the kinds of collectivized energies that generate the internet, and regenerate it every day, that make it such a ‘discursive chaos’ (Krauss, 1999: 31), are now more often than not subject to property law.

Conceptualist rhetoric seems to predict these changes, both in the ways it mobilizes art along the axis of idea and expression, but also in Conceptual artists’ turn to contracts and a legal discourse that would continue to protect their artworks even when manifest as mere ideas. Conceptualist practices, that is, shifted the grounds of materiality, and in so dematerializing the artwork, they opened the door to its rematerialization upon different grounds, grounds that many thought needed to be propped up by the law in order to remain legible and accountable as possessions, and thus as artworks. Dematerialization is about the process whereby the property form changes alongside the materiality and mediation of everyday life. Intellectual property law is the technology of this transformation. The point is that materiality and law are not thinkable without one another. And when they are delaminated, as they usually are, we end up with overly materialist or overly immaterial notions of materiality.

On Kawara’s Workday

On Kawara’s work, in being more of a habitation of than a response to dematerialization, does not try to escape or sidestep or fix a problem whose overall contours no one in the late Sixties could have fully known. It arrogates no distance, neither critical nor historical. It is not retrospective because it never stops but only ever continues (unto death). It is not progressive, because it never varies, never develops. On Kawara doesn’t embrace or celebrate dematerialization; he simply sets up a practice in parallel to it that, along that proximate vector, attempts to limn its full scope: its durations, its cycles, that which gets dematerialized as well as the new materialities that arise in the wake of that space-clearing, but most of all, the forms of labor that are themselves deformed and reformed in the process. Like dematerialization itself, On Kawara unspecifies the medium of art, but also intimates, by way of what it never quite becomes, the vectors along which it will come to be rematerialized, recuperated for and as secure value.

If Joseph Kosuth rarifies artistic labor by divesting it of every quality save the most important, namely its own conceptual system (a procedure Benjamin Buchloh, 1990, says leads to tautology), then On Kawara can be said to move in the other direction: to generalize artistic labor so that it is almost in-different, so diffuse as to be hardly separable into distinct practices or projects. This is directly manifest in On Kawara’s Today series, commonly known as his Date Paintings, and even more so when that series of paintings is considered together with the various series that, since the 1970s, literally constituted his days: I Got Up, I Am Still Alive, I Read, I Went, and I Met (Weidemann, 1994: 54–55). ¹⁰

In the Date Paintings, a project which began on 4 January 1966 and ended only when he died, On Kawara sets out to paint each day’s date in oil on canvas (see Figure 2). He chooses from among eight pre-determined canvas sizes, and three pre-determined background colors: red, blue and a dark grey (although he mixes the paint anew daily, so the colors vary infinitely and sometimes, in the right light, perceptibly). These facts are well known, but On Kawara’s abstentions force their rehearsal, for what else does he leave us? As will become obvious in what follows, the Date Paintings make a grotesquerie of ekphrasis. The text is always painted in white, its language and orthography chosen to match the calendrical conventions of the country in which he makes the painting. The Date Paintings represent the date, but also, working beyond representation, they consume the day so represented.

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Figure 2

MTAA, On Kawara Update (v2), 2007, screen grab (29 February 2016, accessed 27 April 2016). Image reproduced with permission of the artists.

On Kawara typically needs at least eight hours just to paint each day’s date. With this, he references the standard eight-hour workday. ¹¹ At the same time – now looking ahead to the new economy work of today and not just back to the nine-to-five rhythms so iconic of an earlier era of labor – the quantity of time he spent, though significant, was always secondary to the process or project that fills that time (Deleuze, 1992; Ross, 2003). On Kawara works until his paintings are complete, sometimes right up until midnight if the canvas is a large one. If he doesn’t complete an individual date painting by midnight of the day whose date that painting depicts, he destroys the painting as well as its record in the book that On Kawara called his journal. His work, in other words, is project-based more than hours-based, although within the confines of a day’s absolutism and the project’s ongoingness.

On Kawara has, in other words, chosen a form and a method of recording the date that consumes the better part of the day so recorded. Much of the rest of his day, everyday, is taken up with other modes of documentation: noting the time he awoke, noting his continued livelihood, noting the people he met, the things he read, the places he went. Each project is a kind of schematic of the activity described, but also immanently entangled with that activity. The representational systems of his series – canvas, paint, postcard, stamp, type, telegram, newspaper – collapse into that which the system might otherwise simply represent: its content or referent. Labor and life thus become indistinct, leaving nothing to represent, no remainder, only a practice to continue indefinitely.

So while some of his contemporaries questioned the materiality of traditional modernist mediums, and critical optimism gathered cautiously around the erosion of value that that shift might effect, On Kawara’s Today series continued to operate within the materiality of modernist media. On Kawara, in other words, continues to paint, and to paint with obvious skill, a disciplined hand. What he does without is the supercharged economy of innovation to which Conceptual art committed itself as a consequence of re-conceiving creative labor as ‘intellectual labor’ (Alberro, 2003: 215–216). ¹² Robert Morris: ‘The problem has been for some time one of ideas – those most admired are the ones with the biggest, most incisive ideas (e.g., Cage & Duchamp) …’ (Buchloh, 1990: 115). On Kawara seems, in this respect, to only have had one idea, an idea in some respects as old as time itself (i.e. time’s regimentation), and to have committed the rest of his life to seeing it through. The act of seeing it through, that ongoing process which is predominantly a process of painting, is the work in a way that it could not have been for Conceptual artists who often employed other people to see their projects through once the original idea had been established – artists like Sol LeWitt, for whom ‘execution is a perfunctory affair.’ LeWitt’s famous statement: ‘the idea becomes the machine that makes the art’, relegates hired labor to a status below that of the machine, making it doubly devalued (LeWitt, 1967: 12). The dematerialization of the art object, in other words, is a process that produced a critical distinction between the labor of conception and the labor of production or manufacture. This is why Benjamin Buchloh (1990), looking back on the decade from the 1980s, called it an ‘aesthetic of administration’. At about the same time (1984), Apple was just beginning to market a new personal computer precisely to white-collar middle managers, a computer that promised to unshackle the creative labor of managing from the labor of production, labor which could thereafter be understood as machinic, automatable, and de-valued.

On Kawara’s Today series, by contrast, took on the appearance and the means of traditional medium-based craft: the ascetic seclusion, the absolute devotion to a medium and to one’s own particular practice of it, the long hours spent in front of the canvas. In the Date Paintings, On Kawara takes a demanding bodily practice and, precisely by pursuing it with the kind of commitment Lippard and Chandler (1968: 31) disdained, empties it of its magic, its transcendence, its value in those forms. ¹³ In doing so, he makes possible the re-location and re-distribution of that value: to the affective impact of the project as a whole, to the ongoingness of the Today series, to the form of ceaseless, monotonous, yet life-bound labor that the project involves, to the repercussions of that labor on the rest of On Kawara’s life, and most pointedly, to personhood itself as it is given form by labor.

The day treated as a unit of measure – a unit of labor, an accounting of the body’s work that we hear in that syncretism ‘the workday’ – is, if anything is, On Kawara’s artistic medium. By this, I mean that the workday is the frame and object of his labor; it is the vehicle for his work as well as that which he goes to work on. Painting, while absolutely central to the conceptual shape of the project, is central only in its near stasis, its non-development over time. The process of On Kawara’s painting never obviously or dramatically changes, nor do its results, except by way of external systems (e.g. of font and typography as well as the calendar itself) that themselves never change in a way that could easily be recuperated as value. They only vary minimally within repeated parameters. There are, in short, just todays, quiddity flattened out to a horizon that is always as near as midnight. The stillness of painting itself amplifies such slight variations, making the most ordinary of differences seem busy and dramatic in the jolting contrast of frames. ¹⁴

If the workday is On Kawara’s medium, then medium in his work has become the site into which life and labor collapse. ¹⁵ As an artist, Conceptual or otherwise, On Kawara produces objects of value. To remain an artist, these products must become, one way or another, properties. If we think of On Kawara as a maker of paintings, then the importance of this line of questioning disappears and we are left to contemplate the ongoing mystery or travesty by which the art market continues to assimilate more and weirder and more recalcitrant kinds of things as commodities and thus as properties. We become ongoing witnesses to capitalism itself – not so interesting; anyway, no more or less interesting that that activity has ever been. But the same thing happens if we see his paintings together with his various other durational projects as a brand of Conceptualism. Something shifts, however, if we ask what it means to make the workday into a medium. In tying his paintings so closely, even ontologically, to the form of the day, and then combining the Today series with all of the other durational projects that both represent and are his days, On Kawara forces the property form to try to take account of life itself. This is not like bottling one’s breath or shit or harnessing a body to an assembly line. It is more like copyrighting a process for growing food, or criminalizing the desire to share what one loves. Property in these situations no longer needs to make a distinction between life and a market for goods and innovations. This, ultimately, is what most closely links On Kawara’s work, via a quiet, parallelistic aesthetics, to the ways that intellectual property law comes to operate in the conflict zone of dematerialization.

Dematerializing innovations force the law to become the supplement to materiality in order to recuperate value that had once been tied up in a specific materiality and its associated modes of distribution. In phases of intense dematerialization, materiality becomes juridical in the overall drive to keep creation within the property form. This has meant that the labor practices relevant to this process themselves expand, away from production per se, and toward ordinary practices once separated from the property form by the legal distinction between use and invention. This is evident in the case of the VCR and the time shifters whose practices in part drove the creative industries’ lawsuits. It is far more evident in cultures mediated through digital formats, especially networked ones, where property law has come to cover mere ideas, while also criminalizing use (e.g. file sharing) by collapsing the difference, both material and legal, that once separated it from invention.

It is as though On Kawara’s Date Paintings watch the succession of these phases from a slight distance: not interrupting them, not quite subject to them – but also never free from them in their commitment to producing objects around which value might, and as it turns out, did coalesce. The invariance of his practice makes it clear that such furious reorganizations of materiality in the service of ownership rely on volatility, on a legal and cultural rhetoric whereby all changes can potentially be understood as innovation. From the VCR to the MP3, On Kawara just paints todays.

Copyright law, in contrast, must fetishize the time before today in order to protect an older profit stream. The extension of copyright terms from a past moment of creation far into the future dramatizes this fetish and its necessary avoidance of the temporality of today. At the same time, property owners push copyright law to court futurity in its attempts to protect future profit streams that might be resident in new materialities and their concomitant modes of distribution. We see this logic at work in recent pushes to extend copyright law to cover what people will do with products and not just the products themselves. The Today series generates a parallel temporality that, in standing still, in going nowhere except where time itself goes, fluoresces what is continuous in the serial flux of dematerialization. The Today series goes forward, inevitably, but not in a way that’s motivated by a logic of potentiality or innovation or even novelty. On Kawara’s work therefore does not instigate the expansion and dematerialization of copyright law itself, as did the work of Sieglaub’s Conceptualists, or the users of the VCR, or the myriad creative forces, both industrial and ordinary, that came to produce the MP3 format (Sterne, 2012).

Copyright law has had to conflate life and creative labor in its gradual criminalization of the uses people invent for the products of dematerialization (time shifting, file sharing, etc.), in its successful efforts to copyright plant life and indigenous knowledge, and in various attempts to delaminate intellectual property itself from any specific materiality in order to cover future ideas and future formats as well as the uses to which those ideas and formats might be put. On Kawara’s projects also conflate life and labor, but without the key instigating element: volatility itself. ‘Dematerialization’ names this volatility. It is volatility that has made media, mediums, play a role in the ongoing process of dematerialization, the most tangible product of which is the dematerialization and expansion of intellectual property itself. The scandal isn’t that Conceptual art paved the way or succumbed to these processes, thereby abdicating its modernist aesthetic responsibilities (Alberro, 2003). The scandal is that there seems to be no invention in art or design or ordinary life or hacker culture or the halls in which VCRs were daisy chained together in order to mass reproduce material recorded from the television (Lardner, 1987) … no invention that doesn’t provide an excuse for the property form to expand. ‘We at Philip Morris feel it is appropriate that we participate in bringing these works [from the 1969 Conceptual art exhibition ‘When Attitude Becomes Form’] to the attention of the public for there is a key element in this “new art” which has its counterpart in the business world. That element is innovation’ (Alberro, 2003: 2). The volatility of this innovation claim spurs the expansion of property form.

What to do but to stay as still as possible? To create in the smallest and least significant increments of innovation. And still On Kawara’s paintings accrete value. What is the least ambitious form of aesthetics we can imagine? It couldn’t be clearer with regard to On Kawara’s work that various forces, all of which feed and are abetted by the grasping ambitions of property law, swirl around the work, catching it up in its stillness – affiliating it with Conceptualism or performance art or durational art or painting or institutional critique or any category that will volatize the work by highlighting what thereby comes to look like its innovation.

Still, there is On Kawara’s effort, which never apparently diminishes if we take the material record of that work and its sublime persistence through time as evidence. McKenzie Wark (2014) uses the term ‘effort’ instead of ‘labor’ to produce, by force of language, a minimal distance between, on the one hand, the seepage of labor into all corners of ordinary life and, on the other, the expenditures of the body that flash into being just before they can produce value for someone else in the form of labor. Between life and work, On Kawara leaves so little remainder that one can’t help but be directed to the contemporary dissemination of labor into everyday life, as everyday life. We see this dissemination in contemporary networks that so easily turn the fandom of file sharing into theft. But such networks also need do nothing more obtrusive than produce data as a backend to acts of sharing in order to convert lives into property.

It is as though the Today series and all of the laboriously slight increments of On Kawara’s workday can only produce one thing, or a thing whose novelty is derived almost entirely from another source, one as ordinary as the calendar itself. If one typed ‘I am still alive’ into every social media outlet and search engine, once per day, everyday, there would be some data produced – data being the property forms’ new favorite materiality. But certainly the outputs of that data, the forms of personalization that recuperate the effort of life as labor and thus as product, would be a lot more didactic, a lot less recognizable than anything we otherwise might feel or imagine or fantasize is ourselves. On Kawara’s work offers up to the process of dematerialization a minimum of selfhood, of life, generating the smallest possible increment of labor with the largest possible expenditure of effort. That’s what it means to be the painter of dematerialization.

On Kawara Update (Attention as Labor)

Some of the historical specificity and diachronicity of this process is made explicit by a recent ‘update’ of On Kawara’s Date Paintings. On Kawara Update (2001, 2007), by M.River & T.Whid Art Associates or MTAA, renders On Kawara’s Date Paintings on-demand, as automatically-generated web pages (Figure 3). ¹⁶ Call up the webpage on any given day and it will show you that day’s date, white Verdana Bold font on a black background. Click on the date and you get headlines pulled algorithmically from that day’s newspaper. Where On Kawara struggles to finish each painting in time for it to count in the historical record of his work, MTAA simply wrote the code that would generate the date pages in perpetuity then moved on to other projects (Unattributed, 2004). ¹⁷ The tone of On Kawara Update is, in this sense, obviously glib. It is an easy joke, self-consciously so. ¹⁸

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Figure 3

MTAA, On Kawara Update (v2), 2007, screen grab (27 April 2016). Image reproduced with permission of the artists.

But there are a few crucial differences between the projects that make the update more than just a facile joke. The individual units of On Kawara Update, a URL and the associated web page instead of paintings and their spaces of display, are produced on demand and instantly distributed to whatever devices request the URL. On Kawara’s paintings, in stark contrast, are produced with a maximum of effort, and if one wants to view them in person, in the medium of their making, one would need to travel, with a maximum of effort and expense, to wherever in the world they are showing at that time – galleries, museums, auctions, private homes. Candida Höfer’s photographs of hundreds of Date Paintings held in private collections around the world, all photographed in situ, approximate the time, effort, and expense of such an itinerary (Höfer, 2009). Still, one’s vantage on the project would only be extremely partial. Contributing to the partiality of any vantage on On Kawara’s project, the Today series is determined – literally, existentially determined – by details of On Kawara’s life that are unavailable to the public for his work, details that determine the days on which he will complete paintings and those on which he will try and fail. In MTAA’s version of the project, only those dates on which someone requests the URL will appear in the historical record of the work (Figure 4). ¹⁹ If the URL is never requested, the work is never, in a sense, made manifest. It exists in code, in potentia, but is never materialized in a form that could, by most, be encountered as MTAA’s update of On Kawara’s Date Paintings.

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Figure 4

MTAA, On Kawara Update (v2), 2007, screen grab (27 April 2016), date shown with archive. Image reproduced with permission of the artists.

The significant transformation here is MTAA’s substitution of viewer attention for the artist’s labor. This switch, attention for labor, itself registers a significant transformation that the most recent waves of dematerialization effect in the relationship between a work of art or other creative commodity and the moment of its reception. MTAA can be said to be responsible for the code that makes the update possible, as well as the idea of an update. But they stop short of authoring the work as it will exist publicly, as something that can be encountered and experienced. That work they leave to their viewers (and in a way that’s far more literal than is admitted by the familiar Duchampian proclamation that the viewer completes the work). Specifically, they leave that work to a single viewer, a specific person but one who only has one necessary quality: that she or he is the first to visit a date page on the date that it depicts. Everyone else’s capacity to experience the work after that day depends on this one person, and on his or her single relevant quality: attention granted within a particular 24-hour span. Like On Kawara, who must, by his own strictures, complete a work on the date the work depicts or else destroy the work, that one key viewer and his or her minimum of attention must visit On Kawara Update on the date of its coded but not otherwise manifest depiction, or else the work will be destroyed. Potential, or code itself, replaces the materiality of a painting as the object of destruction, while attention replaces the artist’s workday as the key ontological determinant, and thus the key aesthetic determinant of the work. This is both a promotion and a demotion for the artist, for while MTAA effect a (technological, facile) conceptual upgrade of the Date Paintings by dematerializing On Kawara’s version, by dis-embedding its concept from the material medium of that concept and rematerializing it in a new networked milieu, they also make the existence of their work dependent on the attention of viewers who may never come (and some days do not, as Figure 4 shows). While inattention is the ineluctable effect of On Kawara’s failure to complete a work in a day, inattention directly instigates destruction in MTAA’s version.

I say ‘attention’, but we should note something about the form of that attention here, a formal feature that matches something of the scale and depth of the authorial subjectivity at work in On Kawara’s original series. Attention in MTAA’s update means simply showing up – merely calling up the URL of MTAA’s artwork. Nothing more is required. One might arrive by accident and the effect would be the same. Attention in MTAA’s update is, in this sense, semi-automated, routed through the name domain conventions and distributed connectivity of an electronic network, which comes to supplement or supplant the kinds of attention we might once have been able to associate, in a humanistic vein, with generosity, with listening, with focus, etc.

MTAA thus points to the next major iconic cycle of dematerialization. Now digital and networked, the medium of MTAA’s update is not the workday, but that newly dematerialized form of labor, attention (Beller, 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Crary, 1999; Davenport and Beck, 2001). Here, attention is not just the ambivalent, uncertain byproduct of cultural production, but is itself, quite directly, a form of labor. As MTAA demonstrates with their glib automation, this trajectory is not a failure of vision on Kawara’s part, not an aesthetic procedure that comes to look, retrospectively, like another abdication of aesthetic autonomy. It is, rather, an entailment of dematerialization itself, a routine upgrade in dematerialization’s long historical cycle. Such an update is practically entailed when dematerialization becomes a basis for capitalist innovation, something corporations must learn to navigate and turn to profit. The subsumption of life and life’s ordinary practices into the medium itself – here in the figure of attention – has been a primary tactic for shoring up value in the wake of dematerialization, at least in the two major cycles of dematerialization sketched here. If the physical materials can no longer be policed, then the procedures and practices can.

Today’s digital media, at home in the distributed networks of the internet, effect a dematerialization of both physical media and, in a far broader sense than was the case with Conceptual art or the VCR, the circuits of cultural dissemination, and so have predictably sent the major culture industries running to the law for redress, this time with a great deal more success. Universal ultimately lost its case against Sony in what became known popularly as the Betamax case, and the recordable media of the VCR went on to inspire video clubs, time-shifting, video art, documented performances, and a host of new practices located all over the cultural map. But when the same fight against dematerialization was waged in relation to digital media and networks – this time led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) against Napster, who, like Sony, were demonized as thieves – corporate interests won the right to control the instruments and practices of dematerialization that threatened a previously-secure income stream. Over a couple of decades, the gains from this and many other similarly-motivated lawsuits have come in the form of the now-familiar litany: extended terms of copyright, greater ease of copyright renewal, the capacity for cultural industries to regulate not just their proprietary content but any present and future technologies that might threaten their control over those properties, and even the ordinary practices – or in a larger framing, forms of life – invented in the wake of dematerialization. ²⁰

In Parallel

The Date Paintings insist on focalizing history through the rhythms and repetitions of today, not the stable distance of yesterday or the seductive accelerations of tomorrow. Today is, in a sense, the only temporality not subject to the kinds of expropriations at work in the historical logic of dematerialization. Today is a series that goes nowhere on its own. Immanent, nearly unchanging, undramatic. To be stuck always in today means that the past, as such, and the future, as such, are both orphaned, cut loose. If the commons can no longer subsist on the creations of the past (now copyrighted in perpetuity) nor in the ideas generating the future (now automatically subject to intellectual property law, even in their most dematerialized forms), maybe it can exist here, in the minor idiosyncrasies of today, a this-ness of proximity, of minimal orientation, of near eventlessness. Are we willing to let things get that unexciting? Presentness is gracelessness (Fried, 1967)?

I’ve argued that On Kawara’s practice proceeds within an undramatic parallel world of dematerialization, that if it teaches, it teaches not through defamiliarization, resistance, reparation, or utopian re-imagination. This, I think, is ultimately why so many of On Kawara’s historians and critics have needed to account for the unobtrusiveness of the work: many talk about On Kawara’s privacy, even his reclusiveness; others talk about how there is almost literally nothing to see when viewing his work (Denizot, 1991). In the end, it’s a lot like watching a life unfold – incrementally, undramatically, and out of the spotlight. Just one thing, then another, the increments barely punctuated, except that the effort of living that life occasionally produces a painting of incrementality itself, the day accounted for as date and viewable at a later date, or never. On Kawara’s work guarantees so little.

This suggests two aesthetic modalities in which On Kawara operates. In the first and most dramatic (the one most amenable to avant-garde desires), On Kawara and his work become a kind of cautionary tale of dematerialization. More than just undermining the novelty imperative which has been so necessary to capitalist advance, we can say that On Kawara’s Today series undermines the very idea of transformation over time, and with it, Krauss’s renovated idea of a specific medium, not to mention that of a conventional artist’s career, an oeuvre, a future into which an artist grows and matures (or ages badly). On Kawara persists past the moment of Conceptual art, past the tragic return of Buchloh’s specular regime, for his part obviating the epistemic finality of that ‘moment’, and all the while making paintings, paintings whose primary temporal situation is always today. On Kawara’s is a movement without progress, without promises of Conceptual or technological transformation and advance. Just more todays. These todays are the same in that all of the paintings are part of one ongoing series. The same in that the market evaluates them all, mutatis mutandis, as products of a single artist. But making the same product, with the same procedures, the same manufacturing process, his products realize high value again and again, even increase in value over time, as averred by the consistently high prices that On Kawara’s paintings command. The painting that depicts ‘May 1, 1987,’ a large canvas within On Kawara’s range of canvas sizes (61 x 89 in.), sold on 16 May 2007 for $1,832,000. ²¹ A small painting, ‘8 Jan, 1973’ (26 x 33 in.), sold on 5 February 2009 for £157,250. ²² In this perspective, the Date Paintings are a cautionary tale for those who would hear it. They manifest an apotropaic vision of a future in which capitalism has figured out how to profit without any change over time, without any dematerializations except the ones it invents itself, a fulfillment of one of the wishes that animates copyright law’s recent activism. Maybe the Date Paintings, in all of their stillness and stability, offer a relief from the clamor of the market for commodities and all of the various forms of expendable, affective, effortful labor that invisibly powers it. But they are probably very few people’s idea of how a less privatized labor of the commons might look or feel.

The second aesthetic modality is differently attuned to the present tense that it would historicize. In this modality, we would notice how disciplined On Kawara’s work is in keeping its distance from the dramas of re-materialization as re-specification. This is not the critical distance, an arrogated distance, so important to both Krauss and Buchloh in their assessments of the Conceptualist moment. It is the intimate distance of intimation, of being close but not touching. This, in part, is why I’ve referred to a parallelistic aesthetics. ²³ Eschewing response, reaction, tactics, strategies, various intersectional or interventional ploys, On Kawara simply persists within the dilemma of dematerialization seen as an ongoing historical process, a tendential process which seems always to provoke reactions that, each in their own ways, seek to collapse commodity, life, and law. Here, the aesthetic object-event, working in a non-evental temporality, inhabits a problem, it persists, it dwells. Lacking ambition, it courts resignation, but also never resigns itself to ambition. On Kawara can be a painter of dematerialization because he refuses to respond to it, and so refuses to accept the ways it goads respondents of all kinds (technocrats, lawyers, critical theorists, early adopters, hobbyists) to try to undo its effects while ignoring its persistence and regularity as a structuring force in modern life. It’s harrowing how little space there is to maneuver in the velocitized slip between life and commodity, but that’s where we are today.