But it all too often gets used as a licence to see in art nothing but the trace of language and culture. Theory abstracts any residues of the everyday out of art in order to say how art is actually just a symptom of some hidden social or political cause. The more subtle, unthinkable, everyday side of art is then no longer available as a resource, and art is trapped within theory. Maybe art still has a few tricks up its sleeve for outwitting the ever vigilant and always ferocious rhetorical energies of theory. G iven the banality of the newspaper criticism of contemporary art, Artspace , one of the host venues for the Biennale, put out its own little booklet of critical writing.
Art is also a kind of creative productivity with things, in the world.
On Kawara, two of the giants of postwar modern art. On Kawara is represented by two simple books that record people he met and places he went. A s David Carter once suggested, there were two kinds of postmodernism, the wild and the cool. While Watkins reproduces the currently fashionable antipathy for postmodernism, he is more at odds with its cool than its wild expressions. Wild postmodernism was deeply interested in the everyday.