Jonathan Watkins, ‘Where “I Don’t Know” Is the Right Answer’, in On Kawara (page 60)
Continuing from this.
All communication is “distorted through preconception and our grasp of language [and so] rather than being the means to elucidation, actually tends to foster obscurity and suppress imagination.” (60) // cf. Javier Marías
Both Kawara and Wittgenstein thus conclude that “neither philosophy nor language is efficacious [because both] are required for their own auto-analysis and thus a philosophical infinite regression of tautologies, or closed loops, must ensue”. (60)
Brings to mind Greenberg’s comment that “the essence of Modernism lies [...] in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticise the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence” (from Modernist Painting).
Is medium-specificity (eventually/inevitably) a tautology? Maybe. These two conceptions combined point towards something resembling and supporting differential specificity. // cf. Krauss, Hawker
Kawara’s "critique of language paradoxically embodies itself [...] The boldness of ‘EGG’ and ‘SOMETHING’ [from Nothing/Something/Everything (1963)] asserts the problematic nature of certainty [my emphasis] often presumed in the use of language (and clearly not a certainty felt by the artist) [my parentheses]” (60). // Similarly, I don’t believe in this ‘certainty’ but I’m not interested in any sort of critique of language; I’m interesting in acknowledging that uncertainty(?) as something inherent in language and using that as a starting point