Review: Art & Time - On Kawara

On January 4 1966, On Kawara painted the first of what would amount (for now) to over two thousand paintings collectively titled the Today Series (Figure 1). Often referred to as date paintings, each is a painting of the date on which it was made. Each date painting is executed in accordance with strict directives imposed by the artist upon himself. Four or five layers of acrylic paint in dark hues are applied to a pre-stretched canvas in one of eight possible sizes to create a monochrome background, with the date drawn freehand in the centre of the canvas in a san serif type font and painted with six or seven layers of white acrylic paint. Kawara, a frequent traveller, paints the date in the language and convention of the place in which the painting was made. If the painting is not finished by midnight on the day it was started it is destroyed. Each painting is then recorded in a journal and stored in a specially made box with the date marked on the lid. For years Kawara would also store a clipping of that day’s newspaper with the painting, though in recent years he has often forgone this element. Kawara continues the series to this day.

Figure 1: On Kawara , OCT. 68 1968, 1968. Liquitex on canvas, cardboard box, newspaper, 20.5 x 25.5 cm.

On Kawara is an artist concerned with time. His interest is time as it pertains to existence and to consciousness, and to these mortality is inextricably linked. The date paintings that comprise the Today Series make time their subject. Upon completion, the “today” of each painting is irrevocably doomed to the past, as the painting becomes a relic, a marker of time spent. With each new addition to the Today Series, Kawara is simultaneously counting down. Kawara’s art is one of process. A date painting typically takes eight or nine hours to complete, the fastidious workmanship evident on close inspection of the final product. The surface of each date painting speaks of each moment passing in its creation.

In 1970 Kawara began sending telegrams to friends and colleagues bearing the message “I am still alive” (Figure 2). I am still alive is perhaps the most overt of Kawara’s work in terms of its explorations of time and mortality. Though largely superseded by electronic communication, the telegram remains synonymous with the delivery of urgent and often bad news. Receipt of a telegram frequently meant that someone had died. Kawara’s stark message is deliberately redundant in that the sender of a telegram is necessarily alive in order to send the telegram in the first place, and that due to the lapse in time between composition and arrival, the validity of the message as still holding true is brought into question. As much as the message is one of life, it is simultaneously one of death. In informing us that he is still alive, Kawara is actually reminding us that he might not be, that eventually time will catch up with us all.

Figure 2: On Kawara, I am still alive, 1970-. Telegram.

I got up (Figure 3) is a series of postcards on which Kawara has stamped the date and the time at which he got up on that particular day. Kawara began sending these postcards, two a day, everyday, until the stamp he used to create the messages was stolen along with his briefcase. The humour of the piece arises from the sending, in postcard format, of a solemn piece of information that logically is not of much interest to anyone. A postcard is typically sent by a tourist and detailing the activities of time spent in a foreign city. It serves as a sort of proof that at a particular time, a particular person was in a particular place. Kawara’s postcards document not the activities or thoughts of a particular day, but the time that he got up, the moment when he once again entered into consciousness.

Figure 3: On, Kawara, I got up 1968-. Rubber-stamped postcard.

One Million Years (Past) (1969) and One Million Years (Future) (1971) each consist of ten volumes of leather bound books listing one million years into the past and future respectively. In these works time is in a sense condensed into a palpable entity that conversely only serves to emphasis the intangible nature and overwhelming immensity of time. A lifetime is less than a paragraph; the whole of civilization is just a few pages. For all its coolness, seeming simplicity, and formality Kawara’s work speaks poetically about existence, mortality and the inescapability of time.

Image References:

Figure 1: Kawara, On. 21 OCT. 68, 1968. Liquitex on canvas, cardboard box, newspaper, 20.5 x 25.5 cm. Reproduced by Johnathan Watkins, On Kawara (New York, Phaidon Press Inc. 2002) p80

Figure 2: Kawara, On. I got up, 1968-. Rubber-stamped postcards. Reproduced by Johnathan Watkins, On Kawara (New York, Phaidon Press Inc. 2002) p97

Figure 3: Kawara, On. I am still alive, 1970-. Telegram. Reproduced by Johnathan Watkins, On Kawara (New York, Phaidon Press Inc. 2002) p88

Bibliography

Lippard, Lucy, “Just in Time: On Kawara” In Whole and Parts, 1964-1995 / On Kawara, edited by Xavier Douroux & Franck Gautherot, 359-362. Paris: Les Presses du reel, 1996.

O’Connor, Teresa, “Notes: On Kawara’s I Am Still Alive” In Whole & Parts 1964-1995 / On Kawara , edited by Xavier Douroux & Franck Gautherot, 475-477. Paris: Les Presses du reel, 1996.

Watkins, Johnathan, On Kawara. New York: Phaidon Press Inc. 2002