From Todays series
On Kawara is now mostly known for his conceptual art which plays on the themes of time, and to a lesser extent space. A Japanese emigre living in New York, he rose to prominence, with his Death Masks series, as one of the few artists early in the fifties, to actively respond to the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the new global anxieties brought by the possible future unleashing of these technologies.
Another early work which was critically difficult as well as in being difficult in production was ‘A Million Years’ (1971). This ten volume piece was hugely laborious and was produced concurrently with a series which would later be seen as his defining work. ‘A Million Years’ was, just as its title states, a series of numbers counting back the last million years from 1969. Kawara spent an extensive period on this for 6 or 7 hours a day. It would later be accompanied by ‘One Million Years (future)’ which counts forwards from 1980.
Newspaper which accompanies image shown above
Previous to this work Kawara began his magnus opus. On 4th January 1966 he began to paint the date, a series that continues to this day. Called ‘Todays’, he has produced over 2000. These monochromes have essentially varied little over time but have been displayed and presented with accompanying emphemera such as newspaper cuttings which temporally site the work further. These cuttings go some way to describing Kawara’s whereabouts and movements over this time. Further to this the dates are produced according to the date conventions local to his current whereabouts, with the local language used for the month, or roman numerals.
Technically these are awkward works, requiring speed and precision. Several thin coats are applied to create a uniform surface on the canvas, keeping them expressionless. Up to 5 paintings have been completed per day, but Kawara stipulates that any work unfinished at midnight will be discarded and destroyed. The day will remain forever, lost, unproductive.
On Kawara has been alive for over 27,000 days. He should know – he has counted it out. He compulsively documents his life in the manner of a manic book-keeper. He has mapped his daily walks, cab rides (‘I Went’) and made lists of the people he met (‘I Met’) and newspaper articles he has read (‘I Read’).
Kawara does not give interviews, discuss his work or often even appear at his shows. He can disappear for such lengths that he started at one point to begin a further series of works designed to allay friends’ fears. He would send simple assuring messages by telegram, postcard or latterly by fax or email, with simple phrases like ‘I am still alive’. This obviously underscores the inescapable truth of all his works – eventually all the counting will end and all will be over.
The zen and meditative aspects of routine and repetition, which underpin all Kawara’s work, require huge resolve to sustain. How many well-intentioned blogs and enterprises have fallen by the way-side due to the efforts to maintain daily output of a consistently high standard? Before Twitter and the ubiquitous blog brought us constant huge flows of information in small chunks, Kawara set out his stall and defined his place with infinite accuracy in the context of (contemporary) art. Kawara uses time and dates to situate himself within a contemporary framework, knowing that when the counts stops he will pass directly into history.
Bibliography
Art of the Twentieth Century, Ed. Ingo F Walther, Taschen,2000
Conceptual Art, Tony Godfrey, Phaidon, 1998
Moderna Museet – The Book, Eds. Cecilia Widenheim, Magnus af Petersens, Teresa Hahr, Moderna Museet, 2004
Adrain Searle reviews Watcher on the Hills is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham from The Guardian in 2002
This article was posted by Ronan McDonnell on
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 at
04:01.
It is archived in Art, Culture and tagged Art, art practice, conceptual, contemporary, Culture, death masks, hiroshima, japan, metaphyics, million years, nagasaki, physics, space, Time, zen meditative.
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