On Kawara's "Date Paintings": Series of Horror and Boredom
On Kawara: 6 OCT.68, 1968. Liquitex on canvas, handmade cardboard box with newspaper; 25.4 x 33 cm.
One Thing
In New York, in 1965, On Kawara created Title, a tripartite painting that employed his signature style of white letters on a monochrome canvas. On deep pink canvases, the artist meticulously painted three phrases: ONE THING–1965–VIET-NAM.[1] Anne Rorimer argues that the work is essentially self-referential: "ONE THING" designates the painting's own reality as an object, while "1965" and "VIET-NAM" provide minimal political-historical context.[2] However, the original constellation of the work demonstrates its calculated reference to the political incidents of the year, particularly the war and trauma in Asia.
After visiting Kawara's New York studio in 1965, Honma Masayoshi, then curator of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, wrote an article about Kawara's life and work in the United States for Bijutsu Techo, a popular art magazine published in Japan. Honma's description of the studio reveals that "RED CHINA" was originally placed on the left side of "1965" and "VIET-NAM," instead of "ONE THING.”[3] Unlike "ONE THING," "RED CHINA" makes it clear that the artist was making a strong political statement. In 1965, Mao Zedong proclaimed the now-notorious Cultural Revolution and established the Red Guard, which led to the unprecedented massacre of citizens during the following decade. The presence of "RED CHINA" unequivocally forces a charged reading of the third canvas, especially considering that the United States had begun a campaign of massive bombing in North Vietnam in early 1965. A closer observation of Title reveals that these supposedly neutral numbers and letters refer specifically to America's military response to the ideological clashes in Asia, the latest episode of the ongoing "red scare" within the United States. Tiny white stars painted on each corner of the three canvases prompt further serial associations among the three political entities that hover over the seemingly self-referential canvases: the United States, China, and North Vietnam, all of whose national flags feature stars.[4]
According to Honma, he and Kawara were concerned with the possible public uproar that "Red China" might cause in Japan during this politically turbulent era, so they agreed to substitute "ONE THING" for "RED CHINA."This anecdote is a perfect example of the anticommunist paranoia that was sweeping Japan at the time. Kawara and Honma's political decision also inadvertently shows the dual operation of Kawara's ensuing projects. As anticipated, the substitution of "ONE THING" seemed effectively to diffuse the disquieting political sentiment of the entire work. As noted in Rorimer's discussion, "VIET-NAM" was almost reduced to a neutral reference to the temporal context of the painting, and the entire work was reduced to "one thing" or, to use Donald Judd's term, a "specific object" of Minimalism. "ONE THING," the sign of the painting's materiality, diverts our attention and removes the triptych from the urgent historical arena of war and violence, placing it instead within the apolitical frameworks of both Minimalism and Conceptual art.
Title was a harbinger, both stylistically and thematically, of the Date Paintings or Today series, Kawara's best-known works, which he began the following year. In the Today series, the austere surface of the monochrome canvas, or the "one-thing-ness," persistently abstracts the politically motivated disasters and war-related atrocities which lurk beneath the neutral facade. Kawara's persistent attention to tragedy, violence, and death is deeply embedded in his abstract projects, and becomes evident only by close examination of his obsessive manual labor, inconsistent texts, and fragmentary references to fatal accidents and historical disasters.
Meaningless Days
After having witnessed Japan's total destruction and unconditional surrender at the end of the Pacific War, Kawara began painting in Tokyo in 1952. He was an unknown nineteen-year-old with no academic art training when he first presented his Bathroom series in 1953, at the first Nippon exhibition held in Tokyo. In these pencil drawings, the bathroom is meticulously rendered as a distorted, claustrophobic space that harbors horrific scenes of murder, dismemberment, and matricide. Kawara's Bathroom series depicts figures with deformed skin, mutilated bodies, and bloody wounds, clearly alluding to nuclear destruction and its scarred victims.[5] Notably, it was around this time that the subject of the atomic bomb and the lingering effects of its radiation began flooding the Japanese mass media, as the Allied Occupation ended and censorship on the subject was lifted.
The graphic images understandably provoked sensational responses from his contemporaries, and Kawara was immediately marked as a leading figure of the new generation of artists who were determined to use social realism to confront the reality of Japan's postwar society. As early as 1957, Kawara's painting was recognized as a "masterpiece of the first decade of postwar art,”[6] and his meteoric rise to fame became the stuff of legend in postwar Japanese art history.[7] In Japan, Kawara was an active participant in the social-realist art movement that committed to expose the reality of the catastrophe and defeat, which the Japanese government was trying to expunge with its postwar rhetoric of progress and development.[8] However, since leaving Japan in 1959, Kawara has completely transformed himself into a postnational artist by erasing all traces of his Japanese past from the abstract surfaces of his daily project, the Today series.
Kawara began the Today series in New York on January 4, 1966, so he has now been producing the Date Paintings for over four decades.[9] The Today series is the result of Kawara's strict adherence to an elaborate, self-imposed system of production that he developed. Each Date Painting bears the date on which it was executed, printed horizontally in white paint across the center of a monochrome canvas. When inscribing the date, Kawara uses the standard language and convention of whatever country he is currently residing in or simply adopts the format from local daily newspapers. If Latin letters are not used locally, as in most Asian countries, including Japan, he uses the universal language of Esperanto. Every Date Painting must be completed within a twenty-four-hour period beginning at 12:00 a.m., or else it is destroyed.
Once completed, each Date Painting is stored in a matching cardboard box, which also includes a clipping from the day's local newspaper, selected by Kawara. The series is accompanied by a meticulous inventory, or "journal," as the artist calls it, which is composed of calendar pages marked with the date of each painting's production. Loose-leaf binders contain extensive information on each painting, such as the date and site of production, annual and monthly serial numbers, size of the canvas, background color sample, and, occasionally, a photograph of the locale.[10] Each Date Painting has a subtitle, which is recorded in yet another journal. The journal is essentially an array of headlines from local daily newspapers, with the occasional inclusion of activities from Kawara's personal agenda for that day, all of which are typed on paper.[11]
Around the same time he began the Date Paintings, Kawara also initiated several related projects aimed at collecting the mundane facts of his daily activities, such as reading, sleeping, and walking. Despite their banality, Kawara meticulously documented these trivialities with a compulsive deliberation usually reserved for religious ritual and preserved the results through a bureaucratic system of filing and archiving. Shortly after the Date Paintings, the I Read series (1966-79) came to accompany Kawara's daily ritual of the Today series. He cut and pasted portions of the daily newspaper that he had read onto sheets of paper marked with the designated date, sheathed them in vinyl pockets, and then collected them in binders. His three other daily practices were added in 1968, while in Mexico: I Got Up At (1968-79), I Went (1968-79), and I Met (1968-79).
For I Got Up At, Kawara selected two recipients and sent each a postcard stamped with the exact time he got up that morning or, in some cases, in the afternoon. Surprisingly, for such a diligent artist, Kawara's daily time of awakening was fairly random. He used a typical souvenir postcard representing the cityscape or a tourist spot from wherever he was staying. The I Went series is composed of copies of maps, on which Kawara traced his daily movements in red ink. For I Met, he typed the names of people whom he had met during the day. The telegram project of I Am Still Alive was begun in 1970. Starting that year, Kawara occasionally sent out a telegram with the message: "I Am Still Alive. On Kawara." In contrast to his other projects, I Am Still Alive relied partially on other people for its production. Despite the seemingly simple message, Kawara's telegrams were subject to erratic translations and typographical mistakes, thus denying the artist's strict control over the products. Though Kawara was extremely meticulous in maintaining the refined quality of all his products, the termination of his serial projects was subject to chance. For instance, I Am Still Alive could only be sustained while the telegraph machine was still in use. The I Got Up At series was brought to an unexpected halt when Kawara's box of rubber stamps was stolen in Stockholm in 1979. Hence, a purely coincidental event served to demonstrate the limits of the artist's control over his product.
The One Million Years project differs from Kawara's other series not only in its cosmic dimension of time, but also in its book format, which has a beginning and, more important, a clear and definitive ending. In 1969, he compiled One Million Years–Past, which was supplemented with One Million Years–Future in 1980. For One Million Years–Past, Kawara typed out all of the calendar years descending backward from 1969 c.e. to 998031 b.c.e., 500 years on each page, 200 pages in each volume, and ten volumes per set. One Million Years–Future retains the same rigorous format, with the years ascending from 1981 to 1001980 c.e. Kawara dedicated the Past to "all those who have lived and died" and the Future to "the last one." This suggests the possibility of an apocalyptic end to human history, but the abstract numbers accumulated to such an incomprehensible size hardly allow one to envision that end.
A fictive reconstruction shows that Kawara s typical day would have been completely consumed by painstaking labor and tedious chores. He would begin his day by checking the time he woke up, which he then would stamp onto two postcards. Then, he would start the arduous process of that day's Date Painting, which would usually require over nine hours of manual labor, including mixing the paint, applying multiple layers to create the monochrome canvas, and finally lettering the dates with mechanical precision.[12] Perhaps while waiting for each of the multiple layers of paint to dry, he would create a journal entry, type out the years for his One Million Years project, or prepare the postcards of I Got Up At. Perhaps there would even be time for him to go out and send one of his I Am Still Alive telegrams, after which he would copy the map and mark his route for the I Went series. If he spent time reading the newspaper, he would clip articles to catalogue in the I Read file. If he met anyone that day, he would type their names for the I Met series.
Kawara's daily labor combines the prerequisites of Taylorist bureaucracy with Fordist factory production. Most businesses catalogue their daily production, whether in documents or objects, and store it in a rigidly defined order. This is exactly what Kawara has been doing. The predetermined mode of production eliminates the need or even the option for the artist's spontaneous intervention and creative involvement. All that is required is a repetitive, almost mechanical labor: layers of paint application, standardized documentation, and uniform packaging. Clearly, Kawara's one-day workload is comparable to that of a clock-punching office clerk or an assembly-line worker. However, despite the tightly regulated labor or, rather, because of such stringent organization, Kawara's daily activity is essentially meaningless, unlike production in a real workplace. His labor is meticulous but unproductive, as his actions actually produce nothing other than a series of almost identical canvases. The "rationalized time" on his canvas eliminates and ultimately abstracts the sense of epistemological duration. It is not a lived or experienced continuity of a subject, but rather a pure articulation of punctuality: "homogeneous, empty time.”’[13] Kawara has marked the passage of each and every day on canvas, but such repetition only diminishes the differences and abstracts the meaning of the idiosyncratic days.
Kawara's practice of public disappearance further contributes to this meaninglessness.[14] The notations of the artist's daily activities hardly reveal a tangible and consistent persona, since his journal features only an absentee central character. Kawara is sequestered from the public eye by a policy of no photographs, no official interviews, no meetings with more than six people, and no release of a biography. As a consequence, he has obliterated all traces of his cultural, ethnic, and national origin, such as the Japanese language and the artist's physical appearance, in his persistent pursuit of becoming a "citizen of the world.”[15] Honma's 1965 article about his New York studio visit features the last published photograph of the artist. The picture can be read as a portent of the artist's later decree of silence–the young Kawara, with a cigarette in his hand, smiles before the backdrop of his painting, CIPHER. This enigmatic artist has since become notoriously difficult to decipher.[16]
Among all the meaningless organization associated with Kawara's trivial daily labors, the subtitles of the Date Paintings are perhaps the best explication of this project in terms of wartime history, traumatic memory, and psychophysical suffering. A cursory skim through the subtitles, which Karawa excerpted from daily newspapers, reveals that the artist was keenly attentive to death in myriad forms, including wars, bombings, accidents, murders, diseases, natural disasters, suicides, or social upheavals. For example, the first and the last subtitles of January 1966, the month Kawara began his Today series, reflect the interior social crisis and the warfare which were prevalent for the United States that year:[17]
Jan. 4, 1966 "NewYork's traffic strike."
Jan. 31, 1966 "U.S.A. began to bomb North Vietnam again."
Since most of the subtitles are from newspaper headlines, it is natural that they are highly focused on social and political upheavals of the time. By their very nature, newspapers tend to emphasize scandalous events, which were quite plentiful during the 1960s. But the subtitles of the Date Paintings reveal Kawara's particular attention to war, accidents, and deaths. The following examples from the journal of subtitles between February and April of 1966 emphasize his concerns on this particular matter.
Feb. 9, 1966 "Two students shot in Santo Domingo."
Feb. 21, 1966 "An American naval hero of World War II is dead."
Mar. 3, 1966 "109 Americans were killed last week in Vietnam."
Mar. 4, 1966 "A Canadian Pacific jetliner crashed in Tokyo."
Mar. 7, 1966 "U.S. Marines estimated today they have killed 1,100 North Vietnamese in last 4 days." Mar. 11, 1966 "The killer of Wendy Sue Wolin, 7, is still hiding somewhere."
Mar. 21, 1966 "Spring has come and the lost H-Bomb in Spain sinks deeper into the sea."
Mar. 24, 1966 “501 Viet Cong killed in the past 24 hours, Allied officials report today."
Apr. 7, 1966 "Rioters in Saigon burned an American jeep and danced around the flames."
Apr. 12, 1966 "A violent Atlantic storm killed two passengers on Italian liner Michelangelo for New York." Apr. 13, 1966 "In New York, a cable explosion in a subway tunnel under the East River killed one maintenance worker."
These selections demonstrate Kawara's ongoing concern for the very subject matter which marked his early paintings from postwar Japan: war and death. The exceptionally long subtitle of June 11, 1967, demonstrates Kawara's long-standing concern for World War II and its nuclear destruction:
In Hiroshima, about 500 people set out today on the annual 540-mile peace march to Tokyo where the 13th world conference against nuclear weapons will be held starting Aug. 4 and in New York, almost 18,000 people paid from $ 10 to $ 100 a ticket to get into Madison Square Garden tonight for the United Jewish Appeal's Israel Emergency Fund.
However, Kawara's journal established that tragic deaths were occurring not only to soldiers abroad, but also to civilians at home, due to crime, social riots, natural disasters, and industrial accidents. Indeed, his selections demonstrate the ubiquity of death by highlighting the extreme visibility of arbitrary deaths, which were reported as "news," and by indifferently recording the accumulation of various casualties over the days and weeks.
While the newspapers relentlessly depicted different versions of death on a daily basis, Kawara persisted in his monotonous routines. The details of the artist's banal existence emerge alongside the shock of death in the subtitles. Kawara records his everyday personal events with the same seriousness as world events:
Jan. 16, 1966 "Janine came to my studio."
Jan. 21, 1966 "Meeting Y.Tono at M. Ikeda's hotel."
Mar. 13, 1966 "Ay-O brought his cat to my apartment."
Mar. 20, 1966 "Taeko kissed me. I asked her 'are you all right?”
Kawara's undifferentiated array of deaths and everyday details is disturbing on every level. On the level of content, the pervasive presence of death certainly casts foreboding shadows across the peaceful everyday. On the level of ethics, the blunt manner of juxtaposing these deaths with ordinary, insignificant activities vulgarizes the human tragedy. Finally, on the level of structure, the seemingly arbitrary mixture of newspaper headlines with the artist's intimate details of the everyday efficiently resists any attempt to construct a coherent meaning or to determine the intent of the Date Paintings. Is it a serious protest against human destruction? Is it a mimetic critique of the mass media's numbing effect? Or is it a self-absorbed autobiography indifferent to the world of historical news? It may be all or nothing. Contrary to the unified surface of the almost identical canvases, the notation of the course of history and the random insertion of biographical tidbits sustain no linear development or logical continuity.
Notably, the subtitles, which undermine the organized array of the canvases, are not meant to be displayed with the paintings. Usually, only the Date Paintings themselves are exhibited in public, with their meaningless, tautological language foregrounding their existence as serial objects. The bland surface and mechanical system of numbering of the Date Paintings suppress the chaotic presence of death and suffering in the subtitles. Similar to "ONE THING" in Title of 1965, the abstract objecthood of the Date Paintings camouflages the effect of the catastrophe of history which the subtitles purport to chronicle. But even when the subtitles are displayed along with the paintings, the abstract numbers and calendar dates fail to convey the actual horror of their referents. For, as it is often said, "statistics don't bleed.”[18]
Kawara was also concerned with the self-referential nature of the Date Paintings, as his early subtitles were focused on the act of painting (or "dating," to borrow his own term) as its own subject matter. In the ensuing years, he occasionally revealed his obsessive attachment to his paintings and, consequently, to the incessant passing of time, via the systematic units of the calendar.
Jan. 15, 1966 "This painting itself is January 15, 1966."
Jan. 18, 1966 "I am painting this painting."
Jan. 28, 1966 "I am dating here."
July 25, 1966 "I make love to the days."
Nov. 18, 1966 "I collect the painted days."
Kawara never ceased his obsessive repetition of his daily rituals, even when he was plagued by physical pain and discomfort, which sometimes lingered for several months.
July 10, 1967 "I have a dull pain in my eyes."
Aug. 6, 1967 "I have a pain in my eyes."
Sept. 16, 1967 "I still have a pain in my eyes."
After an especially assiduous period of work in April of 1966, Kawara followed his ordinary newspaper quotes about political issues, war-related atrocities, and racial concerns by stating, "I am afraid of my 'Today' paintings (May 29, 1966)." Thus, the everlasting project of Date Paintings, which Kawara once called "an endless game to enjoy until death," had taken on a threatening effect.[19]
It seems that Kawara's anxiety emerged less from the first order of shock–the reality of death–than from the second order of the trauma: the endless, repetitive, and obsessive task of the Today series. The repetitive production of the series, with its stark surfaces, effectively dominated the disorderly mix of traumatic historical events and trivial personal encounters which composed Kawara's existence. The daunting presence of the Date Paintings turned out to be a source of anxiety in and of itself. But regardless of the outer turmoil reflected in the surfeit of death or the artist's physical pain, the numbing task of the Date Paintings continued. Eventually, the intimidating quantity of Date Paintings and their neatly ordered stacks began to haunt the artist in a nightmarish image. After 166 pieces of Date Paintings had piled up in the artist's studio, the horror of the accumulating paintings became a gruesome nightmare: "A razor is getting in between my teeth so that I cannot close my mouth (Sept. 10, 1966).”[20]
Kawara's compulsive repetition encompassed physical suffering, pain, and horror, but it simultaneously erased traces of those sensations as well. The flawless monochrome surface and the impersonal typeface conceal any sign of the artist's bodily labor, and the exclusive use of Roman letters hides his Japanese nationality. Superficially, Kawara is not a Japanese artist remembering the pain and suffering of war, but a universal artist executing a neutral practice of self referential, highly conceptual painting. The Date Paintings emerge as the site where Kawara's physical suffering and mental anxiety over the memories of war and death are repeated over and over, but this daunting repetition conceals the reports of global warfare and disaster, which serve as his fundamental link to the source of that horror. The austere surfaces of the conceptual canvases suppress the physical torments lurking underneath, just as the dull, monotonous register of personal events superficially engulfs the international devastation of death and pain.
Rootless Existence
In most books and exhibition catalogues, Kawara's biography consists only of the number of days he had lived prior to the date of publication.[21] Consequently, this series of biographies, composed of increasing numbers, shifting languages, and inconsistent punctuation, repeatedly alludes to the blurred presence of the artist with clear indications of his constant movement from place to place:
BIOGRAPHIE ON KAWARA
(6. Juni 1991) 21 348Tage
(6 juin 1991) 21 348 jours
(June 6, 1991) 21,348 days[22]
The artist began to exist only in indefinite numbers, indirect quotations, nomadic dwellings, foreign languages, and, most important, the tireless act of painting.[23] The subtitle of one Date Painting shows the neighbors' apprehension over the long silences of Kawara's daily reclusion: "Two or three men knocked on the door of my apartment tonight. Without opening the door I asked 'What's wrong with you?' One of them said, 'It's all right if you are there.'" This happened on May 21, 1967, after Kawara had been working for six consecutive days on Date Paintings. Three of the paintings were of a larger size than usual, requiring long hours of intense, silent labor. It seems that his neighbors tried to confirm that he was "all right," or to borrow the artist's words, "still alive." But again, according to his note in the subtitles, Kawara did not open the door to them. The entire story was derived from his works: the only evidence of the event exists in the record of his production, the subtitle, and the actual painting. Thus, it is not the artist's body, but rather his painting and subtitle which proves the artist "[was] there." The seemingly autobiographical aspects of the Today series clearly resist their function of explaining or revealing the author behind the work.[24]
Besides the role of autobiographical writer, Kawara has also adopted the image of an archivist. Jeff Wall once read Kawara's Today series as history painting, and Kawara's work certainly does take the form of history writing through the obsessive cognizance of passing time and daily events happening throughout the world.[25] However, in Kawara's "history writing," the supporting documents and the languages he uses reject any consistent narratives or unified plot structures. In the I Read series, for example, the already fragmentary clippings of news paper articles are often pasted upside down and overlapping one another. The series also contains a wide range of languages from all around the world. Unless one is fluent in all these languages, including Esperanto, it is not possible to understand the full scope of his reading plan.[26] This history is not programmed to progress toward comprehension, but only to repeat arbitrary fragments of "news" without closure.
The open-ended quality serves as another formidable marker of the meaninglessness of Kawara's project. The Date Paintings will no doubt remain ongoing until the artist's death. From the beginning of his project, Kawara was conscious of this sense of endlessness. In the novelist Sahara Jiro's memoir of his first encounter with the artist, Sahara noted the strong impression he received from the young painter's daunting lifetime project and his light-hearted utterances about death: "When Kawara said, 'It's painting,' he put emphasis on the 'ing' as a present progressive form. [Kawara continued,] 'It's an endless game, because I can enjoy this until I die,' then he laughed.”[27] With the exception of One Million Years–Past and–Future, Kawara's works begin from certain points and then remain in progress, with the end as yet undetermined. The completion of the work necessarily means the death of the artist.
An absentee author, a language barrier, chaotically arranged reference materials, endless repetition, and a dedication to nonsense all contribute to the tautological aspect of the Date Paintings. As a Date Painting refers only to the date when the painting is made, it is tautological and, therefore, meaningless. This aspect of the Today series was immediately recognized as a manifestation of Conceptual art, which posits art as analytic proposition and self-referential procedure. In his article "Art after Philosophy," Joseph Kosuth claimed that Kawara's painting was an important precedent for "purely Conceptual art." Kosuth further claimed that art was a set of analytic propositions, in which the sole reference is art itself, rather than any empirical, aesthetic, or extraneous experience.[28] Later, Rorimer essentially reaffirmed Kosuth's view by emphasizing the rejection of an artist's subjectivity and the autonomous status of a painting as a self-referential object.[29]
For Benjamin Buchloh, Conceptual art's achievement is that it eliminated the traditional ideal of transcendence through art. He argued that Conceptual art successfully subjected art to the late-capitalist order of vernacular administration, with its principle of arbitrary and abstract quantification for critical purposes. In this respect, according to Buchloh, Kawara's relentless practice of cataloguing and his absurd enumeration of dates are safely embraced within the new paradigm of the aesthetic of administration.[30] Indeed, as Buchloh asserted, Kawara's seemingly bureaucratic tasks and the indiscriminate selection of his subject matter, whether newspaper clippings or recipients of his mail messages, seem to abandon the artist's claim of authority.[31] Buchloh further claimed that neo-avant garde art's "metaphor of a performance of daily bureaucratic tasks" effectively eradicates the artist's "imaginary and bodily experience, physical substance and the space of memory.”[32]
Alongside Buchloh's thesis regarding the paradigm shift of Conceptual art, many art historians, such as Alexander Alberro and Rosalind Krauss, have extended this conception of the "decentered" Conceptual artist into the post modern celebration of the author's death.[33] Following this tenet, Kathryn Chiong examined Kawara's practices in terms of the artist's linguistic death.[34] Yet to support Buchloh's claim that Kawara's bureaucratic practices fall into the aesthetic of administration as a critical agency of the capitalist society and its productive mode would require a more careful examination of the specific history and the terms involved. For during World War II, which Kawara lived through, bureaucracy and management served less for production than for efficient destruction not only of landscape, but also of human bodies.[35]
Certainly, to some artists, the process of erasing memories can be more traumatic than triumphant, as the bureaucracy is entirely united with the memory of destruction, violence, and pervasive death in a war-trodden state. For Kawara, the mode of production which emulates the logic of a bureaucratic administration serves as a site of mimetic resistance to the totalitarian society. In the twentieth century, the totalitarian state's intolerance to differences ultimately brought about its fatal destruction, an effect which was represented most emblematically by Auschwitz, or the "modern industrial apparatus of the elimination of difference.”[36] Yet the most current history of Conceptual art, which has securely represented Kawara's practices, is determined to sanctify artistic practices that are devoid of the artist's private memories and corporeal substance, as surplus of poststructuralist art history.[37] The discourse has thus ignored the fact that the postmodern claim of the death of the author paradoxically reinforces the hegemonic practice of writing history, which tends to suppress the subversive content of memory, death, and destruction. Kawara's tightly organized procedures, which radically deny any possibility of unified meaning, order, or totality, are significant in that these seemingly "meaningless" practices of administrative aesthetics turn out to be an urgent response to historical trauma.
In his study of the Japanese construction of modern history, Harry Harootunian argued that historiography is a fundamental instrument that asserted a homogeneous grand narrative of the nation-state and reduced the differences or "surplus" of the everyday as a means of securing a unified structure of national history. He defined the everyday as a site of fragmentary memories of private individuals, in opposition to history as the fictive site of a collective and unitary narrative which could be mobilized to suppress others.[38] If Kawara's practice is an act of history writing, his version of history challenges the possibility of metanarrative. If Kawara's daily series is an autobiography, it constantly estranges its author, as the artist reveals himself only within the work, in a very fragmentary way. Ultimately, he is the only person who can never have access to the full scope of the product, since the Today series will be completed only upon his death. He is neither an omniscient master presiding over the narrative nor a self-absorbed writer of a reductive psychobiography. He is an everyman who bears the burden of horror and the boredom of the everyday through his endless daily labor.
Endless Repetition
An "unscheduled stop" at Altamira during Kawara's travel in Spain in 1963 is frequently referred to as the moment of enlightenment for the artist, who reportedly had been facing an artistic block which caused him to contemplate giving up painting altogether. lt is said that Kawara felt "the possibility of art again" after seeing the Altamira cave paintings of circa 16,000-9,000 b.c.e.[39] Indeed, the cave paintings impart the redemptive effect of endless temporality. These vivid markers of the past will exist in the future when the present has become the past, thanks to the cave protecting the paintings from exterior disturbances of natural weathering and human destruction.
In her study of endless temporality as a preoccupation of art of the 1960s, Pamela Lee sees Kawara's Date Paintings as a nonheroic register of trivial accidents of everyday life onto the longue duree.[40] Fernand Braudel's formulation of the longue duree is a model of history that Lee suggests as a paradigm of Kawara's projects. For Braudel, the history of individual events constitutes "surface disturbances" on the geographical temporality of longue duree.[41] Lee maintains that Kawara's obsession with the eternal temporality manifested in his Today series is historically specific to America in the 1960s. She argues that the rhetoric of the "ever quickening and ever repeating" speed of the information age produced that period's anxiety of endless time, ennui, and a future with no closure. For Lee, therefore, Kawara's diligent labor of registering his own minuscule activities on the longue duree intrudes on the periodic anxiety of the 1960s by providing a new "ethic of slowness and commitment" that resists "teleological end games.”[42]
Despite the insightful analysis, however, Lee has overlooked the crucial difference between the rhetorical sense of the "teleological end games," which haunted the American psyche of the 1960s, and the historical and empirical “teleological end games" which devastated Japan in 1945. The fantasy of "end games," which ensnared the consciousness of the entire population of wartime Japan with the possibility of patriotic suicide in the name of the Emperor, was shattered by the atomic bombs in 1945. The nuclear disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki literally marked the "end" of the imaginable scope of manmade destruction. They marked the end of the world, the apocalypse. Kawara's resistance to teleological end games is directed not to the endless present that haunted 1960s America, as Lee suggests, but to the apocalyptic past of Japan from which Kawara emerged.
The cave paintings, signs of "transcendental history," can be seen as portents for a tedious future without a redemptive end. For Kawara, the prospect of endless time, non-eventfulness, and a future with no closure does not conjure anxiety, but longing and even achievement. For endless, uneventful days were brutally stolen by the war and the intensive national history of Japan, under the banner of the "final resolution" for the sake of national unity. It is thus particularly striking that Kawara's experience with the prehistoric paintings reflects the complex structure of horror and desire in his work. The cave paintings represent both the haunting return of the past and the prospect of an eternity lacking any anticipation of redemption, or more precisely, redemption from redemption.
Kawara once compared sleep to death. "We are not very knowledgeable about death. We have never tried it. Westerners fear death. They fail to realize that death is an essential generator of energy. Sleep and meditation are forms of death. In the East, when a monk meditates upon a mountain, he persists until the mountain disappears and the entirety of the world is perceived as uninterrupted sameness.”[43] Putting aside the somewhat mystifying remark on the Zen master, Kawara's comment reveals the redemptive structure of his Today series, but only in the paradoxical sense of redemption. The foreboding presence of death, pain, and suffering is absorbed into the "uninterrupted sameness" of his everyday routine. Kawara's paintings persistently retreat from historical narrative into mere materiality. Their structure is inherently chaotic and essentially meaningless. They communicate almost nothing. Kawara's extremely tedious projects speak only of the incommunicability of everyday horror and the indifferent continuity of time. Yet, "One Thing" is clear: The moments marked by an endlessly ticking clock and the consistent repetition of dates on a calendar may herald, arbitrarily, either a major disaster or a minor detail. Through the relentless enumerations and the superficial boredom of the Date Paintings, Kawara both conceals and exposes the artist's struggle with the shattering arbitrariness of life and death. In the midst of all this horror, Kawara is "still alive," heroically and triumphantly.
Jung-Ah Woo
Notes
1 Kawara described the color as "shocking pink" and said that pink is "as strong a color as white." Transcript of interview with unnamed interviewer, July 1, 1982, On Kawara artist file, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art. I would like to thank Mr. Otani Shogo for allowing me access to the file.
2 Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 58. Also see her "The Date Paintings of On Kawara," Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 17, no. I (1991): 120–37 and 179–80.
3 Honma Masayoshi, "Sono ato no Kawara On: Nyuyoku no atorie o tazunete" [On Kawara since Then: Visiting New York Studio], Bijutsu Techo, December 1965,34–41.
4 Minemura Toshiaki noticed the tiny stars on the canvas and suggested their reference to the national flags of the three nations. He argued that these stars would have no determinate meanings, but rather unite the three disparate canvases into a triptych, like an altarpiece. See Minemura Toshiaki, "Hizuke-kaiga no yashin: Kawara On [Date Painting's Ambition: On Kawara]," Ohara Magazine 28, no. 6 (June 1978): 90.
5 See Tadashi Yokoyama, "At the Junction of Time and Space: On Kawara in the 1950s," in On Kawara, ed. Jonathan Watkins (New York: Phaidon, 2002), 59. Kawara has also said that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki left a profound impact on his personality. See Watkins, "Where 'I Don't Know' Is the Right Answer," in On Kawara, ed. Watkins, 48.
6 Gendai bijutsu: Sengo 10-nen no kessaku-ten (Contemporary Art: Masterpieces of Ten Years' Postwar Art Exhibition) was organized by Mainichi Newspaper Company, funded by the Ministry of Education (Monbusho), and held at the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art. See Hijikata Teiichi, "Sengo 10-nen no kessaku ten" [Contemporary Art: Masterpieces of Ten Years' Postwar Art Exhibition], Geijutsu Shincho, September 1957, 237–40; and Nakahara Yusuke, "Sengo bijutsu no jyu-nen" [Postwar Ten Years' Art], Mizue 626 (September 1957): 75–82.
7 Nakahara Yusuke, "Densetsu sengo bijutsu no jyu-ni: Kawara On no hutatsu no shirizu" [Twelve Legends of Postwar Art: On Kawara's Two Series], Bijutsu Techo 240 (August 1964): 68–69.
8 For English publications on Kawara's activities in Japanese postwar social realism, see Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art in japan 1945 1965, exh. cat. (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art Oxford, 1985), and Bert Winther-Tamaki, "Oil Painting in Postsurrender Japan: Reconstructing Subjectivity through Deformation of the Body," Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 3 (2003): 347–96.
9 The series titles Date Painting and Today are often used interchangeably. But I use Date Painting to designate only his canvases with a date, and Today series for his entire practice, including the Date Paintings and the related work of cataloguing, compiling, and the supplementary documentation.
10 There are nine different sizes of canvas, which range from the smallest, A (8 x 10 inches) to the largest, H (61 x 89 inches), including type A's slight modification, A1 (8 x 16/2 inches). The detailed description of the Date Painting production process is from Yamada Satoshi, "Kawara On kenkyu noto: "Today" shirizu ni tsuite" [On Kawara Research Note: About the Today Series], in Bijutsu-shi ni okeru kiseki to hamon [The Traces and Impacts on Art History] (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Bijutsu Shuppan, 1996), 446.
11 Considering Kawara's extreme reserve in expressing himself about his work after leaving Japan, this journal is a singular source for the artist's comments, though brief, on his Date Paintings, as well as on his private life. Yet, beginning on October 30, 1972, Kawara stopped providing details about each day and began simply using the name of the day (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) as the subtitle.
12 In 1991, Henning Weidemann documented Kawara's one-day production procedure of a Date Painting in a sequence of thirty-one photographs, without any image of the artist. The reconstruction of Kawara's daily labor is partially based on this photo project. Weidemann, On Kawara: June 9, 1991, From "Today" Series (1966-) (Ostfildern, Germany: Cantz, 1994).
13 For a discussion on the fracture of duration into punctuality as inscribed in the industrial society, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7–9.
14 Since all of his projects begin with "I" and reflect on his own daily activities, Kawara's projects are often considered autobiographical. For the previous studies of autobiographical approaches to Kawara's Today series, see Linda Weintraub, Art on the Edge and Over: Search for Art's Meaning in Contemporary Society 1970s–1990s (Litchfield, CT: Art Insights, 1996), 51–58; and Eunhee Yang, "On Kawara's Nomadic Mind: Autobiography of 'A Citizen of the World,'" (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2004).
15 On Kawara: Whole and Parts 1964–1995, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 15; and Yang, 9.
16 Minemura Toshiaki emphasized the significance of the year 1965 as a turning point in Kawara's career, as that was the year the artist not only established his policy of privacy, but also presented his landmark Bathroom series to the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Minemura thereby interpreted 1965 as the dividing line between the artist's career in Japan and his career abroad. See Minemura, "Kawara On: Fu-renzoku no renzoku" [On Kawara: Continuity of Discontinuity], Mizue 912 (March 1981): 46–59.
17 All the subtitles discussed here are reprinted in On Kawara Continuity/Discontinuity 1963–1979 (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1980).
18 Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Random House, 1967), 13.
19 Kawara quoted in Sahara Jiro, "Uchu-jin no yo-na chikyu-jin" [Spaceman like Earthman], Geijutsu Shincho, February 1972, 136. The author recalls his first encounter with Kawara in Mexico City on "6 Abril 1968." Sahara Jiro is the pseudonym of the novelist Miyauchi Katsusuke, who wrote an autobiographical novel, "Gurinijji no hikari o hanarete" [Leaving the Light of Greenwich], Bungei, May 1980, 36–145. In the novel, the protagonist, a young Japanese man who dreams of a non-national wanderer of the world, meets a painter named Kawana On; the character is based on the writer's encounter with Kawara. "Sahara Jiro" is a Japanized form of "Sahara [desert] Zero," as the writer envisioned the world's largest desert as a neutral place, devoid of a state-oriented identity. For the novelist's exhibition review of Kawara's show, see "Kawara On ten: Junsui-na kodoku" [On Kawara Exhibition: Pure Solitude], Bijutsu Techo 38, no. 563 (June 1986): 138.
20 According to Teresa O'Connor, the subtitle is based on the artist's nightmare. She interpreted Kawara's Date Paintings series as a talisman, in a sense that it prevents the death threat, but by doing so, constantly evokes the terror. O'Connor, "Notes: On Kawara's I Am Still Alive," On Kawara: Date Paintings in 89 Cities, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1991), 246.
21 A recent monograph of the artist contains the chronology: "On Kawara 25,453 days (I September 2002): Lives and works in New York." On Kawara, ed. Watkins, 146. The "detailed" information of his residence in New York is actually a rare exception to his normally strict adherence to numerical values as his biography.
22 Rene Denizot, ed., On Kawara, exh. cat. (Frankfurt am Main: Museum fur Moderne Kunst, 1991), 117.
23 Fumio Nanjo reports that Claes Oldenburg, a neighbor of Kawara's around 1965, remembered that he used to hear Kawara's door open and close once every day, with one long silent interval between, without actually seeing him. Fumio Nanjo, interview by author, February 10, 2003.
24 Minemura Toshiaki mentions an interesting anecdote which occurred around this same period in New York. The critic Tono Yoshiaki invited Kawara to a dinner, but the artist did not attend. Instead, Kawara later sent Tono the Date Painting which he had produced that evening. Toshiaki, "Sei no purakutisu toshite no Hizuke-kaiga: Kawara On ten" [Date Paintings as Practice of Life: On Kawara Exhibition], Bijutsu Techo 28, no. 405 (March 1976): 91.
25 See Jeff Wall, "Monochrome and Photojournalism in On Kawara's Today Paintings," in Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art, vol. I, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1996).
26 Because the Mexican government placed strict censorship on media images of the civil riots in 1968, Kawara's I Read of the month is one of the rare documents of the massacre still in existence. See Watkins, On Kawara. Okabe Aomi emphasizes that May 1968 was the first month in which Kawara produced Date Paintings every day, which implies that the artist was highly conscious of the development of student movements worldwide. The Date Paintings of this month demonstrate that while the artist was staying in Mexico, he paid great attention to the student riots in Paris. In 1988 Kawara held an exhibition as a part of the twentieth annual commemoration of the "May Revolution." See Aomi, "From Paris," Bijutsu Techo 40, no. 598 (August 1988): 168–69.
27 Sahara Jiro, 136.
28 Joseph Kosuth, "Art after Philosophy," Studio International 178 (October 1969): 137 (italics in original).
29 Rorimer, 56–57.
30 Benjamin Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962 1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43.
31 Buchloh argued that Kawara was a significant figure in the development of Conceptual art, but in his anthology, Kawara's name is actually mentioned only three times, within a string of artists' names, with no further analysis. Buchloh, Neo Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 97, 291, and 326.
32 Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962–1969," 143.
33 See Alexander Alberro, "Reconsidering Conceptual Art: 1966–1977," in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology ed. Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xvi-xxxvii; and Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind Krauss, et. al., "Round Table: Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp," in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 222.
34 Kathryn Chiong, "Kawara On Kawara," October 90 (Fall 1999): 51–75.
35 See Eric Hobsbaum, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994), 44–49.
36 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9.
37 I am particularly referring to the strong influences of art historians associated with the journal October. With its heavy inclination to Continental theory, Octobers general tenet of "politics" is narrowly bound by the "art institution" or else sublimated into the purely structural matter of the artworks.
38 See Harry Harootunian, "Shadowing History: National Narratives and the Persistence of the Everyday," Cultural Studies 18, no. 2–3 (March May 2004), 181–200.
39 Regarding the Altamira cave paintings, Watkins emphasized the artist's interest in a form of communication that transcends language and history, as exemplified by the cave paintings. See Watkins, On Kawara, 53–54.
40 Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 298–99.
41 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. I, trans. Sian Reynolds (1966; New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 20–21.
42 Lee, 307–8.
43 Quoted in Weintraub, 57–58.