Time Embodied: The Lived Body in On Kawara's Date Paintings
On Kawara: 21 OCT. 68, 1968. Liquitex on canvas, handmade cardboard box with newspaper; 20.5 x 25.5 cm.
An introduction...
On Kawara has produced over 2000 Date Paintings, each one stating the date of its inception. In the span of one day, Kawara undertakes and completes each Date Painting; and if not finished by midnight of the date, he destroys the painting.
Kawara, a frequent traveler, inscribes each date in the local language of the city in which he is on the stated date, with the exception of paintings produced in countries that do not utilize a Roman alphabet; in such cases he uses Esperanto. Until recently, Kawara always included a contemporaneous local newspaper clipping that he would either rest or paste inside the cardboard box he made for each painting. Kawara then registered the paintings in a journal by title (the date), subtitle, size, and color. A sampling of the subtitles is as follows:
I have decided to be alone. (1.20.66)
Beatles and their neutrality. (1.2.66)
Two students shot in Santo Domingo. (2.9.66)
U.S. Marines estimated today they have killed 1110 North Vietnamese in last 4 days. (3.7.66)
Numerous sightings of unidentified flying objects since March 16, in Michigan, U.S.A. (3.25.66)
Skirts go up-up-up in Britain. (4.17.66)
9:00 (2) PERRY MASON: ‘Case of the Positive Negative.’ Raymond Burr, Barbara Hale, Brian Donleavy. (4.30.66)
Are your ideas on computers worth shouting about? (5.28.66)
I make love to the days. (7.25.66)
Poison. (8.27.66)
Tony Cox and Yoko left New York for Europe early in the morning. (9.1.66)
A garden with artificial flowers and a yellow net in my studio. (9.16.66)
Not With My Wife, You Don’t. (11.3.66)
A baby crying through history. (12.3.66)
Take it early. You can feel better every minute of every hour of every day of every month of every year. (1.23.67)[1]
In spite of the paintings’ appearance and method of seemingly uncompromising and depersonalized objectivity, these subtitles and their evolution suggest that the works are constituted, in fact, by a deeply subjective presence. For, from the global to the extremely personal, these subtitles are the site of emergence of an undeniable intimacy between their subjects and their author (Kawara). The subject of the subtitles is the author, is Kawara, as the subtitles exist as articulations of his thoughts and his days— in other words, of his person. Quite a few of these subtitles refer to the Date Paintings themselves, such as “I am afraid of my Today paintings’ (29 May 1966)”, “I am painting this painting’ (18 January 1966)”, and “I am dating here’ (28 January 1966).”[2] However, after December 28, 1972’s subtitle, “Jag vet inte,” (“I don’t know,” in Swedish) the subtitles have simply stated the day of the week. In his piece, “Where ‘I Don’t Know’ Is the Write Answer,” John Watkins recounts On Kawara’s transition from expository and descriptive subtitles to “Jag vet inte” to the names of days with an all too suggestive typographic error: "The latter form of entry [subtitles about the Date Paintings themselves] becomes increasingly frequent from early 1971 until 'Jag vet inte' and finally the artist is simply just names the days [sic][3] One may assume that Watkins meant to write "and finally the artist simply just names the days." However, perhaps he meant to write "and finally the artist is simply just the names of the days." Or, perhaps most interesting of all, is the possibility that Watkins meant both at once–that while writing the names of the days, Kawara is simply the days named.
Merleau-Ponty's lived body in time and space
French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty locates the phenomenon of existence in what he calls the “lived body.” According to him, the body exists beyond its physicality. The body is the means by which one experiences the world, objects in the world, time and space. However, the body does not merely collide with these objects and move on unaffected. The body is constituted by the confluence of forces with which it comes into contact—the temporal, the spatial, the social, the psychic, the political, etc. And it is this body, with its field of experiential forces, that comprises the phenomenon that is the body as lived. And, while certain forces may be more or less universal—such as time and space—these forces only have resonance in their relation to an individual's being. As he writes:
I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished —since that distance is not one of its properties—if I were not there to scan it with my gaze.[4]
While these forces constitute the lived, the experienced, of being itself, these forces have relevance only insofar as they are inhabited, or lived, by the subject. Elizabeth Grosz defines her notion of Merleau-Ponty’s lived body, stating that it is “a phenomenon experienced by me and thus provides the very horizon and perspectival point which places me in the world and makes relations between me, other objects, and other subjects possible. It is the body as I live it, as I experience it, and as it shapes my experience.”[5]
In constituting the critical importance of this subjectivity, Merleau-Ponty disengages time from its abstraction as a universal property by locating time in its specific relation to the subject. Time finds relevance as one of many forces lived by the body. “The course of time is no longer the stream itself: it is the landscape as it rolls by for the moving observer. Time is, therefore, not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to record. It arises from my relation to things.”[6] In other words, one is not carried along by the currents of time. Rather, time emerges in relation to one’s ever-changing position as subject. Time, like the landscape, rests in the background of one’s existence. One’s existence is not constituted out of time, but rather time emerges as a crucial description of and suggestion towards one’s specifically embodied existence.
According to Merleau-Ponty, the critical understanding one must broach in order to contemplate time as a force lived by one’s phenomenal existence “is how to make time explicit as it comes into being and makes itself evident, time at all times underlying the notion of time, not as an object of our knowledge, but as a dimension of our being.”[7] Kawara engages this precise phenomenological undertaking in his Date Paintings, as he explores time not as an abstract “notion”, but rather as “a dimension of our being.” In order to do so, Kawara presents time not as a transcendent continuum, but as a series of points that are organized, and even produced, through his own existence. It is only through Kawara’s embodied being that this time (‘underlying the notion of time’) is de-abstracted, recorded, and thus constituted. As Merleau-Ponty writes (and Kawara paints): “It is of the essence of time to be in process of self-production, and not to be; never, that is, to be completely constituted. Constituted time, the series of possible relations in terms of before and after, is not time itself, but the ultimate recording of time.”[8] Constituted time cannot exist outside its recording. Thus, constituted time cannot exist without a recorder, without a being whose temporal existence can be made specific, without Kawara. Time is always of one’s being. In the Date Paintings, time is always of Kawara. Kawara’s works are about time only insofar as time is about Kawara’s being. The time stated in the Date Paintings and the location given through language are very much about Kawara, about his precise location in time and space. And this time that is given, this location that is given, they are Kawara’s to share in his works, as only with his existence do they acquire any meaning. They are literally incorporated by Kawara in his existence—time and space are his to convey, as they are only through him. As Merleau-Ponty makes clear, one takes possession of the coordinates that comprise one’s existence, as opposed to merely existing as byproducts of them: “we must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time.”[9]
In their manifest exactitude, the Date Paintings mark the coordinates of Kawara’s being, and as such, are intensely constituted by Kawara himself. Kawara positions his Date Paintings within a larger constellation, the Today series, which include other recent works, such as “I Met,” “I Went,” and ‘I Got Up,” which similarly attend to a serial temporality, a precise spatial locating, a meticulous recording of daily existence. “I Met” is a record of the people Kawara met on a particular day; “I Went” is a plotting on a map of the places Kawara went on a particular day; and “I Got Up” is a series of postcards sent out from around the world with the message “I got up at...” followed by the specific time Kawara woke up on the day stated. The Today series is not a collection of disparate artifacts and moments, but rather is unified within Kawara’s being as corporeal subject. As Merleau-Ponty suggests, one is not a series of points within space and time, but rather space and time merely point to one’s existence. Kawara literalizes this mapping of points in his “I Went” series. The points on the maps do not comprise a larger mapping of abstracted space, but rather locate Kawara’s decidedly physical presence in the world as it encounters spatial and temporal forces. For, according to Merleau-Ponty, “to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world, as we have seen; our body is not primarily in space: it is of it.”[10] Kawara is not in the time and space depicted in his works. Rather, he is of time and space, constituted by time and space such that the time and space depicted in his works are of Kawara. His works, as expressions of time and space, make explicit the essence of time as both “in process of self-production” and that which is “not to be.” For, in the Date Paintings, time quickly ceases to exist outside Kawara, as time's passage both authorizes as well as exists only within the paintings as series, as process. The next painting cannot be until Kawara’s existence within time no longer holds relevance to the previous painting. Time, from painting to painting, becomes no longer.
Language’s Wonderful Obsolescence, or, a Successful Language is a Disappearing Language
Much has been written about Kawara’s mistrust of language, his recognition of the inadequacy of language to truly communicate. According to Watkins’ conversations with the artist, “Kawara does not believe that authentic communication is possible.”[11] And yet, Kawara does not answer this inadequacy by eschewing language for the figural, by attempting to transcend language. Kawara, in fact, turned to language from the figural images that characterized his early work.
We see in Kawara’s Date Paintings an intense adherence to, a hyper-literalization of, the linguistic. Each Date Painting is absolutely subject to the temporality signified by the date of the paintings. If Kawara does not complete the painting by midnight of the date painted, the painting is destroyed. This is Kawara’s attempt to capture time, to expand what is temporary into a realm of permanence by a hyper-fidelity to that which is fleeting. The painting can only survive beyond its time if it is purely proper to its time, completed before midnight of the day it states.
Kawara further literalizes language by inscribing each date in the local language of the city in which he is on the stated date. Language, in its significatory capacity as well as its cultural multiplicities, serves to locate Kawara's consciousness in a precise moment in time and space. As the paintings travel beyond their signified spatio-temporal specificity, Kawara can, in a sense, exist dually in two times and places at once. Ironically, only by wholly succumbing to a finite temporality and spatial specificity can Kawara exist outside of it. And, this signification of Kawara can only be accomplished through language's deferral to meaning. As Merleau-Ponty writes, "the wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion: my eyes follow the lines on the paper, and from the moment I am caught up in their meaning, I lose sight of them[12] I argue that language in Kawara's Date Paintings operates precisely by this logic of simultaneous recession and emergence.
Language, in its literality, in its marking of time and place, recedes, as Kawara' s artistic process, his expression of the spatio-temporal specificity of his being, emerges. Of late, Kawara's Date Paintings include neither the personalized subtitle nor the newspaper clipping from the date and place. Language, Kawara seems to be saying, stands alone. For in his Date Paintings, language is both the barrier as well as the conduit to the phenomenological presence of Kawara. The date, something that has such a banal presence and function in our everyday lives, becomes the means by which Kawara's existence is communicated. "Expression fades out before what is expressed.”[13] In other words, a successful language is a disappearing language. In the Date Paintings, language is the expression that "fades out" before Kawara. And the time that is indicated, the place that is given, serve only to communicate Kawara's being, to mark the presence of Kawara's corporealized existence, his lived body.
Jennifer Rhee
Notes
1 Dan Cameron, “The On Kawara Story,” Arts Magazine (October 1986): 38.
2 Jonathan Watkins, “Where ‘I Don’t Know’ Is the Right Answer,” Jonathan Watkins. On Kawara (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002), 42.
3 Ibid.
4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1989), ix.
5 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 86. Merleau-Ponty, 412.
6 Merleau-Ponty, 412.
7 Ibid., 415.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 139.
10 Ibid., 148.
11 Watkins, 60.
12 Merleau-Ponty, 401.
13 Ibid.