On Kawara’s Guggenheim retrospective was a surprising revelation, far more powerful–and poignant–than I’d previously expected. The artist, who died last year, was born in Japan on December 24, 1932, forcing him to experience the horrific bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he was a teenager. Though he’d initially wanted to be a scientist, witnessing the dangerous side of scientific advancement changed his mind. After a brief career as a figurative surrealist, Kawara destroyed his early work, left Tokyo for Paris then New York, and landed on a practice that would endure for nearly fifty years. His subject was time, and his goal was to record its passage.
He began by painting austere “date paintings” in 1966, a series which he would later (very aptly) call “Today.” These rectangular canvases were created according to a set of strict rules: 1) each painting must be completed on the date that it depicts; 2) each painting must show the date using the language and date conventions of the country Kawara was in when he made it; 3) each painting must be done in one of eight sizes and in grey, red, or blue; and 4) almost every painting has a matching box lined with newspaper clippings from that date.
These boxes–perhaps the most relatable part of the entire project–had never been exhibited before the Guggenheim show, and they completely change the tone of the “Today” series. The dates are no longer just numbers; instead, they become contextualized. For those who didn’t live through many of the years On Kawara painted (like me), the series is an idiosyncratically edited history book; for visitors who remember the events listed in the newspapers (like my parents), the series induces nostalgic. Over all though, Kawara illustrates how, though specifics may change, the larger issues that we tackle as humans remain largely the same.
Similarly, his paintings evolve ever so slightly over time, demonstrating variation within constraints. As the cultural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss once said, “ritual is the killer of time,” and Kawara’s work embodies of this idea. By repeating the same rituals day after day, the artist aimed to prevent major change, but evolution within the work is still visible.
Kawara continued to explore this dichotomy in the “I Got Up” series, in which he sent two postcards every day for nearly 12 years. Kawara was not one for elusive titles: the postcards say the time he got out of bed each day while traveling all over the world. It appears that he often suffered from jetlag, as the times vary wildly (4:32 p.m., 6:53 a.m., 8:10 p.m.). Simultaneously, Kawara began two other series, “I Met,” and “I went,” in which he recorded the names of everyone he met and traced his route for the day, respectively. All together, these three series read like present-day social media status updates. They provide us with his coordinates–we see the address and an image of the place he’s currently staying on the postcards–as well as the time he rose to begin his day, who he saw and where, but we get no substantive information. After looking at the nearly 1500 postcards dozens of times, I do not know Kawara any better.
Indeed, the show may tell us more about ourselves than it does about the artist. Sure, we can see that Kawara was maddeningly habit-oriented and likely suffered from some form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Yes, he was an adventurous traveler and a successful gambler (before his paintings began to sell, he financed his lengthy trips with earnings from the Go and Mah Jong tournaments he hosted at his apartment), but I don’t have a sense of his desires, anxieties, interests, or fears. Instead, the exhibition has made me reflect on how I spend my own time, and it has caused many others to reach far back into their memory banks.
Unexpectedly, the appearance of dates that hold significance–birthdays, anniversary, 9/11–engenders spontaneous emotional outpourings. And in this way, the visual representation of time, the most universal subject of all, has become incredibly personal.