@onemillionyears is the On Kawara @dailyrothko, which is complicated, because On Kawara was already the @dailykawara in so many ways. Anyway, today I wondered where Kawara was on 17 August 1989, so I went to Duncan McLaren’s site to see if he’d tracked him down.
[TL;DR no, but since he was in Nagoya in June, and since he used Esperanto when not in a Roman alphabet country, I’m fine to assume he was still in Japan for AŬG.]
Point is, Duncan has this whole fabulating passage where he imagines Kawara spending a week in Chicago, visiting a show of his work at the Renaissance Society. On Kawara Date Paintings: 1966-88 was a version of Again and Against, a show Kaspar König started at Portikus, to pair 23 date paintings with works by another artist from the same year. Duncan imagines Kawara spending time with each work, waiting for layers on his date paintings to dry.
The 1980 work was a Boomer-triggering bronze plaque from Jenny Holzer’s Living Series:
AFFLUENT COLLEGE-BOUND STUDENTS FACE THE REAL PROSPECT OF DOWNWARD MOBILITY. FEELINGS OF ENTITLEMENT CLASH WITH THE AWARENESS OF IMMINENT SCARCITY. THERE IS RESENTMENT AT GROWING UP AT THE END OF AN ERA OF PLENTY COUPLED WITH REASSESSMENT OF CONVENTIONAL MEASURES OF SUCCESS.
Thea and Ethan gave a bronze-colored plaque to the Whitney. A later, engraved version was recently reinstalled on the UChicago campus, and is visible on social media.
The 1986 work, meanwhile, was a small, cartoon gang by Richard Prince whose title, Missing and Presumed Dead, sounds like a joking reply to an I AM STILL ALIVE postcard.
Only after ventriloquizing Kawara’s discourse with each of these works does Duncan discover/reveal that in fact, Kawara had been in Nagoya, the next venue for the Portikus show, for his week-long run of date paintings.
Duncan writes, “On Kawara seems to have been fascinated by Date Painting at the venues of his own shows at this stage in his life. He definitely site-specifically Date Painted while the Frankfurt and Sydney parts of the show were on. He definitely Date Painted in Nagoya a few months before the opening of the third stage of the tour…”
And this is alluring, as is the conceit of König’s concept, of lipsynching a dialogue between Kawara’s paintings and their immediate contemporaries. I think, though, that Kawara painted when he traveled, and painted when he was home. Painting these paintings involved about as much site-specificity and engagement as smoking: it happened when it was needed, sometimes alongside other people.
Previously, ventriloquizing-related: Johns said leave it open