on kawara – greg.org

On Kawara In Dialogue

dark almost black grey on kawara date painting reads 17 aug 1989 in white

@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.

jenny holzer's plaque reads 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 — Jenny Holzer, Untitled, 1980, bronze, probably 8 x 10 in., installed at the Renaissance Society in May 1989, probably after the semester ended

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.

a richard prince cartoon gang of nine rephotographed sections of magazine cartoon drawings of white guys in suits, cropped in various ways, and arranged in a 3x3 grid using the white frames of 35 mm slides as a compositional device, then rephotographed all together and enlarged into a work titled missing and presumed dead — Richard Prince, Missing and Presumed Dead, 1986, c-print, looks to be about 24×24 in. in the Renaissance Society installation

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

Cy Twombly Watermark

At one point in my life I decided instead of just normal engraved stationery, I wanted a watermark. So I went to Mrs John L. Strong, and sat down with Mrs Lewis. Mrs John L. Strong has its own watermark, so surely they would know a paper mill that could accommodate my plan, I suggested. Mrs Lewis explained very tactfully, in as positive and genteel a way as possible, that no. Mrs Strong would certainly be able to help design a beautiful paper that evoked the subtlety of a watermark. I was glad to hear it, that we would be able to produce a paper with a watermark.

She said, “What part of ‘no’ did you not understand?” only it was the Vanderbilts’ stationer on Madison, so it came out like, “It’s interesting when two people have a conversation about the same thing, how they understand it differently.”

a black cloth covered clamshell box lies open on a featureless table. on the left side are loose sheets of handmade paper, face down. on the right, are more loose sheets of handmade paper, face up, revealing one sheet of on kawara's code drawing, except it's a print, a text rewritten in cipher where two differently colored hashmarks replace each letter of the alphabet. published by yvon lambert in 1996 — Zooming in, zooming in, where is the Twombly watermark on these CODES prints at Yvon Lambert

The point is, yesterday I read that in 1996, not so far from the time I was pursuing my watermark, Yvon Lambert published On Kawara’s CODES in an edition of 150 “on 180gr/m2 pure rag paper made especially for the book by the Moulin de Fleurac* and watermarked by Cy Twombly.” And I realized I’d been doing it wrong. But to know how wrong, I needed to figure out wtf is going on with why Cy Twombly is making and watermark paper for On Kawara.

He did not, and it was not. The listing for CODES in the Bibliothèques de Paris clarifies: “Chaque feuille porte la signature d’Yvon Lambert en filigrane (réalisé par Cy Twombly)” So the watermark is Lambert’s, as written by Twombly.

And Twombly also made his bookplate. So far I can find images of neither. But we do have two versions, four years apart, of Twombly’s ex libris for Dr. Reiner Speck, courtesy of Dr. Speck’s show of Twomblyphemera at Maison d’Art.

a detail of a page in the maison d'art catalogue for the 2025 show, cy twombly reiner speck: fragments of an adoration, where two versions of the bookplate twombly designed for speck are displayed side by side. a draft from 1974, and the real deal, from 1978, which, we read, was published as an edition of 1000. both bookplates say ex libris dr speck, etc., in twombly's messiest handwriting — Cy Twombly Ex Libris draft, 1974, and Ex Libris, 1978, ed. 1000? via Maison d’Art’s catalogue for Fragments of an Adoration

Do I need to check the prints CR to get a full bookplate inventory? Is a watermark a print, a drawing, or a sculpture?

*Lambert’s choice of mill for his small batch watermark paper is instructive. He did not ask Arches. Though Moulin de Fleurac sounds prized, specific, and ancient, it only started in the 1970s.

On Kawara Codes, Codecs, Codex

a black cloth covered box with the word codes in all caps debossed large and vertical on the cover, standing in a featureless white space. this is an edition by on kawara published in 1996 by yvon lambert — On Kawara, Codes, 1996, three code works in screenprint, letterpress, and braille, with a text by Jacques Roubaud, published in an edition of 150 by Yvon Lambert on paper made with a watermark comprising Lambert’s name as written by Cy Twombly, which feels like an entirely other blog post about to spiral out of the first caption

In the 2015 Guggenheim catalogue for On Kawara — Silence curator Anne Wheeler wrote that there were eight Code drawings: three made of hash marks in colored pencil; two typed texts of extremely large and small numbers; two pictograms; and a poem printed in braille.

Duncan McLaren counts nine Code works: there are actually four Code hashmark drawings, with varying titles. But then he says there are eight, because two pictograms are the same. Except the two pictograms McLaren references seem to be just two sides of one of the pictograms Wheeler mentioned, in a catalogue; the other was a poster in a window. And he notes that braille is only a mystery if you don’t know braille. Honestly, I’m taking braille and pictograms off my Code list.

a 1965 black and white photo of on kawara's studio wall, which is filled with large format paintings, dark with a white english word painted at the center: untitled, cipher, art. and small paintings along the floor, similar style. three of the paintings are encoded texts replaced with dashes of varying lengths and spacing. it is believed that kawara destroyed all the paintings depicted here. — 1965 photo of On Kawara’s studio, with unfamiliar subjects painted in a now-familiar way, plus at least four encoded text works, all destroyed, apparently. (via the Guggenheim’s 2015 exhibition catalogue)

And I’m adding back the Date painting-style, graphically encoded paintings Kawara made in 1965, before starting the Date paintings, which he destroyed. The surviving Code works begin in 1965, and cluster in the 1960s. But except for a 1996 artist book, most of Kawara’s Code works were unpublished and almost entirely unconsidered until his Guggenheim retrospective in 2015. One filled sixteen pages and the cover of a massive, major 1996 catalogue, and yet seems to have gone unacknowledged. In 2015 Ben Slyngstad, a gallery guide at the Guggenheim, deciphered Kawara’s last Code drawing, Voice from Moon (2011), which turned out to be the transcript of the July 20, 1969 moon landing. Unaware of Slyngstad’s achievement, McLaren also deciphered it in 2022, and identified the source of the title and the transcript as the front page of the NY Times.

duncan mclaren's worksheet decoding a page from on kawara's 2011 drawing, voice from moon, in which differently colored pairs of hashmarks were substituted for roman alphabet letters. spoiler alert, though the title gives a big hint: it's the transcript of the 1969 moon landing, as published in the nyt, via onkawara.co.uk — Duncan McLaren work in progress deciphering On Kawara’s *Voice from Moon* (2011)

Which is all prelude to the mindboggling realization that in 2024 McLaren, Anders Delbom, and Tommy Wrede deciphered all but one of On Kawara’s surviving Code works. McLaren’s account of the deciphering extends over seven parts, and it is quite a journey, and it ends with a call for help in cracking the last Code. Which is the first, but first:

The hashmark drawings—one of which, Les Lettres d’Amour/ Love Letters (1965), was also reproduced as a seven-page screenprint in the Codes (1996) artist edition—end up being straightforward enough susbtitution ciphers, where a pair of colored hashes represents a letter from the Roman alphabet.

One drawing, Traveler’s Song, or Traveler no Uta (1965) turned out to be a partially translated Japanese folk song, with the mix of English and romanized Japanese lyrics complicating typical pattern/frequency recognition.

the cover of whole and part, a 1996 on kawara catalogue, is covered in typed out numbers of extraordinary size, both large and small. it turns out to be the beginning of a code work, though it was not acknowledged as such anywhere, only recognized later, by curators, and then decoded in 2024. via onkawara.co.uk — On Kawara, Whole and Parts, 1996, les Presses du Reel edition, with *No Title*, a typed work of encoded text on the cover, photo via Duncan McLaren

The two large number Code works, include Eight Quintillion… (1969), six pages of typed out numbers, and No Title (1996?), in which each typed out number corresponds to a sentence or line? And thus the constituent digits substitute for letters. Kawara gave a clue to the [most unlikeliest] source of the 1969 text in a rare 1970 interview. Fortunately the same cipher key was used for the sprawling 1990 text, too.

The last Code work to decode is the earliest, Code, or Colored Cryptogram (1965), in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo. The hashmarks appear to encode Japanese phonetic syllables. And as the surprise at what McLaren and his collab have accomplished wears off, it’s replaced by surprise that they haven’t cracked the Japanese code, too. I mean, come on, it’s been a year!

On Kawara Used A Template

That’s it. That’s the post.

It can sometimes feel like the work On Kawara left behind is so vast, constrained, and specific that it leaves anyone with questions—or answers—about the artist and his practice stuck in critical fabulation. But that turns out not to be true.

Beneath Duncan McLaren’s occasionally rhapsodic biographical reconstruction of Kawara’s career lies an extraordinary amount of data drawn and synthesized from the work itself. The artistic actions of a day or an instant—where Kawara was when he painted, who he sent postcards to, where he went, and who he met—now create a structure of a life.

And when McLaren sees that one neighbor got dozens of I GOT UP postcards, and another got only one, he tracks them down and asks what happened. And that is how we find out how Nobu Fukui, the guy who organized their artist co-op building, and hosted their late night mah-jong, and stored his art & stuff at the Kawara’s when he went back to Japan, also got in some date painting trouble:

On normally brought a painted canvas [to mah-jong] with the date pencilled out, all he had to do was to paint. Sometimes he came with a blank canvas, painted the canvas and played the game while the paint was getting dry. He used a set of plastic templates to draw dates with a pencil. I didn’t know, but I learned later that somehow he kept this a secret. Apparently he wanted the public to believe he was drawing freehand.

The typeface changed over the years; would it be a shock to learn that Kawara used a template for some of those styles? Actually, yes, but only because of how the project evolved and was presented. And a template at the beginning does seem—and look—plausible, if unexpected. But this posthumous disclosure is only part of the drama. Here is McLaren:

Nobu told me that on his 25th birthday, on June 2, 1967, Nobu borrowed On’s templates and made a Date Painting on an orange background, the characters being displayed both upside down and running backwards…

Later in 1967, when Nobu was going to Japan for several months and was giving up his rented loft, On and Hiroko offered to store his birthday Date for him. Upon Nobu’s return from Japan, On did not give him back the Date. Mind you, Nobu didn’t ask for it back, so maybe there was an unspoken understanding that Nobu had been in danger of somehow undermining On’s project.

a jpg of an orange on kawara style date painting if the template was flipped, so the date, june 2, 1967, appears in white mirrored and upside down, an illustration based on nobu fukui's story of doing just this, as told to duncan mclaren of onkawara.co.uk — ceci n’est pas un Nobu Fukui: Duncan McLaren’s rendering of the flipped-stencil date painting Nobu supposedly made for his own birthday, via onkawara.co.uk

June 1967 was just over a year in. It already became clear in late 1966, when he destroyed a date painting that took longer than a day to finish, that Kawara only settled the conceptual contours of his painting project over time, as he experienced it. Was having someone else paint a Date painting ever OK? How about finding out your punk friend, ten years younger than you, painted a flipped stunt version of a Date painting for themselves?

21 nov 2003 painted in white on a dark grey rectangular canvas, a 60th birthday gift from on kawara to kaspar koenig

Was Nobu the first person to inspire the Date painting-as-birthday-gift, only to play himself in the process?

14,906 – 14,910 Days

an instagram post by __artbooks__ of a yellowing photocopy of a biographical chronology and list of places, handwritten by on kawara, from the artist's birth in 1933 through 1969, on the letterhead of the holiday inn in saint louis — __artbooks__ ig post of a photocopy of an on kawara chronology

In the instagram post at __artbooks__ it says On Kawara wrote this “personal chronology” on stationery from the Downtown St Louis Holiday Inn, “some time between October 16 and 20, 1973.” The timing is based on the assumption that he didn’t just grab the stationery for later use, but instead wrote out this list while he was staying in St. Louis. It’s also possible that another sheet stapled under this one—these are photocopies, and were not known to the One Million Years Foundation that handles Kawara’s estate—continues with all the places he’d been, ending with Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, the places he’d visited before arriving in St. Louis.

a photo of a page in on kawara's 2008 multi-volume edition, I GOT UP, showing both sides of the postcard he sent to sol lewitt on october 18 1973, letting him know he got up at 9:56 AM. It was sent from the holiday in st louis, and on the front is a photo of a skeletal geodesic dome with a lily pool in the foreground, a greenhouse at the missouri botanical garden known as the climatron. via tama art university — A postcard of the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, sent by On Kawara to Sol Lewitt on Oct 18, 1973, published in I GOT UP, 2008 by mfc-michèle didier, digitized at TamaBi

In mid-October Kawara and his wife Hiroko Hiraoka were barely a week into a three-month road trip across the United States, making art along the way: Date Paintings, I Am Still Alive telegrams, I Got Up postcards, and I Went maps. The postcards for the four mornings he woke up in the St Louis Holiday Inn were all sent to Sol Lewitt. Between the postcards and maps in the On Kawara Database at Tama Art University and Duncan MacLaren’s extraordinary reverse-engineered narrative, it’s possible to reconstruct the form of Kawara’s life, if not the substance.

This chronology, sort of an I’VE BEEN, is only loosely related to the I WENT project. Every day from June 1, 1968 through September 17, 1979, Kawara traced the path he traveled on a photocopy of a local map. It hints at broader documentation of his life alongside his work, if not for it. But it also shows Kawara looking back, a perspective that rarely surfaces in an art practice so thoroughly grounded in the moment of its making.

a black and white 1966 photo of on kawara's loft studio with two rows of date paintings along the wall: the smaller ones are hung in a line, and the medium sized ones are lined up along the floor. a giant date painting, perhaps 6 by 9 feet, of sept. 20, 1966 rests on blocks on the floor in front of the rows of smaller paintings. [spoiler] it was later destroyed, presumably because it had taken longer than a day to finish it. — On Kawara’s 13th St studio, c. 1966, via onkawara.co.uk

It reminds me of a glimpse into the evolution of Kawara’s project that I read recently on MacLaren’s page reconstructing the first year of the Date Paintings, 1966. Among the photos of Kawara’s 13th St studio I’d seen many times before, is this image of the largest date painting to-date, Sept. 20, 1966. McLaren points out, though, that Kawara does not record making a painting on the 20th, nor on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or 24th. Yet there one is.

This giant painting, then, was perhaps the first one Kawara could not finish in a day. And so it was almost nine months into his project, and only after completing and photographing his biggest painting ever, that Kawara decided a Today Series painting must be made on the day, or it had to be destroyed.

__artbooks__ [ig]

Kasper König’s Bookshelf, Birthday

Wolfgang Tillmans, *Kasper König’s Bookshelf*, 1995, 30×40 cm, ed. 10/10+1AP, selling König’s copy Oct. 1st, 2024 at Van Ham

There are some fascinating things in Kasper König’s collection, which is being auctioned at Van Ham in Cologne starting next week. Some weird things, too. One thread I see going through it is König, a hugely influential curator and museum director for decades, got many early works from artists who went on to greatness, early but not iconic.

A couple of pieces are both, though: like Wolfgang Tillmans’ 1995 photo of König’s bookshelf, which looks monumental, more like a Gursky than the Gurskys, but also offhand and intimate, like a Tillmans.

On Kawara, *Today Series, 21 Nov.2003*, 8×10 in., selling from Kasper König’s collection at Van Ham

Of course, the most early and most iconic work has to be On Kawara’s date painting from 1967. König’s early and unflagging enthusiasm for Kawara’s conceptual projects was instrumental to their acclaim. And that support manifests in another Today Series painting, 21 Nov. 2003, which was a gift from the artist for König’s 60th birthday.

Which, how does that work? I mean, I’m sure everyone shopping for a Date Painting quietly gravitates to a date that means something to them. But this is the opposite. Are König’s birthday and the moon landing the only two events explicitly commemorated by Date Paintings?

Kawara, Richter, Rorimer, Longino

On Kawara family snapshots, from “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer,” curated by Alan Longino

Here are snapshots of On Kawara’s family attending Gerhard Richter’s New Year’s party.

Installation view of “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer: On, Anne, On,” scr via ig/alan_longino

They were included in, “From the Desk of Anne Rorimer: On, Anne, On,” an exhibition staged over a series of weekends in Apr-May 2024 in what looks like a student lounge at the University of Chicago. The material was taken down every night so it wouldn’t disappear. It was the fourth and final show of Longino, IAH, a curatorial project by post-war Japanese Art History graduate student Alan Longino. Longino’s idea was a show focused on an art historian, and Rorimer gamely opened her lifetime of files and correspondence, and archive of artist interactions to him.

More than most artists, Kawara’s work was so intertwined with the medium of interaction, correspondence, and daily activity, and the professional and personal ephemera give glimpses of life beyond the edges of his practice.

Screenshot from “A Conversation with Anne Rorimer on Blinky Palermo, On Kawara and Lawrence Weiner, 29 June 2024 at Dia Beacon via youtube

The identification of the snapshots was from Rorimer herself, who mentioned the exhibition and Longino in late June at Dia, where she and curator Jordan Carter discussed her work with Kawara and other Dia artists.

Rorimer began working with Kawara in 1979, when she included him in the 79th American Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Judging by the age of Kawara’s daughter in the lower snapshot, the party would probably have been in the late 1980s. A more intrepid soul than I might deduce the year from the date formats of paintings produced around the holidays. Or it’s on that pink envelope. [update: which, that Sojourner Truth stamp was issued in 1986.] Or just ask Rorimer.

Of Longino, IAH, there is a text by Calvin Lee on Longino’s Google Drive, but the most thorough documentation of the show for the moment is Longino’s Instagram. I was stunned and saddened to learn Longino, 36 and at the very beginning of his career, passed away from cancer in July, barely a week after Rorimer & Carter’s conversation.

Longino, I.A.H. [longino-iah.com]
previously, related: I Hunted Butterflies

I Got Up In Salt Lake City

image of On Kawara’s *Sept. 23, 2007* and its box, with its front page from the local news section of The Deseret News, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 10×13 in., via onkawara.co.uk

I am still trying to wrap my head around the enormity of what Duncan Mclaren’s accomplishing in his day-by-day, work-by-work, trip-by-trip, show-by-show documentation of On Kawara’s life. But without it, I somehow would have not realized that Kawara painted one Today series work in Salt Lake City.

I say somehow because I didn’t clock it when I saw this painting in 2012, at David Zwirner’s show, “Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 other cities.” Which was very much a show about Kawara making date paintings all over the world/in New York City. Or so I thought.

Actually it was a show of date paintings made all over the world, which is not the same thing. Mclaren’s project of combing through the data of Kawara’s oeuvre, is about the making, and of finding the glimpses of the artist and his life in work that seems to obscure it.

I Hunted Butterflies

In May 2023 University of Florida entomologist Akito Kawahara and nearly 90 collaborators published the findings of their massive, eight-year study of butterfly and moth evolution in Nature. greg.org hero Brian Sholis posted a recent article about Kawahara’s research in Smithsonian Magazine. He was inspired by his father, On Kawara:

When Kawahara was 4 years old, his parents noticed that he was scared of insects and would run away from them. To help him overcome this fear, his father started taking him for walks in the parks of suburban Tokyo, looking for insects, talking about insects and carrying a butterfly net. “I still remember the first butterfly I collected,” says Kawahara, his eyes brightening at the memory. “It was near my grandmother’s house. I remember the exact place where the butterfly landed. It was a snout butterfly. I had seen it in books, and now it landed right in front of me. I remember my hands shaking and my dad helping me to catch the butterfly.”

Kawahara still has that specimen in his personal collection in Tokyo, which now numbers between 5,000 and 10,000 and also serves as a remembrance of his father. In his youth, the family divided its time between Tokyo and New York—Kawahara attended schools in both cities—and on weekends, his father would take him on butterfly collecting trips. On Kawara also traveled extensively to create his art and sometimes brought his son along, plus their butterfly equipment. As a boy, Kawahara gathered specimens from Singapore, Hawaii, Alaska, California and all over Japan.

Stickers included in the catalogue for *On Kawara: Date Paintings 1981-83…On Sundays*, an exhibition at Galerie Watari in Tokyo, via Jonathan A. Hill Booksellers

Kawahara would have been 4 in 1983. The exhibition catalogue for Kawara’s fall 1983 exhibition at Galerie Watari in Tokyo includes a facsimile of his painting journal for the period between 1981-83, and three sheets of date painting stickers, to scale [above], including just five made in June, July, and August 1983.

The One Million Years Foundation, notes bookseller Jonathan A. Hill, no longer recognizes the catalogue as part of the artist’s printed oeuvre. But Kawara’s documentation of date painting production on his 100-year calendar does seem to confirm this number. And so now we see that on the other days of the Summer of 1983, the artist was laying the foundations of a major scientific breakthrough by hunting butterflies with his son.

A global phylogeny of butterflies reveals their evolutionary history, ancestral hosts and biogeographic origins [nature]
Where Did Butterflies Come From? This Scientist Is On the Case [smithsonianmag via brian sholis]
Previously, related: On Kawara Date Painting Stickers
On Kawara Db
Today Job: On Working Late

Today Job: On Working Late

The closest thing to Apr. 5, 1966 I can find, On Kawara’s E 13th St studio, photographed in late 1966, published in the catalogue for the Guggenheim’s retrospective, *On Kawara — Silence*, 2015

On Tumblr Voor Werk asked the archetypal artist question, prompted by stunning early photos of On Kawara’s work and studio: how did he pay for it, and how did he live to keep making it?

Even though I knew the only thing written in the biography section was “29,771 days,” I looked for clues in the catalogue for On Kawara — Silence, Jeffrey Weiss’ 2015 show at the Guggenheim.

tl;dr: The amount of time accounted for by the production of the date paintings alone does not seem conducive to having a regular job. The only thing I can guess besides family money, wife supported them, or somehow eked out a living selling date paintings from his studio, is that he made money playing mahjong. Or maybe Kasper Koenig kept it going.

Kawara was a well-known avant-garde artist in Japan in the 1950s, and wrote essays for Bijutsu Techo, the leading Japanese art magazine. But he also didn’t have shows for extended stretches. He traveled to Mexico and Europe and settled in Paris before moving to New York in 1964 on a student visa. Which he took art classes at the Brooklyn Museum to keep. He was 31. With some precursors, including many paintings he destroyed, the form of his Today series came into focus in January 1966, but developing the full concept took some time [sic].

In his essay, Weiss traces some of Kawara’s apparent thoughts and questions about the project through the date paintings’ subtitles. Alongside headlines, phrases, or even full sentences from the day’s newspaper, Kawara sometimes used personal anecdotes, observations, or meta-commentary as subtitles.

Some subtitles were repeated, and showed hints of both future bodies of work and community: “I met Nam June Paik at the B.M.T. Canal St subway station [insert various evening times].” And my favorite so far, is for April 5, 1966— “Tono, Arakawa, and Johns are now waiting for me in Tono’s apartment.”—when Kawara ended up missing a dinner with Yoshiaki, Shusaku, and Jasper in order to finish the day’s painting.

Though Kawara was included in many group shows, including some now-historic ones, by 1969, his date paintings were not exhibited in any significant way until 1972, five years and hundreds of paintings into the project.

On Kawara Db

On Kawara, *Trilogy (I GOT UP, I WENT, I MET)*, 36 volumes, 13,690 pages, ed. 25, 1968-79/2008, published by mfc-michèle didier

Of all the—

The library of Tama Art University in Tokyo, known as Tamabi, has digitized their collection of publications related to On Kawara. The On Kawara Db includes images and publication information for many exhibition catalogues, but also CD box sets of audio recordings of One Million Years performances. As in, each CD in a box set has an entry and a photo. But no audio.

Hundreds of Today Series paintings and boxes are included, I think from an 1993 exhibition in Bordeaux.

And michèle didier’s compilation editions of I GOT UP, I WENT, I MET, and I READ, covering every day from 1968 through 1979 are included, ALL 24 VOLUMES, ALL 16,962 PAGES. By date. I guess all that’s left is to digitize every page of the ONE MILLION YEARS volumes? I’ll keep checking back.

There are also an undetermined—but filterable and countable, be my guest and lmk—number of I AM STILL ALIVE telegrams. Fine, I counted, I got 204. I think they constitute the entirety of the 1978 Edition Rene Block catalogue, covering 1970-1977.

This project feels different after a month of watching Palestinians in Gaza post the same daily declarations to social media, until they don’t.

Thanks to Yoshi Hill of Jonathan A. Hill Bookseller for yet another On Kawara deep cut.

On Kawara Date Painting Stickers

It was On’s ’80s sticker sheet, he coppeth one of three

Among the rich and rare On Kawara publications and ephemera assembled by bookseller Jonathan A. Hill for their latest catalogue [No. 242], past the massive and already unavailable facsimiles and limited editions of Kawara’s conceptual journals I Went, I Met, I Read, or I Got Up, is an unexpectedly kawaii delight.

The small exhibition catalogue for Kawara’s Oct.-Nov. 1983 show at Galerie Watari in Tokyo, On Kawara: Date Paintings 1981-1983…On Sundays, which is mostly a facsimile of the artist’s journal recording the details of each painting he made during the interval of the title, includes three sheets of Date Painting stickers. As every catalogue of On Kawara, and indeed every artist, should from now on.

Destroyed On Kawara Paintings

In 1965, before he figured out his Today Series date paintings, On Kawara experimented with several other types of paintings about language, text, and information. They contained a word or phrase, or a graphically encoded text. The National Gallery has a triptych, Title, that weren’t, but most of them were destroyed. [image from the Guggenheim’s exhibition catalogue via ig/mondoblogo]

18,262 Days

JAN. 4, 1966, New York’s traffic strike

just guessin’, tbh

I Got Up, I Met, I Went, I Read

On Kawara’s One Million Years readings have always had a profound effect on me. From the first time I saw it at the Dia, to the resonance of One Million Years in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002; to an installation at David Zwirner, to the reopening Stedelijk. It was Brian Sholis’s moving account of reading with his then-fiancee Julia Ault at Zwirner that cemented my determination to read one day, too.
That day was April 5th, Easter Sunday. I had booked my wife and myself to read in the first shift, just as the Guggenheim opened. I’d already seen the museum’s On Kawara retrospective, but on a day when there was no reading. These are some recollections and thoughts of the experience with the piece.
One Million Years and an unannounced roaming exhibition of one week’s worth of date paintings in kindergarten classes are the two projects Kawara authorized to continue after his death last summer at age 29,771 days. Mary, who was coordinating production of One Million Years and prepping volunteers, took our picture when we sat down on the dais. She said the artist used to listen to recordings of One Million Years as he worked in his studio, and that the liked to have photos of the readers.
I had not anticipated such a thing, but now the entire project felt extremely personal. It was not just a performance, but a communication, a communion, with the artist himself. But not anymore, not for us. It turns out the Guggenheim was recording the reading, but only for exhibition documentation. Posthumous recordings like ours would not end up contributing to a “complete” recording. That aspect of the work, too, ended with the artist’s death.
Still, as I’d expected, reading itself was a wonderful experience. I found it somehow meditative and exciting at the same time. I found myself thinking of the dates we were reading, long before modern humans, and their history, existed. Yet narrative was there; the numbers became their own narrative. There was suspense as we counted down to an even hundred. Symmetrical numbers, or pairs or trios of digits, or chains of multi-syllabics, felt momentous, like a winning poker hand. These numbers, these years, with literally no significance of their own had significance thrust upon them, at least for a few seconds, by being read aloud. It turns out long numbers are not usually read aloud.
The greatest thrill was the echo of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. We sat on the ground floor, backs to the window, with loudspeakers flanking us, and our numbers seemed to ring out through the show. We took it slow and serious. We intoned, and I imagined how we must affect the reception of the rest of Kawara’s works up the ramp. We contributed our small part to everyone else’s enlightenment.
After we ended, we went through the show. We stopped on the way out to watch our replacements. Mary had said it’s easy to tell when the readers are a couple. Inversely, it was immediately obvious that the two jokers after us were either breaking up, or didn’t know each other and could not be bothered. Even on the rare numbers they didn’t mumble away into nothing, you could barely hear them standing right in front of the dais.
But how was this really any different from our experience? In fact the sound from One Million Years never left the ground floor, and sometimes it hardly left the little stage. In the hard-surfaced cacophony of the rotunda, One Million Years was essentially lost. I felt very acutely the gap between our rewarding personal experience of performing and the empty opacity the being in the audience. Or of not even noticing the piece existed.

In glass half-full mode I considered this divergence alongside the rest of Kawara’s practice, where dates and times and lists barely hint at the complexities of the artist’s daily experience.
Did I say half-full? This comparison, along with some of Kawara’s lesser known series [60s word diagrams, the coded letters, and of course, all the newspaper clippings in all the Today series boxes] made me wonder what there actually is to know? Frankly, I’ve begun to fear that under it all lurks an actual Message, hidden by Kawara, just waiting to be cracked. And that the profundity, the interpretation, the significance, will turn out to be all in our heads.