At all schools they hang in classrooms, bearing dates that fall within the lifespans of the children.
(meta data) TITLE: On Kawara, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham | Global | The Guardian (meta data) AUTHOR: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/adriansearle (meta data) PUBLISHER: https://www.facebook.com/theguardian (meta data) PUBLISHED DATETIME: 2002-12-03T10:02:57-0500 Skip to main content The Guardian - Back to home Support The Guardian Available for everyone, funded by readers Search jobs Sign in current edition: US edition Elections 2020 US Politics # It's a date! On Kawara has made over 2,000 of these paintings since the 1960s, each one completed on the day shown. And if he fails to finish by the stroke of midnight, he destroys it. Adrian Searle is intrigued Adrian Searle Tue 3 Dec 2002 10.02 EST First published on Tue 3 Dec 2002 10.02 EST One day at a time... just one of over 2,000 'date paintings' produced by the artist How much time does On Kawara's exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, take? How much of your time will the show eat up, how long does it last? You can be out of the gallery in less than half an hour. One drawing; 37 paintings, each presenting nothing more than a date from 1966 to the near present; two groups of books, 10 volumes each in a pair of vitrines facing each other across an otherwise empty room; a series of tables displaying numerous old telegrams under glass. Finally, should you choose to leave by the back stairs, you will hear a man and a woman alternately reciting numbers. That's it, that's the show. There is no punchline. Thank you and goodbye. It took 30 years to walk down that staircase as the voices counted from 375 to 405AD. They were reading from the books in the vitrines, which contain nothing more than columns of dates - One Million Years (past), working backwards from 1969, and One Million Years (future), counting forwards from 1980. Tempus fugit, I said to myself, ars longa, or something like it. Life is short but sometimes it seems to go on for a very long time. Each of On Kawara's "date paintings" was completed on the date shown, the painting's sole image. Collectively they're called Todays, and the artist has made over 2,000 since the 1960s. Should he fail to finish a painting by the stroke of midnight, he destroys it. You imagine his failures to make the deadline - an unexpected visitor, the artist was struck down with sudden toothache, time ran out. The paintings here were all made on Sundays. That is not the only day of the week the artist paints, but the qualification gave him the rubric for this selection. Perhaps, as you read this, somewhere in the world On Kawara is making a date painting. If he is in the US, the date will begin with the name of the month, in English, followed by the day and year. If he is painting in Europe, the day will precede the month. The abbreviated name of the month will be recorded in the language of the country he happens to be in. If the country doesn't use Roman script - in Japan, say, or Russia - he will write the name of the month in Esperanto. He invents rules for himself, self-imposed limits. There are four or five coats of the same brand of paint on each canvas. The paint goes round the edge of the stretcher. The lettering is hand-painted with calculated precision and anonymity. It is always in crisp, white lettering and occupies pretty much the same proportion of each canvas, though the canvases themselves are not always the same size, nor quite the same colour. Some days are greyer, some more brown or a shade darker or bluer than others. Every day has its individual timbre, though at first they seem alike. That's how the days go, as reticent as the way he paints them. January 30, 1966 had a blue, expansive feel. On Aug. 23, 1998, On Kawara made two small, identical paintings. It was a day for doing things twice. There are French Sundays in Fevrier, red days in March. The paintings are not so much self-effacing as unrelieving. The days go by. For many years, On Kawara always placed a page from the day's newspaper in the plain cardboard box in which each painting is stored. For some reason, he no longer does this. Perhaps for him the day's events make us read too much into the painting (although, like the kidnapper's photo of the prisoner holding aloft the newspaper, it is proof that some sort of hope remains). Is there a painting dated Sept. 11, 2001? Did On Kawara get up that morning in New York, where he has lived for many years, take up a canvas and start brushing on the first layer before the day went wrong? Lately, On Kawara has lent date paintings to kindergartens and schools in Iceland, Australia and the Ivory Coast, where they hang in classrooms, bearing dates that fall within the lifespans of the children. He calls these small poetic interventions "pure consciousness". On the day I write this, On Kawara will have been alive for 25,546 days. He is around 70 years old (the leap years trip me up) and counts the days. Does he also count the cigarettes, the dinners out, the aeroplane trips and laundry tickets? For a long time he made a map of his daily walks and cab rides. He made lists of the people he met. He sent telegrams to friends and colleagues around the world, telling them he was still alive, "I am still alive - On Kawara", and for some years he also sent out postcards from wherever he was, each rubber-stamped with a message detailing his temporary address and the time he got up. Then someone stole the rubber stamp, so he stopped. Telegrams have largely disappeared too, thanks to the fax and email, so On Kawara sends far fewer than he used to. The "I am still alive" telegrams are valuable now. Here they are, addressed to famous curators, artists, dealers. There are variations: "I am not going to commit suicide don't worry", "I am not going to commit suicide worry", and "I am going to sleep forget it". On Kawara's work is a matter of life and death, a question of survival. Never agreeing to interviews, shunning photographers, always absent from his private views, he too seems to exist as pure consciousness, recording his persistence. He is like one of those peculiar, driven characters in a Paul Auster story, except On Kawara deserves a better fate than to be memorialised in Auster's overrated fiction. On Kawara creates his own memorial every day, in the eloquent silences of his works. He exists, and his art is the proof of it. One day all this will stop. No more counting. There are no remembrances of time past in On Kawara's work - or is that, precisely, all there is? When he was a teenager in Tokyo, the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He stopped, by his own account, being a diligent student. His early works, from his late teens and early 20s, were images of prisons and cold, detailed drawings of amputees in sealed bathrooms. Legless, pregnant women, bits of bodies, smears and slugs crawling the tiles. These drawings are terrifying. Much of his early work he destroyed; these he left behind. He travelled, learned Spanish and French, immersed himself in Sartre and Camus. He became, I suppose, what is called a conceptual artist, but his art is, in every sense, singular. You'll get it or you won't, be captivated or moved or not. Perhaps you'll be bored and feel the show's a waste of time. Whose time? It will or will not get under your skin. Where will you be when you think of it later, and for how long will you turn it over in your head? What day was it? Can you prove that you were alive? When On Kawara wakes up, does he think one day more or one day less? We do not know. Nor do we know, at this moment, if On Kawara is still alive. · On Kawara's Consciousness. Meditation. Watcher on the Hills is at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, until January 26. Details: 0121-248 0708 or www.ikon-gallery.co.uk. Reuse this content
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On Kawara
Work.:"Pure Consciousness".
In "Pure Consciousness," a traveling exhibition initiated in 1998, Kawara lent seven "Date paintings" (January 1 to January 7, 1997) to kindergartens and schools in Madagascar, Australia, Bhutan, Côte d'Ivoire, Colombia, Turkey, Japan, Finland, Iceland, Israel, Canada and the United States.