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102
On Kawara, JUNE 1, 1967, 1967

Chapter: wordsearch - Concept and Poetry

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Inner and outer time
“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.” So wrote James Joyce in his 1922 novel Ulysses. He described a phenomenon that deeply fascinated twentieth-century art and literature: the inner and outer perception of time, which was radically transformed in modern life by technological, scientific, and social revolutions. Yet after two world wars, in the age of consumerism and space travel, the abstract, expressive painting that had served to express utopia, life attitude, and the spirit of the age after 1945 appeared exhausted.

Deconstructing one’s own life
On Kawara was a Japanese-American conceptual artist and a contemporary of Lawrence Weiner. His artistic concern was time, its measurement in days, years, centuries, and eons. His painting is not based on expression or artistic signature, but on the almost mechanical division of his own life into individual days. Each date painting from his Today series, which he began in New York in 1966, is a monochrome field on which the date of completion is written in the language and calendar system of the country where Kawara was staying at the time. Kawara made a cardboard storage box for each date painting. Many of these boxes contain a clipping from a local daily newspaper. If he had not finished a painting by midnight, he destroyed it. Kawara produced more than 2,000 date paintings in over 112 cities worldwide, a project that ended only with his death.

Entirely in the moment
Kawara sought to create paintings that do not represent or refer to anything else but are themselves “real”; apart from the paint and the date, there is nothing to see. Yet on closer inspection, brushstrokes can be discerned on the canvas, traces of life. The paintings mark collective history while remaining intimate, like a diary. They possess a Zen-like quality, similar to the breaths counted during meditation in order to free the mind from inner monologues and thoughts, even from giants and ghosts, and to encounter the self, which is empty yet fully grounded in reality, existing only in the present moment, as fleeting as life itself, as transient as June 1, 1967.

Audio

Note: The audio transcription is voiced by an AI.

On Kawara, JUNE 1, 1967, 1967
From the series Today, 1966-2013
Acrylic on canvas with handmade cardboard box and newspaper clipping
© One Million Years Foundation
Written Art Collection

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