On Kawara

On Kawara is a Japanese conceptual artist that lived from 1933-2014. His pieces tend to be disconnected from personal emotion and stripped to purely information or solely just an idea. His Today series, perhaps the most well-known, he paints the date from January 4, 1966 until his death in 2014. Each painting is precisely measured so that the date is centered on the canvas. The paintings follow the grammar conventions of the country that it is painting in.  All paintings are constructed on a horizontal canvas with white text and a solid colored background. When one piece is finished, Kawara would paint a swatch of the unique background color into a journal titled One Hundred Years Calendar. Beneath each swatch is a number telling the painting’s sequence in that year and its size. Each year between 63 and 241 paintings were made and created around 3,000 before his death in 2014.

In another series that Kawara worked on titled I Went from June 1, 1968 – September 17, 1979 he used a red line to trace his starting point to end point over a photocopy of a map everyday. He also include the names of cities that he would explore on gray pages–therefore each volume has a different number of pages, depending on how often he travelled during that year.  Each day is recorded to its own designated page. In the course 12 years he created 12 volumes containing 4740 pages total.

Kawara created a similar project called I Met, recording every persons name that he met that day. He started the project on May 10, 1968  and ended on September 17, 1979. Each day has a list of names and is completed with the date stamp of the present day.Geographical location changes are indicated by gray pages in between. I Met consists of twelve volumes from 1968 to 1979 which total 4790 pages. This project is paralleled with his I went project. Both projects were ended on the same day.

I am very intrigued in this artist’s ideas of recording information in such an organized way. The most interesting part about these sets of work is the visible amount of information to be looked at. 12 years of information to thumb through is absolutely remarkable. I’m sure that Kawara didn’t exactly understand the reason why he was doing it–but the repetitive phenomenon of simple everyday information makes me think of each day as being so shockingly unique. It’s something that we don’t think about often, as everyday can be seemingly the same when we don’t think about it.