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On Kawara's Date Paintings: Series of Horror and Boredom

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DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2010.10791384

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On Kawara's Date Paintings: Series of Horror and

Boredom

Jung-Ah Woo

To cite this article: Jung-Ah Woo (2010) On Kawara's Date Paintings: Series of Horror and
Boredom, Art Journal, 69:3, 62-72, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2010.10791384

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 One Thing

In New York, in 1965", On Kawara created Title, a tripartite painting that employed
his signature style of white letters on a monochrome canvas. On deep pink
canvases, the artist meticulously painted three phrases: ONE THING-1965"-
VIET-NAM.' Anne Rorimer argues that the work is essentially self-referential:
"ONE THING" designates the painting's own reality as an
Jung-AhWoo object, while" 1965"" and "VIET-NAM" provide minimal
political-historical context.' However, the original constella-
On Kawara's Date Paintings: tion of the work demonstrates its calculated reference to
the political incidents of the year, particularly the war and
Series of Horror and Boredom trauma in Asia.
After visiting Kawara's New York studio in 1965",
Honma Masayoshi, then curator of the National Museum of Modern Art in
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Tokyo, wrote an article about Kawara's life and work in the United States for
Bijutsu TeeM, a popular art magazine published in Japan. Honma's description of
the studio reveals that "RED CHINA" was originally placed on the left side of
"1965" and "VIET-NAM:' instead of "ONE THING."} Unlike "ONE THING:'
"RED CHINA" makes it clear that the artist was making a strong political state-
ment. In 1965, Mao Zedong proclaimed the now-notorious Cultural Revolution
and established the Red Guard, which led to the unprecedented massacre of
citizens during the following decade. The presence of "RED CHINA" unequivo-
cally forces a charged reading of the third canvas, especially considering that the
United States had begun a campaign of massive bombing in North Vietnam in
early 1965". A closer observation of Title reveals that these supposedly neutral
numbers and letters refer specifically to America's military response to the ideo-
logical clashes in Asia, the latest episode of the ongoing "red scare" within the
United States.Tiny white stars painted on each corner of the three canvases
prompt further serial associations among the three political entities that hover
The translations of Japaneseinto Englishare mine. over the seemingly self-referential canvases: the United States, China, and North
unless noted otherwise.
Vietnam, all of whose national flags feature stars.'
I. Kawara described the color as "shocking pink" According to Honma, he and Kawara were concerned with the possible
and said that pink is "as strong a color as white." public uproar that "Red China" might cause in Japan during this politically tur-
Transcript of interview with unnamed interviewer,
July I, 1982. On Kawara artist file. Tokyo National bulent era, so they agreed to substitute "ONE THING" for "RED CHINA."This
Museum of Modern Art. I would like to thank anecdote is a perfect example of the anticommunist paranoia that was sweeping
Mr. Otani Shogo for allOWing me accessto the file.
2. Anne Rorimer, NewArtinthe 60s and 70s:
Japan at the time. Kawara and Honma's political decision also inadvertently
Rede~ning Reality (London: Thames and Hudson. shows the dual operation of Kawara's ensuing projects. As anticipated, the substi-
200 1),58. Also see her "The Date Paintingsof
On Kawara," ArtInstitute of Chicago Museum
tution of "ONE THING" seemed effectively to diffuse the disquieting political
Studies 17, no. I (1991): 120-37 and 179-80. sentiment of the entire work. As noted in Rorimer's discussion, "VIET-NAM"
3. Honma Masayoshi. "5ono ato no Kawara On:
was almost reduced to a neutral reference to the temporal context of the paint-
Nyiiyoku no atorie 0 ta2unete" [On Kawara since
Then: Visiting New York Studio], Bijutsu Techii. ing, and the entire work was reduced to "one thing" or, to use Donald Judd's
December 1965, 34-41. term, a "specific object" of Minimalism. "ONE THING," the sign of the paint-
4. Minemura Toshiaki noticed the tiny stars on
the canvas and suggested their reference to the ing's materiality, diverts our attention and removes the triptych from the urgent
national flags of the three nations. He argued that historical arena of war and violence, placing it instead within the apolitical
these stars would have no determinate mean-
ings, but rather unite the three disparate canvases
frameworks of both Minimalism and Conceptual art.
into a triptych. like an altarpiece. See Minemura Title was a harbinger, both stylistically and thematically, of the Date Paintings
Toshiaki, "Hizuke-kaiga no yashin: Kawara On
or Today series, Kawara's best-known works, which he began the following
[Date Painting's Ambition: On Kawara]," Ohara
Magazine 28. no. 6 (June 1978): 90. year. In the Today series, the austere surface of the monochrome canvas, or the

61 FALL 1010
 "one-thing-ness," persistently abstracts the politically motivated disasters and
war-related atrocities which lurk beneath the neutral facade. Kawara's persistent
attention to tragedy, violence, and death is deeply embedded in his abstract proj-
ects, and becomes evident only by close examination of his obsessive manual
labor, inconsistent texts, and fragmentary references to fatal accidents and his-
torical disasters.

Meaningless Days

After having witnessed Japan's total destruction and unconditional surrender at

the end of the PacificWar, Kawara began painting in Tokyo in 1952.He was an
unknown nineteen-year-old with no academic art training when he first pre-
sented his Bathroom series in 1953,at the first Nippon exhibition held in Tokyo.
In these pencil drawings, the bathroom is meticulously rendered as a distorted,
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claustrophobic space that harbors horrific scenes of murder, dismemberment,

and matricide. Kawara's Bathroom series depicts figures with deformed skin, muti-
lated bodies, and bloody wounds, clearly alluding to nuclear destruction and its
scarred victims. s Notably, it was around this time that the subject of the atomic
bomb and the lingering effects of its radiation began flooding the Japanese mass
media, as the Allied Occupation ended and censorship on the subject was lifted.
The graphic images understandably provoked sensational responses from
his contemporaries, and Kawara was immediately marked as a leading figure of
5.5ee Tadashi Yokoyama, "At thejunction of
Time and Space: OnKawara in the I 950s," in the new generation of artists who were determined to use social realism to con-
On Kawora, ed. jonathan Watkins (New York: front the reality of Japan's postwar SOCiety. As early as 1957, Kawara's painting
Phaidon, 2002), 59. Kawara has also said that
thebombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki left a was recognized as a "masterpiece of the first decade of postwar art,"? and his
profound impact onhis personality. See Watkins, meteoric rise to fame became the stuff oflegend in postwar Japanese art history?
"Where 'I Don't Know' Is the Right Answer," in
On Kawara, ed. Watkins. "18. In Japan, Kawara was an active participant in the social-realist art movement
6. Gendai bijutsu: Senga /D-nen na kessaku-ten that committed to expose the reality of the catastrophe and defeat, which the
(Contemporary Art Masterpieces ofTen
Years' Postwar Art Exhibition) was organized Japanese government was trying to expunge with its postwar rhetoric of progress
by Mainichi Newspaper Company, funded by and developmenr." However, since leaving Japan in 1959, Kawara has completely
the Ministry ofEducation (MonbusM), and held transformed himself into a postnational artist by erasing all traces of his Japanese
atthe Tokyo National Museum of Modem Art.
See Hijikata Teiichi, "Sengo 10-nen no kessaku- past from the abstract surfaces of his daily project, the Today series.
ten" [Contemporary Art Masterpieces ofTen Kawara began the Today series in New Yorkon January 4, 1966, so he has now
Years' Postwar Art Exhibition], Gequtsu Shincho,
September 1957. 237-40; and Nakahara Yusuke, been producing the Date Paintings for over four decades. 9 The Today series is the
"Sengo bijutsu nojyu-nen" [Postwar Ten Years' result of Kawara's strict adherence to an elaborate, self-imposed system of pro-
Artl. Mizue 626 (September 19S7): 7S-82.
7.Nakahara yusuke. "Densetsu sengo bijutsu no duction that he developed. Each Date Painting bears the date on which it was exe-
jyu-ni: Kawara Onno hutatsu noshirizu" [Twelve cuted, printed horizontally in white paint across the center of a monochrome
Legends of Postwar Art: OnKawara's Two canvas.When inscribing the date, Kawara uses the standard language and conven-
Series], Bijutsu TecM 2"10 (August I 96"!): 68--69.
8.For English publications onKawara's tion of whatever country he is currently residing in or Simply adopts the format
activities in japanese postwar social realism. see from local daily newspapers. If Latin letters are not used locally, as in most Asian
Reconstructions: Avant-Garde ArtinJapan /945-
/965, exh. cat. (Oxford: Museum of Modem Art countries, including Japan, he uses the universal language of Esperanto. Every
Oxford, I 98S). and Bert Winther-Tamaki, "Oil Date Painting must be completed within a twenty-four-hour period beginning at
Painting in Postsurrender japan: Reconstructing
Subjectivity through Deformation oftheBody," 12:00 A.M., or else it is destroyed.
Monumenta Nipponica 58, no. 3 (2003): 3"17-96. Once completed, each Date Painting is stored in a matching cardboard box,
9.The series titles DatePainting and Today are
often used interchangeably. But I use DatePainting which also includes a clipping from the day's local newspaper, selected by
todesignate only his canvases with adate, and Kawara.The series is accompanied by a meticulous inventory, or "journal," as
Today series for his entire practice, including the
the artist calls it, which is composed of calendar pages marked with the date of
DatePaintings and the related work ofcataloguing,
compiling, and the supplementary documentation. each painting's production. Loose-leaf binders contain extensive information on

6] art journal
 each painting, such as the date and site of production, annual and monthly serial
numbers, size of the canvas, background color sample, and, occasionally, a pho-
tograph of the locale. 10 Each Date Painting has a subtitle, which is recorded in yet
another journal. The journal is essentially an array of headlines from local daily
newspapers, with the occasional inclusion of activities from Kawara's personal
agenda for that day, all of which are typed on paper. "
Around the same time he began the Date Paintings, Kawara also initiated sev-
eral related projects aimed at collecting the mundane facts of his daily activities,
such as reading, sleeping, and walking. Despite their banality, Kawara meticulously
documented these trivialities with a compulsive deliberation usually reserved for
religious ritual and preserved the results through a bureaucratic system of filing
and archiving. Shortly after the Date Paintings, the I Read series (1966-79) came to
accompany Kawara's daily ritual of the Today series. He cut and pasted portions of
the daily newspaper that he had read onto sheets of paper marked with the des-
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ignated date, sheathed them in vinyl pockets, and then collected them in binders.
His three other daily practices were added in 1968, while in Mexico: I Got Up At
(1968-79), I Went (1968-79), and I Met (1968-79).
For I Got Up At, Kawara selected two recipients and sent each a postcard
stamped with the exact time he got up that morning or, in some cases, in the
afternoon. Surprisingly, for such a diligent artist, Kawara's daily time of awaken-
ing was fairly random. He used a typical souvenir postcard representing the
cityscape or a tourist spot from wherever he was staying.The I Went series is
composed of copies of maps, on which Kawara traced his daily movements in
red ink. For 1Met, he typed the names of people whom he had met during the
day.The telegram project of 1Am Still Alive was begun in 1970. Starting that year,
Kawara occasionally sent out a telegram with the message: "I Am Still Alive.
On Kawara,' In contrast to his other projects, I Am Still Alive relied partially on
other people for its production. Despite the seemingly Simple message, Kawara's
telegrams were subject to erratic translations and typographical mistakes, thus
denying the artist's strict control over the products. Though Kawara was extremely
meticulous in maintaining the refined quality of all his products, the termination
of his serial projects was subject to chance. For instance, I Am Still Alive could
only be sustained while the telegraph machine was still in use. The 1Got Up At
series was brought to an unexpected halt when Kawara's box of rubber stamps
10. There are nine different sizesof canvas. which was stolen in Stockholm in 1979. Hence, a purely coincidental event served to
range from the smallest. A (8 x I 0 inches) to the
largest, H (61 x 89 inches). including type A's slight
demonstrate the limits of the artist's control over his product.
modification, A' (8 x 16Y> inches). The detailed The One MillionYears project differs from Kawara's other series not only in its
description of the DatePainting production process
is from Yamada Satoshi, "Kawara On kenkyU noto:
cosmic dimension of time, but also in its book format. which has a beginning
"Today" shirizu ni tsuite" [On Kawara Research and, more important, a clear and definitive ending. In 1969, he compiled One
Note: About the Today Series]. in Bijutsu-shi nj
MillionYears-Past, which was supplemented with One MillionYears-Future in 1980.
okeru kiseki to hamon [The Traces and Impacts
on Art History] (Tokyo: Chuo KOron Bijutsu For One MillionYears-Past, Kawara typed out all of the calendar years descending
Shuppan, I 996). 446. backward from 1969 C.E. to 998031 R.C.E., 500 years on each page, 100 pages in
I I. Considering Kawara's extreme reserve in
expressing himself about his work after leaving each volume, and ten volumes per set. One MillionYears-Future retains the same
Japan, this journal is a singular source for the art- rigorous format, with the years ascending from 1981 to 1001980 C.E. Kawara
ist's comments. though brief. on his DatePaintings.
as well as on his private life. Yet, beginning on
dedicated the Past to "all those who have lived and died" and the Future to "the
October 30. 1972. Kawara stopped providing last one." This suggests the possibility of an apocalyptic end to human history,
details about each day and began simply using the
but the abstract numbers accumulated to such an incomprehensible size hardly
name of the day (Monday. Tuesday. etc.) as the
subtitle. allow one to envision that end.

64 FALL 2010
 A fictive reconstruction shows that Kawara's typical day would have been
completely consumed by painstaking labor and tedious chores. He would begin
his day by checking the time he woke up, which he then would stamp onto two
postcards. Then, he would start the arduous process of that day's Date Painting,
which would usually require over nine hours of manual labor, including mixing
the paint, applying multiple layers to create the monochrome canvas, and finally
lettering the dates with mechanical precision." Perhaps while waiting for each of
the multiple layers of paint to dry, he would create a journal entry, type out the
years for his One Million Years project, or prepare the postcards of I Got Up At. Perhaps
there would even be time for him to go out and send one of his I Am Still Alive
telegrams, after which he would copy the map and mark his route for the I Went
series. If he spent time reading the newspaper, he would clip articles to catalogue
in the I Read file. If he met anyone that day, he would type their names for the
I Met series.
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Kawara's daily labor combines the prerequisites of Taylorist bureaucracy

with Fordist factory production. Most businesses catalogue their daily produc-
tion, whether in documents or objects, and store it in a rigidly defined order.
This is exactly what Kawara has been doing The predetermined mode of pro-
duction eliminates the need or even the option for the artist's spontaneous
intervention and creative involvement. All that is required is a repetitive, almost
mechanical labor: layers of paint application, standardized documentation,
12. In 1991, Henning Weidemann documented and uniform packaging. Clearly, Kawara's one-day workload is comparable to
Kawara's one-day production procedure of a
Date Painting in a sequence of thirty-one that of a clock-punching office clerk or an assembly-line worker. However,
photographs, without any image of the artist. despite the tightly regulated labor or, rather, because of such stringent organiza-
The reconstruction of Kawara's daily labor is
partially based on this photo project. Weidemann, tion, Kawara's daily activity is essentially meaningless, unlike production in a
On Kowara: June 9. /99/. From "Today" Series real workplace, His labor is meticulous but unproductive, as his actions actually
(/966-) (Ostfildem, Germany: Cantz, 1994).
13. For a discussion on the fracture of duration
produce nothing other than a series of almost identical canvases.The "rational-
into punctuality as inscribed in the industrial ized time" on his canvas eliminates and ultimately abstracts the sense of episte-
SOCiety, see Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence
af Onematic Time: Modernity, Contingency. the
mological duration. It is not a lived or experienced continuity of a subject,
Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University but rather a pure articulation of punctuality: "homogeneous, empty time."'l
Press, 2002), 7-9.
Kawara has marked the passage of each and every day on canvas, but such
14. Since all of his projects begin with "l" and
reflect on his own daily activities, Kawara's projects repetition only diminishes the differences and abstracts the meaning of the
are often considered autobiographical. For the idiosyncratic days.
previous studies of autobiographical approaches
to Kawara's Today series. see Unda Weintraub, Art Kawara's practice of public disappearance further contributes to this mean-
on the Edge and Over: Search for Art's Meaning in tnglessness.v'Ihe notations of the artist's daily activities hardly reveal a tangible
Contemporary Society /970s-/990s (Utchfield, CT:
Art Insights, 1996),51-58: and Eunhee Yang. "On
and consistent persona, since his journal features only an absentee central char-
Kawara's Nomadic Mind: Autobiography of 'A acter. Kawara is sequestered from the public eye by a policy of no photographs,
Citizen of the World,'" (PhD diss.. City University
no official interviews, no meetings with more than six people, and no release
of New Yorl<. 2004).
15. On Kowara: Wholeand Parts 1964-/995, of a biography. As a consequence, he has obliterated all traces of his cultural,
exh. cat. (Tokyo: Museum of Contemporary Art, ethnic, and national origin, such as the Japanese language and the artist's physi-
1998). 15: and Yang,9.
16. Minemura Toshiaki emphasized the sig- cal appearance, in his persistent pursuit of becoming a "citizen of the world."'l
nificance of the year 1965 as a turning point in Houma's 1965 article about his New Yorkstudio visit features the last published
Kawara's career. as that was the year the artist
not only established his policy of privacy. but photograph of the artist. The picture can be read as a portent of the artist's later
also presented his landmarl< Bathroom series to decree of silence--the young Kawara, with a cigarette in his hand, smiles before
the Museum of Modem Art in Tokyo, Minemura
thereby interpreted 1965 as the dividing line
the backdrop of his painting, CIPHER. This enigmatic artist has since become
between the artist's career in Japan and his career notoriously difficult to decipher,"
abroad. See Minemura, "Kawara On: Fu-renzoku
Among all the meaningless organization associated with Kawara's trivial
no renzoku" [On Kawara: Continuity of
Discontinuity]. Mizue 912 (March 1981): 46-59. daily labors, the subtitles of the Date Paintings are perhaps the best explication of

65 artjoumal
 this project in terms of wartime history. traumatic memory. and psychophysical
suffering. A cursory skim through the subtitles. which Karawa excerpted from
daily newspapers. reveals that the artist was keenly attentive to death in myriad
forms, including wars. bombings, accidents. murders. diseases. natural disasters,
suicides. or social upheavals. For example. the first and the last subtitles of
January 1966, the month Kawara began his Today series. reflect the interior social
crisis and the warfare which were prevalent for the United States that year: 17

Jan. 4. 1966 "New York's traffic strike."

Jan. 31. 1966 "U.S.A. began to bomb North Vietnam again."

Since most of the subtitles are from newspaper headlines, it is natural that they
are higWy focused on social and political upheavals of the time. By their very
nature. newspapers tend to emphasize scandalous events. which were quite plen-
tiful during the 1960s.But the subtitles of the Date Paintings reveal Kawara's par-
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ticular attention to war. accidents. and deaths. The following examples from the
journal of subtitles between February and April of 1966 emphasize his concerns
on this particular matter.

Feb. 9. 1966 "Two students shot in Santo Domingo."

Feb. 21. 1966 "An American naval hero of World War II is dead."
Mar. 3.1966 "109 Americans were killed last week in Vietnam."
Mar. 4. 1966 "A Canadian Pacific jetliner crashed in Tokyo."
Mar. 7. 1966 "U.S. Marines estimated today they have killed I, I 10 North
Vietnamese in last 4 days."
Mar. II, 1966 "The killer of Wendy Sue Wolin, 7, is still hiding some
where."
Mar. 21, 1966 "Spring has come and the lost H-Bomb in Spain sinks deeper
into the sea."
Mar. 24. 1966 "501 Viet Cong killed in the past 24 hours, Allied officials
report today."
Apr. 7, 1966 "Rioters in Saigon burned an American jeep and danced
around the flames."
Apr. 12, 1966 "A violent Atlantic storm killed two passengers on Italian
liner Michelangelo for New York."
Apr. 13. 1966 "In New York. a cable explosion in a subway tunnel under
the East River killed one maintenance worker."

These selections demonstrate Kawara's ongoing concern for the very subject
matter which marked his early paintings from postwar Japan: war and death. The
exceptionally long subtitle ofJune II. 1967.demonstrates Kawara's long-standing
concern for World War II and its nuclear destruction:

In Hiroshima. about 500 people set out today on the annual Ho-mile peace
march to Tokyo where the 13th world conference against nuclear weapons
will be held starting Aug. 4 and in New York. almost 18.000 people paid
from $ 10 to $100 a ticket to get into Madison Square Garden tonight for the
United Jewish Appeal's Israel Emergency Fund.
17.All the subtides discussed here are reprinted However. Kawara's journal established that tragic deaths were occurring not only
in OnKowaro Continuity/Discontinuity /963-/979
(Stockholm: Modema Museet. 1980). to soldiers abroad, but also to civilians at home, due to crime, social riots. natu-

66 FAll 20'0
 ral disasters, and industrial accidents. Indeed, his selections demonstrate the
ubiquity of death by highlighting the extreme visibility of arbitrary deaths,
which were reported as "news," and by indifferently recording the accumulation
of various casualties over the days and weeks.
While the newspapers relentlessly depicted different versions of death on a
daily basis, Kawara persisted in his monotonous routines. The details of the art-
ist's banal existence emerge alongside the shock of death in the subtitles. Kawara
records his everyday personal events with the same seriousness as world events:

Jan. 16, 1966 "[anine came to my studio."

Jan. 21, 1966 "MeetingY. Tono at M. Ikeda's hotel."
Mar. 13, 1966 "Ay-O brought his cat to my apartment."
Mar. 20, 1966 "Taeko kissed me. I asked her 'are you all right?'"

Kawara's undifferentiated array of deaths and everyday details is disturbing on

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every level. On the level of content, the pervasive presence of death certainly
casts foreboding shadows across the peaceful everyday.On the level of ethics, the
blunt manner of juxtaposing these deaths with ordinary, insignificant activities
vulgarizes the human tragedy. Finally, on the level of structure, the seemingly
arbitrary mixture of newspaper headlines with the artist's intimate details of the
everyday efficiently resists any attempt to construct a coherent meaning or to
determine the intent of the Date Paintings. Is it a serious protest against human
destruction? Is it a mimetic critique of the mass media's numbing effect? Or is it
a self-absorbed autobiography indifferent to the world of historical news? It may
be all or nothing. Contrary to the unified surface of the almost identical canvases,
the notation of the course of history and the random insertion of biographical
tidbits sustain no linear development or logical continuity.
Notably, the subtitles, which undermine the organized array of the canvases,
are not meant to be displayed with the paintings. Usually, only the Date Paintings
themselves are exhibited in public, with their meaningless, tautological language
foregrounding their existence as serial objects. The bland surface and mechanical
system of numbering of the Date Paintings suppress the chaotic presence of death
and suffering in the subtitles. Similar to "ONE THING" in Title of 1965, the
abstract objecthood of the Date Paintings camouflages the effect of the catastrophe
of history which the subtitles purport to chronicle. But even when the subtitles
are displayed along with the paintings, the abstract numbers and calendar dates
fail to convey the actual horror of their referents. For, as it is often said, "statistics
don't bleed."18
Kawara was also concerned with the self-referential nature of the Date
Paintings, as his early subtitles were focused on the act of painting (or"dating,"
to borrow his own term) as its own subject matter. In the ensuing years, he
occasionally revealed his obsessive attachment to his paintings and, consequently,
to the incessant passing of time, via the systematic units of the calendar.

Jan. 15, 1966 "This painting itself is January 15, 1966."

Jan. 18, 1966 "I am painting this painting."
Jan. 28, 1966 "I am dating here."
July 25, 1966 "I make love to the days."
18.RobertJayUfton. Death in Ufe: Survivors of Nov. 18, 1966 "I collect the painted days."
Hiroshima (New York: Random House. 1967), 13.

67 artjournal
 Kawara never ceased his obsessive repetition of his daily rituals, even when he
was plagued by physical pain and discomfort, which sometimes lingered for
several months.

July 10, 1967 "I have a dull pain in my eyes."

Aug. 6. 1967 "I have a pain in my eyes."
Sept. 16, 1967 "I still have a pain in my eyes."

After an especially assiduous period of work in April of 1966, Kawara followed

his ordinary newspaper quotes about political issues, war-related atrocities, and
racial concerns by stating, "I am afraid of my 'Today' paintings (May 29, 1966)."
Thus, the everlasting project of Date Paintings, which Kawara once called "an end-
less game to enjoy until death," had taken on a threatening effect. '9
It seems that Kawara's anxiety emerged less from the first order of shock-
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the reality of death-than from the second order of the trauma: the endless.
repetitive, and obsessive task of the Today series. The repetitive production of the
series, with its stark surfaces, effectively dominated the disorderly mix of trau-
matic historical events and trivial personal encounters which composed Kawara's
existence. The daunting presence of the Date Painlings turned out to be a source
of anxiety in and of itself But regardless of the outer turmoil reflected in the
surfeit of death or the artist's physical pain, the numbing task of the Date Paintings
continued. Eventually, the intimidating quantity of Date Paintings and their neatly
ordered stacks began to haunt the artist in a nightmarish image. After 166 pieces
19. Kawara quoted in SaharaJiro, "Uchu-jin no of Dale Paintings had piled up in the artist's studio, the horror of the accumulating
yo-na chikyU-jin" [Spaceman like Earthman],
Geijutsu ShinchO, February 1972. 136. The paintings became a gruesome nightmare: "A razor is getting in between my
author recalls his first encounter with Kawara in teeth so that I cannot close my mouth (Sept. 10, 1966)."20
Mexico City on "6 Abril 1968." SaharaJiro is the
pseudonym of the novelist Miyauchi Katsusuke,
Kawara's compulsive repetition encompassed physical suffering, pain.
who wrote an autobiographical novel. "Gurinijji and horror, but it simultaneously erased traces of those sensations as well. The
no hikari 0 hanarete" [Leaving the Ught of
Greenwich], Bungei, May 1980. 36-145. In the
flawless monochrome surface and the impersonal typeface conceal any sign of
novel. the protagonist. a young Japaneseman the artist's bodily labor. and the exclusive use of Roman letters hides his Japanese
who dreams of a non-national wanderer of the
nationality. Superficially, Kawara is not a Japanese artist remembering the pain
world, meets a painter named Kawana On:
the character is based on the writer's encounter and suffering of war, but a universal artist executing a neutral practice of self-
with Kawara. "SaharaJiro" is a Japanized form of referential, higWy conceptual painting. The Dale Paintings emerge as the site where
"Sahara [desert] Zero," as the writer envisioned
the world's largest desert as a neutral place, Kawara's physical suffering and mental anxiety over the memories of war and
devoid of a state-oriented identity. For the nov- death are repeated over and over, but this daunting repetition conceals the
elist's exhibition review of Kawara's show, see
"Kawara On ten: Junsui-na kodoku" [On Kawara
reports of global warfare and disaster, which serve as his fundamental link to
Exhibition: Pure Solitude], Bijursu TeehO 38, no. 563 the source of that horror. The austere surfaces of the conceptual canvases sup-
(June 1986): 138.
press the physical torments lurking underneath, just as the dull, monotonous
20. According to Teresa O'Connor, the subtitle is
based on the artist's nightmare. She interpreted register of personal events superficially engulfs the international devastation
Kawara's DotePaintings series as a talisman, in a
of death and pain.
sense that it prevents the death threat, but by
doing so. constantly evokes the terror. O'Connor,
"Notes: On Kawara's I Am Still Alive," On Kawaro:
DotePaintings in 89 Gties,exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Rootless Existence
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1991), 246.
21. A recent monograph of the artist contains the In most books and exhibition catalogues. Kawara's biography consists only of
chronology: "On Kawara 25,453 days(I September
2002): Uves and works in New York." On Kawora.
the number of days he had lived prior to the date of publication. 21 Consequently,
ed. Watkins. 146. The "detailed" information of this series of biographies, composed of increasing numbers, shifting languages,
his residence in New York is actually a rare excep-
and inconsistent punctuation, repeatedly alludes to the blurred presence of the
tion to his normally strict adherence to numerical
values as his biography. artist with clear indications of his constant movement from place to place:

'8 FALL 20'0

 BIOGRAPH IE ON KAWARA
(6. [uni 1991) 21 348Tage
(6 [uin 1991) 21 348 [ours
(June 6. 1991) 21.348 days"

The artist began to exist only in indefinite numbers. indirect quotations,

nomadic dwellings, foreign languages, and, most important. the tireless act of
painting. '3 The subtitle of one Date Painting shows the neighbors' apprehension
over the long silences of Kawara's daily reclusion: "Two or three men knocked
on the door of my apartment tonight. Without opening the door I asked 'What's
wrong with you?' One of them said, 'It's all right if you are there ...·This hap-
pened on May 21, 1967, after Kawara had been working for six consecutive days
on Date Paintings. Three of the paintings were of a larger size than usual, requiring
long hours of intense, silent labor. It seems that his neighbors tried to confirm
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that he was "all right," or to borrow the artist's words, "still alive." But again,
according to his note in the subtitles, Kawara did not open the door to them. The
entire story was derived from his works: the only evidence of the event exists in
the record of his production. the subtitle, and the actual painting. Thus, it is not
the artist's body, but rather his painting and subtitle which proves the artist
22. Rene Denizot, ed.• On Kawara. exh. cat.
" [was] there." The seemingly autobiographical aspects of the Today series clearly
(Frankfurt am Main: Museum fUr Moderne Kunst. resist their function of explaining or revealing the author behind the work. "
1991).117.
Besides the role of autobiographical writer, Kawara has also adopted the
23. Fumio Nanjo reports that C1aes Oldenburg. a
neighbor of Kawara's around 1965. remembered image of an archivist. Jeff Wall once read Kawara's Today series as history paint-
that he used to hear Kawara's door open and ing, and Kawara's work certainly does take the form of history writing through
close once every day. with one long silent interval
between. without actually seeing him. Fumio the obsessive cognizance of passing time and daily events happening throughout
Nanjo. interview by author. February 10. 2003. the world. 's However. in Kawara's "history writing," the supporting documents
24. Minemura Toshiaki mentions an interesting
anecdote which occurred around this same period and the languages he uses reject any consistent narratives or unified plot struc-
in New York. The critic Tone Yoshiaki invited tures. In the I Read series, for example, the already fragmentary clippings of news-
Kawara to a dinner. but the artist did not attend.
Instead. Kawara later sent Tono the DotePainting
paper articles are often pasted upside down and overlapping one another. The
which he had produced that evening. Tosbiaki, series also contains a wide range of languages from all around the world. Unless
"Sei no purakutisu toshite no Hizuke-kaiga:
one is fluent in all these languages, including Esperanto. it is not possible to
Kawara On ten" (Date Paintings as Practice of
Ufe: On Kawara Exhibition]. Bijutsu Techii 28. understand the full scope of his reading plan. 26 This history is not programmed
no. 405 (March 1976): 91. to progress toward comprehension, but only to repeat arbitrary fragments of
25. SeeJeff Wall. "Monochrome and
Photojournalism in On Kawara's Today Paintings." "news" without closure.
in Robert Lehman Lectures on Contemporary Art. The open-ended quality serves as another formidable marker of the mean-
vol. I. ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New
York: Dia Center for the Arts. 1996).
inglessness of Kawara's project. The Date Paintings will no doubt remain ongoing
26. Because the Mexican government placed strict until the artist's death. From the beginning of his project. Kawara was conscious
censorship on media images of the civil riots in
1968. Kawara's I Read of the month is one of the
of this sense of endlessness. In the novelist Sahara Iiro's memoir of his first
rare documents of the massacre still in existence. encounter with the artist. Sahara noted the strong impression he received from
See Watkins. On Kawora. Okabe Aomi empha-
the young painter's daunting lifetime project and his light-hearted utterances
sizes that May 1968 was the first month in which
Kawara produced Dote Paintings every day. which about death: "When Kawara said, 'It's painting,' he put emphasis on the 'mg' as
implies that the artist was highly conscious of the a present progressive form. [Kawara continued.] 'It's an endless game, because
development of student movements worldwide.
The Dote Paintings of this month demonstrate I can enjoy this until I die,' then he laughed."27 With the exception of One MiJJion
that while the artist was staying in Mexico. he paid Years-Past and -Future. Kawara's works begin from certain points and then
great attention to the student riots in Paris. In
1988 Kawara held an exhibition as a part of the
remain in progress, with the end as yet undetermined. The completion of the
twentieth annual commemoration of the "May work necessarily means the death of the artist.
Revolution: See Aoml, "From Paris," Bijutsu Techii
An absentee author. a language barrier, chaotically arranged reference
40. no. 598 (August 1988): 168-69.
27. Sahara jro, 136. materials, endless repetition, and a dedication to nonsense all contribute to the

69 art journal
 tautological aspect of the Date Paintings. Asa Date Painting refers only to the date when
the painting is made. it is tautological and, therefore, meaningless. This aspect of
the Today series was immediately recognized as a manifestation of Conceptual art,
which posits art as analytic proposition and self-referential procedure. In his
article "Art after Philosophy," Joseph Kosuth claimed that Kawara's painting was
an important precedent for "purely Conceptual art:' Kosuth further claimed that
art was a set of analytic propositions, in which the sole reference is art itself,
rather than any empirical. aesthetic, or extraneous experience. 28 Later, Rorimer
essentially reaffirmed Kosuth's view by emphasizing the rejection of an artist's
subjectivity and the autonomous status of a painting as a self-referential object. 29
For Benjamin Buchloh, Conceptual art's achievement is that it eliminated
the traditional ideal of transcendence through art. He argued that Conceptual art
successfully subjected art to the late-capitalist order of vernacular administration,
with its principle of arbitrary and abstract quantification for critical purposes.
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In this respect, according to Buchloh, Kawara's relentless practice of cataloguing

and his absurd enumeration of dates are safely embraced within the new para-
digm of the aesthetic of admintstranon.> Indeed, as Buchloh asserted, Kawara's
seemingly bureaucratic tasks and the indiscriminate selection of his subject mat-
ter, whether newspaper clippings or recipients of his mail messages, seem to
28. Joseph Kosuth. "Artafter Philosophy." Studio
abandon the artist's claim of authority;" Buchloh further claimed that nee-avant-
International 178 (October 1969): 137 (italics in garde art's "metaphor of a performance of daily bureaucratic tasks" effectively
original).
eradicates the artist's "imaginary and bodily experience, physical substance and
29. Rorirner; 56-57.
30. Benjamin Buchloh. "ConceptualArt 1962- the space of memory"!'
1969: Fromthe Aestheticof Administration to Alongside Buchloh's thesis regarding the paradigm shift of Conceptual art,
the Critiqueof Institutions." October 55 (Winter
1990): 105-43. many art historians, such as Alexander Alberro and Rosalind Krauss, have
3 I. Buchloh argued that Kawara was a significant extended this conception of the "decentered" Conceptual artist into the post-
figure in the developmentof Conceptualart. but
in hisanthology. Kawara's name is actually men- modern celebration of the author's death. H Following this tenet, Kathryn Chiong
tioned only three times.within a stringof artists' examined Kawara's practices in terms of the artist's linguistic death.> Yet to sup-
names,with no further analysis. Buchloh. Neo-
Avantgarde ondCulture Industry: Essays on European
port Buchloh's claim that Kawara's bureaucratic practices fall into the aesthetic
andAmerican Art (l'om 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge. of administration as a critical agency of the capitalist society and its productive
MA: MIT Press. 2000). 97. 291. and 326. mode would require a more careful examination of the specific history and the
32. Buchloh. "ConceptualArt 1962-1969: 143.
33. See AlexanderAlberro."Reconsidering terms involved. For during World War II, which Kawara lived through, bureau-
ConceptualArt: 1966-1977." in Conceptual Art: cracy and management served less for production than for efficient destruction
A Critical Anthology ed. Alberro and Blake Stimson
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1999). xvi-xxxvii; not only of landscape, but also of human bodies.»
and Benjamin Buchloh. Rosalind Krauss. et. al.• Certainly, to some artists, the process of erasing memories can be more
"RoundTable: ConceptualArt and the Reception
of Duchamp," in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha traumatic than triumphant, as the bureaucracy is entirely united with the mem-
Buskirk and Mignon Nixon(Cambridge. MA: MIT ory of destruction, violence, and pervasive death in a war-trodden state. For
Press. 1999). 222.
34. Kathryn Chiong."KawaraOn Kawara,"
Kawara, the mode of production which emulates the logic of a bureaucratic
October 90 (Fall 1999): 51-75. administration serves as a site of mimetic resistance to the totalitarian society. In
35. See Eric Hobsbaum.The Age of Extremes: the twentieth century, the totalitarian state's intolerance to differences ultimately
A History of the World. 1914-1991 (New York:
Vintage. 1994).44-49. brought about its fatal destruction, an effect which was represented most
36. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, emblematically by Auschwitz, or the "modern industrial apparatus of the elimi-
Memory. and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press. 1990).9. nation of difference:'16Yetthe most current history of Conceptual art, which has
37. Iam particularly referringto the strong influ- securely represented Kawara's practices, is determined to sanctify artistic prac-
ences of art historians associatedwith the journal
October. With its heavyinclination to Continental tices that are devoid of the artist's private memories and corporeal substance, as
theory. October's general tenet of "politics" is surplus of poststructuralist art history,17 The discourse has thus ignored the fact
narrowlybound by the "art institution" or else
that the postmodern claim of the death of the author paradoxically reinforces the
sublimated into the purelystructural matter of
the artworks. hegemonic practice of writing history, which tends to suppress the subversive

70 FAll 20'0
 content of memory, death, and destruction. Kawara's tightly organized proce-
dures, which radically deny any possibility of unified meaning, order, or totality,
are significant in that these seemingly "meaningless" practices of administrative
aesthetics turn out to be an urgent response to historical trauma.
In his study of the Japanese construction of modern history, Harry
Harootunian argued that historiography is a fundamental instrument that asserted
a homogeneous grand narrative of the nation-state and reduced the differences
or "surplus" of the everyday as a means of securing a unified structure of
national history. He defined the everyday as a site of fragmentary memories of
private individuals, in opposition to history as the fictive site of a collective and
unitary narrative which could be mobilized to suppress others." If Kawara's
practice is an act of history writing, his version of history challenges the possi-
bility of metanarranve. If Kawara's daily series is an autobiography, it constantly
estranges its author, as the artist reveals himself only within the work, in a very
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fragmentary way. Ultimately, he is the only person who can never have access to
the full scope of the product, since the Today series will be completed only upon
his death. He is neither an omniscient master presiding over the narrative nor a
self-absorbed writer of a reductive psychobiography. He is an everyman who
bears the burden of horror and the boredom of the everyday through his endless
daily labor.

Endless Repetition

An "unscheduled stop" at Altamira during Kawara's travel in Spain in 1963 is

frequently referred to as the moment of enlightenment for the artist, who
reportedly had been facing an artistic block which caused him to contemplate
giving up painting altogether. It is said that Kawara felt "the possibility of art
again" after seeing the Altamira cave paintings of circa 16,000-9,000 B.C.E. 39
Indeed, the cave paintings impart the redemptive effect of endless temporality.
These vivid markers of the past will exist in the future when the present has
become the past, thanks to the cave protecting the paintings from exterior dis-
turbances of natural weathering and human destruction.
In her study of endless temporality as a preoccupation of art of the 1960s,
Pamela Lee sees Kawara's Date Paintings as a nonheroic register of trivial accidents
of everyday life onto the longue durCe"o Fernand Braudel's formulation of the longue
durCe is a model of history that Lee suggests as a paradigm of Kawara's projects.
38. See Harry Harootunian."Shadowing History: For Braudel, the history of individual events constitutes "surface disturbances" on
NationalNarrativesand the Persistence of the
the geographical temporality ofIongue durCe.+' Lee maintains that Kawara's obses-
Everyday." Cultural Studies 18. no. 2-3 (March-
May 2004). 181-200. sion with the eternal temporality manifested in his Today series is historically
39. Regarding the Altamira cave paintings. Watkins specific to America in the 1960s.She argues that the rhetoric of the "ever quick-
emphasized the artist's interest in a form of com-
munication that transcends language and history. ening and ever repeating" speed of the information age produced that period's
as exemplified by the cave paintings. See Watkins. anxiety of endless time, ennui, and a future with no closure. For Lee, therefore,
On Kowara. 53-5-4.
-40. Pamela M.Lee. Chronophobio: On Time in the Kawara's diligent labor of registering his own minuscule activities on the longue
Art of the /9605 (Cambridge. MA: MIT Press. duree intrudes on the periodic anxiety of the 1960s by providmg a new "ethic of
2004).298-99.
-41. Femand Braudel. The Mediterranean and the
slowness and commitment" that resists "teleological end games,"!'
Mediterranean Worldin the Age of Philip II. vol. I. Despite the insightful analysis, however, Lee has overlooked the crucial
trans. 5ian Reynolds ( 1966; New York: Harper
difference between the rhetorical sense of the "teleological end games," which
and Row. 1972). 20-21.
-42. Lee.307-8. haunted the American psyche of the 1960s, and the historical and empirical

71 artjoumal
 "teleological end games" which devastated Japan in 1945.The fantasy of "end
games," which ensnared the consciousness of the entire population of wartime
Japan with the possibility of patriotic suicide in the name of the Emperor, was
shattered by the atomic bombs in 1945.The nuclear disasters of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki literally marked the "end" of the imaginable scope of manmade
destruction. They marked the end of the world, the apocalypse. Kawara's resis-
tance to teleological end games is directed not to the endless present that
haunted 1960sAmerica, as Lee suggests, but to the apocalyptic past of Japan
from which Kawara emerged.
The cave paintings, signs of "transcendental history," can be seen as portents
for a tedious future without a redemptive end. For Kawara, the prospect of
endless time, non-eventfulness, and a future with no closure does not conjure
anxiety, but longing and even achievement. For endless, uneventful days were
brutally stolen by the war and the intensive national history of Japan, under the
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banner of the "final resolution" for the sake of national unity. It is thus particu-
larly striking that Kawara's experience with the prehistoric paintings reflects the
complex structure of horror and desire in his work. The cave paintings represent
both the haunting return of the past and the prospect of an eternity lacking any
anticipation of redemption, or more precisely, redemption from redemption.
Kawara once compared sleep to death. "We are not very knowledgeable
about death. We have never tried it. Westerners fear death. They fail to realize
that death is an essential generator of energy. Sleep and meditation are forms of
death. In the East, when a monk meditates upon a mountain, he persists until
the mountain disappears and the entirety of the world is perceived as uninter-
rupted sameness.T-' Putting aside the somewhat mystifying remark on the Zen
master, Kawara's comment reveals the redemptive structure of his Today series,
but only in the paradoxical sense of redemption. The foreboding presence of
death, pain, and suffering is absorbed into the "uninterrupted sameness" of his
everyday routine. Kawara's paintings persistently retreat from historical narrative
into mere materiality.Their structure is inherently chaotic and essentially mean-
ingless.They communicate almost nothing. Kawara's extremely tedious projects
speak only of the incommunicability of everyday horror and the indifferent
continuity of time. Yet, "One Thing" is clear: The moments marked by an end-
lessly ticking clock and the consistent repetition of dates on a calendar may her-
ald, arbitrarily, either a major disaster or a minor detail. Through the relentless
enumerations and the superficial boredom of the Date Paintings, Kawara both con-
ceals and exposes the artist's struggle with the shattering arbitrariness of life
and death. In the midst of all this horror, Kawara is "still alive," heroically and
triumphantly.

Jung-Ah Woo received her PhD in art history from the University of California. Los Angeles. and currently
teaches at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and
Technology). Centering her research on the postwar art of Asia and the United States. she is Writing a
book exploring the array of artistic responses to urban catastrophes and political tragedies that stir fear
and a sense of loss in the name of community or state.

43. Quoted in Weintraub. 57-58.

72 FALL 2010
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