On Kawara

On Kawara started the Date Painting series on January 4, 1966 and continued it throughout his life. Despite their industrial look, Kawara executed these works painstakingly by hand, painting one or more each day, not necessarily every day but always completing works before midnight otherwise he would destroy them. He preferred a nondescript sans-serif font, which he traced with white paint onto canvas of varying colors and sizes. The bigger the painting, the more important the events that took place on that day, its date fixed in the order and language of the country the artist was in at the time. Adding clippings of local newspapers with which he would line the cardboard boxes he constructed for each painting helped him “keep time,” making what we see a true indexical imprint of that day that is both personal and historical, timeless and finite. It also makes this series a very long sequence of instances of the artist being conscious that day, his “today” and, ironically, now ours as well.

Until a certain point, he subtitled each Date Painting in a journal, using newspaper headlines or personal notes. Not intended as aids of any kind, these notes nevertheless betray a certain historical development, as the events recorded produce a narrative from the past. On December 28, 1972, we read: “Jag vet inte” or “I don’t know” in Swedish, and from this date on he recorded in his files only the day of the week.

Taken from a newspaper, these words mark a shift in consciousness, the peak of ontological mistrust in, it would seem, a universal logic driven by cause and effect logic, the flow of time and history.

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