On and On Kawara

Painting is an atemporal art, and, as such, ill suited to documenting the passage of time.  Early Renaissance painters used a technique called multiple narrative, wherein one canvas contained depictions of a sequence of events.   A stunning example is Filippo Lippi's Feast of Herod, which depicts Salome dancing and receiving the head of John the Baptist.   Klimt and others captured time by juxtaposing different figures at different stages of life development, as Three Ages of Woman.  Futurists played with dynamism and simultaneity, simulating the appearance of objects in motion.   The ultimate painter of time, however, was On Kawara.   Kawara documented the temporal flow of his own life by producing numerous series of highly repetitive, bureaucratically ritualistic works that enumerated daily trivialities with a kind of mechanical cruelty.  Though starkly dispassionate in form, Kawara's work is a moving testament to human mortality.  His own life came to an end this week.

Born in Japan in 1933, Kawara's early artistic efforts were figurative drawings, which, like much art of the '50s (think of Bacon, Dubuffet, and Giacometti) reflect an existential malaise brought on by the tragedy of war.  

He would soon shift radically away from figurative work, and turn towards conceptualism, becoming one of its most important practitioners.  On January 4, 1966, he began the Today series, for which he is most known.  Kawara would painstakingly paint a date in a plain font on a uniformly colored canvas.  Each canvas depicted the date of it's own creation, using the language and format of whatever country Kawara happened to be visiting, or Esperanto in the case of languages that use non-Roman type.  If a painting was not completed on the date it began, Kawara would destroy it.  On the back of each paining, he would affix a newspaper from the same day, with headlines (hidden from view), that chronicle the events of the last half century.

The first Today painting is reproduced above, along with an exhibition view from 1970.  The installation reflects the compulsivity of Kawara's project.  Though often called poetic, the work is more striking for its uncompromising austerity.  The work would be oppressively solemn if it weren't for the Sisyphusian absurdity of the effort.  Kawara spent over half a century painting numbers on canvas.

Other explorations of time followed the Today series.  For example, Kawara was a pioneer of mail art, and would send postcards to friends, gallertists, and art writers documenting the precise time he woke up.  The examples below are addressed to two German curators and fellow conceptual artist, John Baldessari.  As the images indicate, Kawara was a globe trotter.  He lived in Japan, Mexico, Europe, and, for many years, New York.

Kawara also found other ways to document his activities.  In a piece called I Met, he listed all the people he met for the duration of the project. Each of many pages documents one day's encounters.  In a related work, called I Went, Kawara documented his movements throughout the day, using city maps.

In a more overtly political series, Kawara preserved things that he read, usually newspapers, with headlines describing the triumphs and tragedies of our time--all without commentary.

Kawara also produced enormous calendars (or "Journals") stretching back and forwards in time.  He added yellow dots on those days he was alive, and he used other colors to indicate whether he had completed a painting (or two) on each given day.  

These calendars can be described as meta-paintings, since they are about Kawara's own production of paintings.  Another meta-project is a series of color samples, corresponding to pigments used in his Today series.

Kawara's work is obsessively biographical, but also studiously impersonal.  He tells us when he woke up each day, and where he went, but not what he did, thought, or felt--the normal contents of a biography.  He also resisted being photographed (the image at the top is a rare exception).  Such inscrutability is a theme of another series, called Codes, in which he deploys cryptic symbol systems.  He includes a series of love letters in an indecipherable notation (below, left).

The Codes series also includes text of a French poem in Braille (above, right).  This is an excersize in incomprehension.  Kawara could understand neither Braille nor French, so the meaning of the poem remains hidden to him and to most viewers (assuming most "viewers" cannot read Braille, and fewer still would have an opportunity to touch the surface of the work).  Kawara's Braille piece remind us that, as a conceptual artist, he was not particularly concerned with retinal dimensions of art.  Everything is an idea, and the primary medium by which he delivered ideas was linguistic. 

At the same time, the visual confrontation with Kawara's work, especially the Today series, can be quite stirring.  The endless succession of dates testifies to our own impermanence.  There is also a dizzying sense of our own insignificance when measured against the fullness of time.  In a recent project, Kawara filled compendious volumes with neatly typed sequences of numbers corresponding to a million years, both past and future.  Kawara's choice of neutral typography and repetitive execution can be read as a commentary on the tedium or banality of existence.  Or as a comment on time's indifference.  Or as an injunction to fill our passing days with things that matter.

The theme of impermanence, or more exactly mortality, is focally featured on one of Kawara's most poignant series.  Over several years, Kawara sent telegrams to friends boasting "I am still alive."  As with his postcards, we don't learn about the content of his life, but about it's persistence.  Pure being, one might say.  

Kawara continued delivering this message of persistence through the internet.  He opened a Twitter account in 2009, and he began to post tweets saying "I AM STILL ALIVE."  These continued to appear daily without further comment or elaboration for years.  On the day of his death, another one of those ordinarily reassuring missives appeared, and then again the day after.  Another appeared today, two days after his death (below).  Kawara's Twitter posts were evidently machine generated; either that or he is communicating with us from the other side.   Either way, the message is true.  Kawara is here to stay.  His obsessive documentation of time's passage has left an enduring mark in the history art.

Salut, Chris Marker

With Chris Marker's passing, we have lost one of cinema's most compelling voices, and also one of the few who resolutely resisted the boundary between cinema and art.  Indeed, he resisted many boundaries. Marker was a pioneer of the cinema essay, and many of his works straddle the criss-crossing borders between fiction and documentary, politics and poems, lofty philosophy and gritty verité.  Marker's style relates to that of other directors in his generation: the psuedo-enthnographies of Rouch, the urban documentaries of Varda, the political assaults of Debord, and the meditations on memory by his close friend Resnais.  Marker's methods co-evolved with these other auteurs, but his work is utterly distinctive and irreplaceable.

Among the central concerns in Marker's films are memory, colonialism, and displacement.  Among the repeating tropes, we find statues, soldiers, things that fly, Vertigo allusions, and, of course, cats.  Stylistically, Marker was perhaps the greatest master of narration.  Quotable, provocative, moving, opaque, and also chillingly clear, Marker's work percolates with ingenuity, grace, and integrity.  He gave us a new cinema, and a new way of experiencing the world.  Every newsreel, still image, and artifact resonates both forward and backward in time, proliferating versions of truth.

Marker is best remembered for La Jetée, a science fiction horror comprised mostly of stills, and Sans Soleil, his quintessential celluloid essay, which moves like a drifting cloud from Iceland to Japan and Africa, and back again.  Other highlights include the street-interviews of Le Joli Mai, his probing demolition of post '68 France, A Grin Without a Cat, and his early anti-colonial art documentary, Statues Also Die, with Resnais.  All these films balance the ideology of leftist politics with a kind of directionless malaise, as if they are nostalgic memories told from some post-apocalyptic perch in time. In a somewhat less political mode, he made a marvelous animated short, Les Astronautes, with Walarian Borowczyk.  Marker also made outstanding politically charged tributes to other artists, including director Aleksandr Medvedkin, and photographer Denise Belloc.  A still from each of these is presented here, along with the image at above, which is one of the rare images of Marker, curtesy of Icarus films.

  

Losing Herb, and so much more.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel (Image from the Telegraph)

The death of Herb Vogel, while not hugely unexpected given his 89 years, comes as quite a blow. I have often "jokingly" inquired, where are the art patrons now? Yes, the predictable outburst of an artist who, big surprise, doesn't make a living making art. The Vogels, Herb and Dorothy, weren't typical patrons because they began collecting with a very small purse.  Herb was a retired postal worker with an extraordinary love of art. He lived for art. Truly. It wasn't about the money, or the status of being art savvy enough to buy a Chamberlain or a Chuck Close for peanuts.  There was no hidden agenda, no retirement plan of selling pieces that had become worth millions for a bigger apartment, or for a time share in Boca.  He and his wife stopped traveling in the 70's (yeah, over thirty years ago!), so that they could afford to buy more art. They lived in a small apartment with turtles and cats, and art filled every other spare nook and cranny of it.  I think we should stop to acknowledge this: real art by real artists can be had even with a meager salary. I mean, they watched Christo's cat as payment for a piece. Sometimes they were forced to pay in installments.  It's easy to get bitter at a big fancy gallery when you see something that moves you, and you wish in your head, "if only I could afford that."  Yes, there are trendy, fabulous artists with fabulous price tags alongside their work.  And I'm certainly as guilty as the next artist when I price my work as I deem it worth. But I also know I would be willing to give my work away for next to nothing if I knew it brought someone so much pleasure. That's kind of the secret wish, that the person/s who acquires your work will really enjoy it.  The Vogels gave away most of their collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  It was an act that speaks volumes about Herb and Dorothy. They gave to the National Gallery what, in away, the National Gallery gave to them: a love and appreciation for art, for everyone to enjoy, for free.  Tonight, I will toast to Herb Vogel, one of a fiery couple who's love for art was endless and limitless.