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Download Transcript (PDF) KAWARA: EXHIBITION OVERVIEW Jeffrey Weiss: On Kawara was a key figure in the art of the 1960s in particular. He began working in Japan and continued work in many other cities, finally settling in New York in the mid-’60s, where he was part of the community of Conceptual art during that period of time. He knew a lot of artists that we associate with Conceptualism including Sol LeWitt and Hanne Darboven, Joseph Kosuth and Dan Graham. It’s easy to associate his work, then, with the rise of Conceptualism, although Kawara’s work, when you examine it closely, stands well apart. This exhibition was organized in cooperation with the artist. And I really wanted to show every category of Kawara’s production since around 1964. We don’t call it a retrospective because Kawara’s work is based on time, on the passage of time. So the idea of the retrospective actually doesn’t apply in the conventional sense. Anne Wheeler: We heard from a number of his friends and colleagues from even years ago that it had always been his dream to have a show at the Guggenheim because of the cyclical nature of time and the way that the building represents that in the way that you can move throughout the chronology of his work. In organizing the show we are moving more or less chronologically through the series of his works, starting in the High Gallery with works from 1963 to ’65. Jeffrey Weiss: We’re also showing Paris–New York Drawings, which he produced in Paris and New York, where he was living—both places. There’s 198 drawings that belong to this series. They all occupy sheets of the same dimension, more or less. These drawings anticipate what happens in 1966. He hadn’t abandoned abstraction and representation yet. What he did with these drawings was create proposals, in a way, for paintings that he might paint, or for installations and sculptural objects that he might make. What you do see in these Paris–New York Drawings, these proposals, is an iconography that becomes familiar to us from the later work. Jeffrey Weiss: We refer to the Date Paintings collectively as the Today series. The Today series extends from January 4, 1966, until his death, this past summer, in 2014. Painting would consist for him solely of the recording of a given date on which the painting was made. So his paintings take the form of monochromes in the sense that they have a single field of color on which are inscribed, in white paint, the letters and numbers that represent the date of that day. And the language that he used for the date would change from place to place based on what city or town he was in at the time—because Kawara traveled extensively. Kasper König: He sometimes said if he wouldn’t be an artist, he would like to run a tourist office to plan trips. But the trips he would plan were, kind of, trips you would do in the early 19th century, right? Going to the Amazonas, and from there to Shanghai, and from Shanghai to… You know? Anne Wheeler: My favorite part of the show is Ramp 3. It’s a section called Self- Observation where the artist combined three series that he began in 1968: the series I Got Up, I Met, and I Went. I Got Up are the postcards that he sent to two recipients each day for almost 12 years. I Met are the lists of names of people with whom he conversed each day. And I Went are the photocopied maps on which he traced his path throughout each city that he was in. Kawara took great pains to be cryptic in his work, to be a cypher of sorts, to not reveal any of his personal information, to not give interviews, to not show up for his openings. However, in this section of the show, Self-Observation, one can look at the paths—literally—that Kawara took throughout his life and see the people that he met and combine different perspectives on Kawara to get a better picture of the artist himself. Jeffrey Weiss: Unlike the group of works that Kawara linked together as Self- Observation, the sequence of works known as I Am Still Alive take the form of telegrams that he sent intermittently. And, of course, the telegrams were sent over the course of many more years than he produced postcards, maps, and lists. Each telegram bears a single message: “I AM STILL ALIVE.” Kasper König: We always grew up with this notion, if there’s a new medium, the old one is going to disappear. It’s not true. The old one redefines itself. This is rather strange, you know? “I AM STILL ALIVE.” Usually you send a telegram—you know, the grandmother died, and so on and so on. And even that is obsolete by now. But he still was using it while it was still possible. So it is also a recording of cultural techniques. Jeffrey Weiss: A number of Kawara’s works take the form of calendars. There’s the One Million Years calendar, which is a chronicle, in a way, through numbers alone, of a sequence of dates totaling, actually, two million years, past and future. Anne Wheeler: While One Million Years looks like it could’ve been easy to make these days on a computer, we have to remember that Kawara was doing this all by hand, typing everything by himself. Jeffrey Weiss: One Million Years is also the work that represents Kawara’s only application of sound in the sense that at a certain point he decided to allow this One Million Years calendar to be read as a live reading with two readers—always with two readers, a male and female reader, alternating dates or numbers. Kawara’s interest in calendars have a lot to do, obviously, with the content—the temporal content—of his work. And specifically, they represent a graphic form of representing the passage of time. There’s also the calendar that we call One Hundred Years Calendar, which is a pre-printed calendrical structure that was hand-marked by the artist. And the calendar was marked in order to demonstrate the days on which Kawara himself was alive, and further marked according to a code of different colors according to the days in which he produced Date Paintings. Jeffrey Weiss: You’re looking at a show that reflects the fact that works were produced, in a way, as the component parts of a larger practice or system overall. And in that regard, I think the experience of this exhibition is one that will ask visitors to abandon some of their habits in exhibition-going, and to try to kind of find a way to absorb themselves in the unfolding process of the work. .
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