On Kawara | Part 2
I Went, 1968-1979 | I Met, 1968-1979 | I Read, 1966-1995 | Journal, 1969
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY is a very simple newsletter where I share a collection of creative expressions I enjoyed coming across.
The books [I Went, I Met, I Read, Journal, 1969/1992] collectively illustrate Kawara's peripatetic lifestyle. While perhaps not intended to actually be read - either to completion or in sequential order - these encyclopedic collections emphasize the power of regular, methodical habit. No simple diaries, they required the sourcing and reproducing of local maps, the typing up of names, the careful cutting and gluing and annotating of newspaper articles, day after day after day, for a decade or more. The books propose a sort of progress - miles walked, friends met, news consumed - but also a kind of circularity or sameness, in which each day, no matter its texture or richness, is treated with the same secretarial rigor, which flattens all of life's chance encounters into uniform data.
Claire Lehmann
I Went, 1968-1979
In the I Went series (1968–1979), Kawara traced his movements over the course of a day in red ballpoint pen on a photocopy of a local map that he stamped with the date. […] [He] marked the location where he began the day with a red dot. On days when he didn’t leave the house, the map solely bears that mark. If the artist was out after midnight, then the next day’s map begins at that location.
Jeffrey Weiss
On the maps, Kawara traces his path with a red ballpoint pen regardless of the type of travel that he’s making: whether he’s in a car, or walking, or on the subway.
Anne Wheeler
There is something very personal and subjective, you might say, about the nature of Kawara’s work. At the same time, he tells us very little about what he felt, or about what he said and what he saw when he went from one place to another. The work is bereft of the content—the details that we associate with our experience of the everyday.
Jeffrey Weiss
I Met, 1968-1979
In his I Met series, Kawara recorded the names of the people — friends, acquaintances, and strangers — with whom he conversed on each day between 1968 and 1979. […]
The series explores two central themes of his work: language and travel. During his travels, Kawara had difficulty remembering the Western names of people he met. He would often ask them for their business cards or to write their names down so that he could record them later. One day, when he received the business card of a man with a name of Hispanic origin in Mexico City, Kawara remembered a challenge issued by his friend Kasper König: write a poem that can be understood anywhere in the world. The man’s name struck him as a “readymade poem” that could be understood by anyone, anywhere. He realized then that a universal language could be found in names.
Anne Wheeler
When you look at I Met, it’s very interesting. Some names appear again and again within a week or two, maybe because he played chess with them. And other names you’ll recognize because they’re intellectual figures. It’s very open. It’s very social. And it’s totally nonhierarchical.
Kasper König
I Met creates a poetry of the moment by provoking the feeling that each day is like an empty page before it is transcribed in book-matter.
mfc-michèle didier
I Read, 1966-1995
The project I Read comprises a collection of daily press clippings, and was started simultaneously with the "Date paintings" in 1966. The material is drawn from newspapers published on the day, and in the location in which the respective painting was made.
David Zwirner
Unlike the three parts of the Trilogy, I Got Up, I Went and I Met, published respectively in 2008, 2007 and 2004, I READ by On Kawara is not a daily work but is connected to the Today Series, artwork gathering all the Date Paintings realized from 1966 to the eve of the death of the artist, in 2014.
mfc-michèle didier
Journal, 1969
1969 contains calendars (in month form and list form) of when paintings were made as well as dates and descriptions of monthly news events that occurred in 1969, with texts in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Specific Object
