ON KAWARA:
ONCE IS ENOUGH; TODAY SERIES

written by Billy De Luca

Imagery is both definable substance and abstract nonsense. It exists to such a degree and with such graphic immensity that it grows every day and has never been so extreme. Its prevalence is that of sand in the wind, frizzing and convulsing in the air, ever moving. There is hardly any space to rest between the abstract bold marks between image and image. Each form is locked like a Sean Scully painting: dense, opaque, and unpassable. It reverberates and swarms through space like a piercing church bell and greets us with daily news and breaking news on corners like the Red Cross. Daily reports (aside from advertising which I am sure to ramble on about later) present the world with authoritative commands about what to care about, what is happening, and (only sometimes) why we should care. In the murked soup of the city, it reaches us on both a personal and world-level — whether it is world news on the radio every hour or a breakup text on a Tuesday morning. 

Every day, the viewer (and consequently, the listener) endures in the thick shrubbery of narrative impregnation. The journals, tabloids, tellies, zines and telephones slip by your eyes as you rub the sleep out of them and through sheets as you tuck yourself into bed. The stories they tell distract us from, and shape our movements in life like a wet hand on moulded clay. Its daily nature impacts us more than one could have ever predicted. More vast than the interpretation of a biblical verse and more portentous than a Yeats poem, the daily influx of information can advance and reorganise our days (and dreams). 

It is interesting to note, then, that the day we receive the ‘news’ is not when the impact ends. We can forget (of course, if the subject was not of interest or importance) or be reminded and thus re-affected by the information retrospectively: this can be achieved with the date of its conveyance. 

9/11. For example.

I was standing in the David Zwirner Gallery on Jan 18, 2012. The exhibit, On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities, had over 150 works. Inside, one odd small-ish painting looked familiar. There were no discernible qualities bar a date plastered onto a lead-grey background, unreadable and frozen like bare feet on cold tiles. It was subdued but resonant; I tend to like grey, so there might be bias here. I sat still in a ruminative stare, looking at this date, wondering whether that was the date of my aunt's birth or the day after. Another work with the date ‘May 11, 1967’ stood alongside. The date was a day before my birthday — my birthday if I were to be born 12,450 days beforehand. This was an image that gave me nothing more than a date and flat background to fixate upon. To question. To analyse. To read. 

Sometimes this can be unnecessary: appreciation for the bare image can (at times, for some artists) be more important. My colleague and friend Theo firmly stated, ‘who cares what it means, it is what it is,’ — overused, I know. This has always been a difficult task and will continue to be; at least Kawara makes it abundantly clear what it is, narrowing the ambit of questioning: so I don’t blow a fuse over-thinking.

I looked upon these works again and tried to appreciate them for what they were. Still, a trained mind — used to pulling explanations and meanings out from asphalt and dirt — could not resist the temptation to question. And this asphalt was tensed in heat. Brown-orange heat.

Grenadier.

On Kawara completed his first painting in the long-running and well-famed Today series on January 4, 1966. For me, that was long ago; very sepia. Now, it is cemented in the world of art as another mysterious and compelling image of what art can be, mean, and do.

The lateral timestamp speaks of the irrevocable reality of time, pushed by the fact that the date depicted is the date the artwork was created. If the work — or works (if they were smaller as they tended to be when produced by Kawara while he travelled) — were not completed by midnight of the referenced day, they would be destroyed. They orbit traditionalist paintings in the sense that they also contain a date. However, these ‘signposts’ depict the date alone. That is the artwork. They move from the old, behind-the-canvas norm. Away from the eschewing of the timestamp to the far corner of the artwork.

Instead, they stand out, and that is enough.

That's all, that's all, that’s all.

Densely layered with paint and hand-drawn without stencils. There is no blatant intervention in the painting as far as brushwork is concerned: Kawara conceals the brushstrokes; the opaqueness of the painting effaces the artist's hand. Their backgrounds are similarly agile in avoiding a finger being placed down on their meaning. Bold white text sometimes sits in darkness like a billboard at night. Other times it can be in bright burnt orange. Never black — possibly to remove the allusion of the day and night. The non-definition and unemotional take on colour avoid a sense of association and, as such, retains an essence of individuality in the various dates and backgrounds. The colours range from cerulean blue, dark reds, heavy grey-browns and greens. The pigment variations of grey and the sheer quantity of grey backgrounds Kawara has produced are similarly non-associative. Using grey instead of red or green does not detract from the date’s importance or imply more. Instead, the colours sit on an equal plane. Macbeth’s incarnadine hand can be as potent and equivalent as Richter’s portrayal of the indifference and noncommitment of grey. Both are equally meaningless and meaningful when reduced to a pigment with nothing more than a white date.

On the date… 

The date alone can be as silent and virulent as a disembodied scream. It can reap pain in the memory or spark joy just as quickly. Anniversaries, birthdays (for some), and ‘first times’ are all applicable in this category — but fun moments are overly discussed, so I’ll leave it at that. Kawara manages to ‘start our minds off’ with an inchoate arena for free thought and independent feeling. Concurrently, he refuses a narrative form, instead placing the viewer on location but without direction. Our minds begin with one thought, but that can shift for each different person that enters the room. Kawara forces one to confront the timestamp without the context or direction of where to go. 

The stamp is, unlike a significant amount of art circulated today, a rigid substance. It is no formless flux to be interpreted randomly. Rather, it is rough and coarse and immovable with what it is. Its fixed numbers and date are held in stasis. A clock that weeps time only once. 

Note must be taken that the date paintings are not the only objects involved in the artwork. The works are sometimes accompanied by a supporting text in the form of a newspaper or crop of a newspaper of that day (and city) where the painting was created. The length of the captured text is variable and has even been known to, at times, only feature the day to which the date pertains. Rather than dragging the bull away into the cavernous hole of conceptuality, Kawara tows the audience towards the atmosphere where art and the everyday are both dichotomised and intravenously linked. The application of newsprint collage is no new feat. The cubists in the 1910s were playing with the stuff like children’s hands in paper mache buckets. 

That said, Kawara references rather than couples the two materials for the artwork, avoiding the two physically melding in the pictorial frame. The paper accompanies and cements the paintings instead of throwing them into the purgatorial flux of meaning established by using a newsprint collage. From Rouchenburg, whose Dadaist assemblage of everyday detritus could lead one into a myriad of questions regarding technological advances, sensory overloads and terminal decades; to Warhol, whose mass production was quite shocking but still had space for questions on the frenetic culture of America and the excess of the world. Kawara removes us from the limbo of questioning ‘mixed media’ and instead points us in a non-direction: written communication that paints a fixed image, only questionable regarding what it is. And, what it is — similar to Frank Stella’s statement in 2002 (“what you see is what you see”) — is a date. These punctuated lines form the title of the events surrounding it, the environment of that day and the isolation of everything prior to the past tense. As such, it is fixed in its definition as a temporal road sign, enabling a plethora of events to be interpreted into the box of the day. So, one will never halt the questions from flooding our minds, even with an absolute like a datestamp. 

Sorry.

Time. 

Sutured into the day by our consciousness. Felt with the twiddling of thumbs and restless scratching of hair, legs, and bum. An overly discussed, idiomatic, heavy, weighted, weightless and sequentially contained abstraction. Run out of time. Hands of time. 

Spare, on, make, find, save Time. 

The concept is personally understood and internationally relied upon to shape our lives. It has a core, irreducible and ebbing with vitality as we thread our first-person perspectives through the pulmonary veins to breathe. It transforms: we are contorted in hatred, loosened by drink, and sharpened by desire, all whilst being held in the clutches of a pace we can measure but cannot stop. Each day is significant on a personal level to somebody, whether it be graduations, publications, marriages, or inaugurations. Simultaneously, every day, national and international news headlines drop information on doorsteps, projectors, screens and loudspeakers. Charity and brutality sway in the wind of mass media like the twin poisons of achievement and failure. The daily forgotten once again. Kawara urges one to draw attention back to the quotidian, back to the weight that each day can have as it comes and goes, never to be experienced again. The artwork does alienate but reminds the audience that the facticity of time is unchanged, restricting us to the present as we remember the past in engineering the future. Kawara’s minimal take on such a facet is thus not a hollow attempt to represent time on a materiality level. Rather, it is a receptacle: a symbol where the audience and the world can sit, looking out and reaching for an answer. No piece of Kawara’s has it, but perhaps they were meant to push us to look at the diurnal world not from an abstract standpoint but in concrete reality. A concrete reality, where interpersonal contact and international events can be remembered, seen on a headline and placed, conveyed on a canvas with only a date and a flat background. 

Maybe Eliot was wrong. Perhaps the brass tacks are more than birth, copulation, and death. Maybe, there’s more. Or, perhaps it's better just to leave it be. As a day. 

Destroyed by the 0:00 of tomorrow.

About the author

Billy De Luca is a non-fiction and short story writer and visual artist practising in Madrid. His fields of knowledge are based in the arts and culture spheres, including fashion, contemporary and modern art, and travel. His cultural background has heavily influenced his perspectives. With a vocabulary spanning over three languages, Billy composes texts that are malleable in subject, genre, and viewpoint, creating an intimate voice that allows him to approach various mediums and topics without sacrificing context.