Kawara on Kawara Kathryn Chiong October, Vol

Kawara on Kawara
Kathryn Chiong
October, Vol. 90. (Autumn, 1999), pp. 50-75.
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Kawara On Kawara*
KATHRYN CHIONG
January 4, 1966
On January 4, 1966, On Kawara paints the first date painting. That information
will never stop us from asking: what time are we looking at? The answer is never
self-evident, for as Henning Weidemann argues, the spectator experiences the
paintings' "Today" as "Yesterday," the preserved "uniqueness of the moment"
generically, in calendrical terms. So not slow, fast, or even very punctual, the date
painting hovers "in-between."l Weidemann, however, includes in this "in-between"
a long list of paradigmatic oppositions: life-death, logic-process, existencenothingness, minimum-maximum, and zero-consciousness. That On Kawara's
time resembles something like this dash (-) seems true, but following Kawara's
logic, we could be more specific. Say between photography's time on one side.
As Rosalind Krauss notes, the phenomenon of painting aspiring to the status
of the photographic index is widespread by the 1970s.2 Photographic time, the*
rized by Barthes as the "That-has-been"3 of the photographic subject, in some
way characterizes the date paintings, evidentiary traces of an activity temporally
circumscribed, occurring within the space of one, remote day. Kawara's registrations
of time-past thus produce a failure of temporal distance that mimics the disjunction
of every photograph. Lacking the photograph's analogical plenitude, however, the
date painting's mimicry remains incomplete. The authenticity of its past must be
supplemented, certified by Kawara's claim to destroy any painting not completed
on its proper date, reinscribed by the absolutely contemporary newspaper articles
*
My gratitude to Rosalind Kratrss and Benjamin Buchloh for their generosity. Sincere thanks a5
well to W. S.,J0sef.a Domingo, the library staff at the Museum of Modern Art, and to my colleagues at
Columbia, whose insights generated this text.
1.
Henning Weidemann, O n Kawara, June 9, 1991. Fmm "Today"Series (1966-) (Ostfildern: Cantz,
1994), pp. 47-57.
Rosalind Krauss, "Notes o n the Index: Part I," and "Notes o n the Index: Part 11," reprinted in
2.
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 196-210.
3.
Roland Barthes, Camera L.ucida, trans. Richard Howard (NewYork: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 7 7 .
OCTOBER 90, Fa11 1999, pp. 51-75. 0 1999 October Magazina 1,td. and Massachwetts Institutr of Technoloo.
Biography of On Kawara
(Dec. 15,1991)
21,540 days
Fnnn On Kawara: Date Paintings in
89 Cities, ed. Kanl Schampers, 1992
OCTOBER
affixed to the paintings' boxes.4 A journal, cataloging every painting's size, color,
location and date of production, appropriately includes a list of obligatory
"subtitles," like the photographic captions whose necessity Walter Benjamin
describes.5 Because the specificity of every date gives way to the arbitrariness of
snapshots, this meaninglessness must be plugged by the existential presence of
time, guaranteed by textual reaffrmations. The link, then, to Duchamp's inscription
of a readymade:
The important thing is just
this matter of timing, this snapshot effect, like
a speech delivered on no matter
what occasion but at such and such an hour."
Kawara too insists on a punctuality experienced by the spectator as endless deferral.
And if Barthes remarks that the snapshot's n o e m ("That-has-been") is habitually
taken for granted, Kawara will simultaneously offer and withdraw those markers
that facilitate indifference. Frustrating narrative, he begins the "subtitles"
anecdotally (Mar. 20, 1966: "Taeko kissed me. I asked her 'are you all right?"') and
ends them tautologically (Oct. 30, 1972: "Monday.").7 Refusing naturalistic or
iconic reference, the paintings are never shown with their corresponding news
clippings, but hover in ambiguity. If sequencing would impart some element of
filmic consistency,S he maintains an irregular chronology, and allows the paintings
to be hung singly. Kawara teases away those conventions that allow the viewer
unthinkingly to accept the index as pure trace, a message without a code. For the
date painting is a patently coded image that nevertheless insists on existing as if it
were an Imaginary object, the registration of a particular presence. And the most
obvious presence would be the physical passage of time, a long exposure spanning
roughly eight to nine hours, measured in the act of painting.
4.
See Karel Schampers, "A Mental Journey in Time," in On Karuara Date Paintings in 8 9 Cities
(Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-Van Reuningen, 1992), p. 199, for a discussion of the clippings' evidentiary
status.
5.
See Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illurninatins
(New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 226: "At the same time picture magazines begin to put u p
signposts for [the viewer], right ones or wrong ones, n o matter. For the first time, captions have
become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of the
painting."
6.
Marcel Duchamp, notes from the Geen Box. See The Bride Stripped bar^ by Her Barhelors, Et~en,a
typographical version by Richard Hamilton of Duchamp's Green Box, trans. George Heard Hamilton
(London: Lund, Humphries, 1960), n.p.
7.
All references to the date paintings' journal from a reproduction in On Kawara, Continuity
Disrntinuity, 1963-1 979, ed. Bjorn Springfeldt (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1980), n.p.
8.
Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," p. 226: "The directives
which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more
explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be
prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones."
Kawara 07L Kawara
53
June 9,1991
On June 9, 1991, Weidemann takes pictures of a date painting in process.
The series begins at 9:21 A.M., with an empty table, a clock, a lamp, and a jar.
Nothing much, and already the snapshot exposes the other side of Kawara's inbetween, because this desk, precisely the opposite of the photographic, belongs
instead to the utterly Symbolic space of writing. The next shot, a white canvas,
looks awfully like a blank page, and not much later (at 11:51) out pops a pencil.
Clearly, what Dan Cameron describes as Kawara's "now" has everything to do with
an "imperative of the presentn9 that characterizes certain writing, committed
literature in particular. And if the term "existentialist" has been here and there
attached to Kawara's work, we should take that label seriously.
On Kawara.June 9,1991.1991. From "%day" Series. 1%6-.
(Photo:Henning Weidemann; taken at 9:21 A.M.)
Denis Hollier remarks that the beginning of Jean-Paul Sartre's La Nausie
over-emphasizes the urgency of the present: "It would be best to write down
events day by day. ...I have to say how I see this table, the street, the people."lo The
journalistic impulse that demands literature to be up-to-the-minute, eaten on the
spot like bananas, resonates in Kawara's decree that paintings must be destroyed if
finished too late. And should Kawara's relentless insistence on the present bear any
Denis Hollier, The Politics of Prose, Essay on Sarhc (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986). p. 45.
10. Jean-Paul Sartre, La Nauctcquoted ibid., p. 45.
9.
54
OCTOBER
resemblance to Sartre's, then the recourse to journalistic time is a prophylactic.
As Hollier notes, La Nawie's Roquentin uses the journal "in order to escape the
temptation of writing."ll To understand the diierence between writing and keeping
a journal, Hollier turns to Maurice Blanchot's The Space of Literature. In this work
Blanchot describes writing as an act of solitude, wherein the writer extracts himself
from the continuum of time and space, establishing a kind of self-deprivation:
"He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed."l2 In an
effort to remember himself, to counter this depersonalization, the writer tries to
reestablish "the propriety of daysn by keeping a journal, by securing himself in
the occupations, incidents and affairs of the world in an active present. The
writer, having lost any sense of being "truly historical," having abandoned himself to
Kawara. June 9,1991.
(Photo: Henning Weidemann; taken at 9:40 A.M.)
literature's "fascination with time's absence," needs somehow to regain his footing
in a common place and time.13 The journal, then, as Hollier writes, is an exercise
in the "mastery of presence," an attempt to see things clearly.14 One senses this
kind of struggle no less in Kawara's painting, tied to the journal he keeps, with its
string of dates, places, personal facts enmeshed with public ones. Through the
11.
Hollier, The Politia ofPmse, p. 74.
12.
Maurice Blanchot, The Space ofliterature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1982),p. 21.
Ibid., p. 29.
13.
14.
Hollier, The Politics of Pme, p. 74.
Kawara On Kawara
55
journal Kawara seems to wrest the space of painting from the no-time of fictional
solitude, reinvesting it in real time. An effort Robert Morris, for instance, would
abandon, finding painting's irrational timelessness insurmountable:
Painting ceased to interest me. There were certain things about it that
seemed very problematic to me. There was a big conflict between the
fact of doing this thing, and what it looked like later. Itjust didn't make
much sense to me. Primarily because there was an activity I did in
time, and there was a certain method to it. And that didn't seem to
have any relationship to the thing at all. There is a certain resolution in
the theater where there is real time, and what you do is what you d0.15
Kawam.June 9,1991.
(Photo: Henning Weidemunn; taken at 11:51 A.M.)
This certain irresolution, however, is precisely what interests Kawara, acutely
aware of that impossibility of "maintenancen which Roquentin's flawed journal
unwittingly exposes. If Roquenetin's mission is to be present, then where is he
when he writes "My body is warmish; I feel stale, washed out. My penknife is on
the table. I open it. Why not? At any event, it would change things a little. I place
my left hand on the pad and thrust the knife firmly into my palm."*6 As Hollier
15. Robert Morris, unpublished interview with Jack Burnham, November 21, 1975, Robert Morris
Archive. As quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 'Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of
Administration to the Critique of Institutions," 0 ~ ~ (Winter
5 0 1990), p. 114-15.
16. Sartre, La Nawic, quoted in Hollier, Thc Politics of Pmc, p. 117.
Kawara.Jan. 15,1966.Jan. 18,1966.Jan. 19,1966. I%6.
notes, Roquentin cannot be stabbing himself and writing at the same time.
Similarly, on January 18, 1966, Kawara records in his journal, "I am painting this
painting." The present progressive reveals this documentary fact to be fictitious,
unless of course, one assumes that the painter has four hands. The word
maintenance includes the French word for hand, and Hollier uses this play to underscore the other implication of presence, phenomenological rather than temporal.
If Kawara admits "a big conflict" in the struggle to keep time, similarly he frustrates the desire for embodiment, seemingly granted by performance. While
Kawara has been credited with an attempt to "nullify the 'theatrical' or contextual boundaries separating art production and everyday activity,"l' there is a
degree to which he creates the work as fiction.
In the Fallminter 1967 edition of Aspen 5 + 6, an issue Alexander Alberro
refers to as the first show of Conceptual art, Barthes publishes "The Death of the
Author." Barthes's theorization of both the author's and the reader's impersonality
and of reading as the primary locus for textual synthesis hooks into certain
Conceptual modes: indifference, contextuality, anti-subjectivity. His references to
Proust and Mallarme, on the other hand, would seem at odds with a Conceptual
insistence on facticity. Rejecting empiricism, Barthes embraces literary visions,
suggesting that even science should become fictional.18 What Barthes insists
17. Joshua Decter, "(Re)Reading On Kawara: The Difference of Repetition," reprinted in On
Kawara, Wh& and Parts, 1%4-1995, ed. Xavier Douroux and Franck Gautherot (Paris: Les Presses du
Rkel, 1996). p. 482.
18.
See Roland Barthes, Rdand Barlhes by Rdand Barlhes, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 90.
Kawara On Kawara
upon, what Kawara's work reveals, is that no amount of facticity escapes art's fundamentally fictive condition, a constraint sociologically exposed by Broodthaers's
Museum Fictions. Kawara, like the Sartrean intellectual, cannot place his hands on
the real, will not be seen getting his hands dirty, as the Weidemann photos prove.
In thirty-one frames, not a single glimpse of Kawara, only those things he has
touched: brushes, canvas, cigarette butts-once
again, only indexical traces.
Notorious for absenting himself from gallery openings, for declining interviews,
there is no forum in which Kawara will produce a proximate link between his
work and his body. Nonetheless, that phantom body haunts the work, being necessarily a dead one according to Barthes and Blanchot: "For isn't the writer
[painter] dead as soon as the work exists? He sometimes has such a presentiment
himself: an impression of being ever so strangely out of work."lg
May 29, 1966
On May 29, 1966, Kawara subtitles his painting "I am afraid of my 'Today'
paintings." This fear must have something to do with the fact that he does not
touch them. More properly, as with the objects that disgust Roquentin, the paintings seem to touch him.20 Tellingly, Weidemann does not picture Kawara writing
with the pencil, painting with the brush, smoking the cigarette. The entities so
carefully arranged on the desk do not make Kawara a master, what Hollier calls a
"dominator of tools."21 If anything, the objects have ceased to function in mere
servility, taking on instead an Uncanny tactility. The subject of Unheimlichkeit is
not a new one for Kawara. During the 1950s his work obsessively projects the
vision of home as a nightmarish slaughterhouse and mother as tumescent freak.
The Bathroom Series, in particular, transforms hygienic tiled rooms into insalubrious
breeding grounds. That the date paintings are somehow more ominous even than
those Surrealist images is clear from Kawara's own nightmare, retold by Teresa
O'Connor:
On once told me about a dream he had of a razor sliding between his
teeth. He was sure it was because his "date paintings" look like the gray
slotted blade of a double-edged razor. Once On visited me and asked
me if I noticed anything different about him. No, I noticed nothing
different. Then he told me that he'd just gotten his false teeth. He had
gladly had most of his teeth extracted.22
19.
Blanchot, The Space ofLitemture, p. 23.
20.
Sartre, La Nausie, quoted in Hollier, The Politics of Prose, p. 112: "Ohjects should not touch,
hecause they are not alive. One uses them, one puts them back in place, one lives in their midst: they
are useful, nothing more. But in my case, they touch me. It's unbearable."
21.
Ibid., p. 112.
22.
Teresa O'Connor, "Notes: On Kawara's I Am Still Alive," reprinted in Kawara, Whole and Parts,
1964-1995, p. 476.
58
OCTOBER
Kawara's version of the dream appears as a subtitle for September 10, 1966: "A
razor is getting in between my teeth so that I cannot close my mouth." And at 225
on June 9,1991, Weidemann's camera spots a razor lying on Kawara's desk.
Joshua Decter describes the appearance of subjectivity in Kawara's work:
"here, subjectivityis subtly murmured through the network of redundant messages
that function to disclose only the most generic type of information obtainable for
an individual."23 According to Decter, "the real fecundity of an individual's life"
emerges from beneath the seemingly neutral dates that organize experience.
Such a description belies the degree to which Kawara pointedly discloses the
most specific, often alarmingly private information. The notion that On Kawara
lurks behind the "self-objectified presence" precipitated by his "bureaucratic"
Kawara.June 9,1991.
(Photo:Henning Weidemann; taken at 225 P.M.)
records seems a strange suspicion.24 Contrary to his hermetic reputation, Kawara
is not so secretive. The razor blade sits on the desk in plain view. Subjectivity is
not merely precipitated as chance by-product. On the other hand, if the work is
primarily "an archive of the self" as Decter proclaims, that self will never crystallize
to form "an individual." Neither can it reduce to what Lippard calls the artist's "life
23. Decter, "(Re)Reading On Kawara," p. 481. Also exemplary is Karel Schampers's assessment of
Kawara's perceived objectivity (see "A MentalJourney in Time," p. 198).
This common assumption is voiced by Lippard in "Justin Time: On Kawara;" (in On h a m [Los
24.
Angeles: Otis Art Institute Gallery, 19771 n.p.): "I find, to my surprise, that I get a sense of Kawara's life
and persona from his work that I do not often find in the most widely confessional narrative art."
Kawara On Kawara
and persona." For Kawara the terms of autobiography are not so simple, not terms
over which he will ever gain authority.
July 25, 1966
On July 25, 1966, On Kawara subtitles his painting "I make love to the days."
Nothing subtle about his object-love, smacking of the auto-eroticism inscribed in
those series where Kawara tracks himself (in I Went, compiling marked maps of his
daily travels), times himself (in I Got Up At, mailing postcards that note the hour he
wakes up). Once again, the question of mastery is at stake. As Hollier notes, Sartre
disdains the masturbatory impulse associated with object-affection, precisely
because it signals an accident, a withdrawal of perception because the object is
caressed rather than taken.25 In general, Sartre's theorization of sex leaves little
space for control, because unlike the hand the sexual organ is insubordinate.
Operating involuntarily it generates in consciousness an essential passivity.'"
Making love to the days, Kawara's punctiliousness gives way to a confirmed lust
that must render him insubordinate to himself. But returning to the question of
hands, Kawara seems fully aware, contrary to Sartre, that writing (or painting)
requires some loss of manual control. As described by Hollier, Roquentin proves
this when his own hands become a phantom pair, doubling the plausible, real set,
with one caught in "persecutory prehension."n7 Kawara (four-handed too) appears
similarly trapped by a compulsory grasp. Such involuntary doubling essentializes
auto-affection, where in order to touch oneself, a self-splitting must occur:
It is thus precisely because there are no double sensations that I duplicate
myself every time that I self-affect myself. So that the subject who
touches himself, divides himself by touching himself, becomes contigrious
to himself, finds (and loses) himself alongside himself, being his own
neighbor, having taken his own place: himself in place of himself.28
The writer does not merely set himself aside as Blanchot states; rather he sets himself
aside in order to replicate. This duplicative operation mobilizes those of Kawara's
series considered most autobiographic, the series which always start with "I" ( I
Bead, I Met, I Went, I Got Up, I Am Still Alive). An act of doubling already estab
lished in a subtitle ("I am painting this painting.").
In The Ear of the OtherJacques Derrida announces the task of the autobiographer: "[he] tells himself this life and he is the narration's first, if not its
only addressee and destination within the text."ng In such a narration, as Jean-Luc
25.
Hollier, Thp Politics cfPros~,pp. 136-37.
26.
Ibid., p. 127.
27.
Ibid., pp. 117-18.
28.
[bid., p. 142.
29. Jacques Den-ida, The Ear cf th 0 t h ~olobiography,
:
lransjr~nce,1ran.tlation: texts and disci~.ssionswith
,]arques Llerrida, trans. Peggy Kan~ufa nd .4vital Ronell, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln and London:
OCTOBER
60
Nancy elaborates, representation is not a second presentation, but an initiatory
one: "The subject becomes what it is (its own essence) by representing itself to
itself."so And as Robert Smith observes,
Derrida links this self-representation to
the phenomenological voice privileged by
Husserl: "The operation of 'hearing oneself speak' is an auto-affection of an
absolutely unique kind."sl This phenomenon of self-reflexive presence, however, is
exposed as an ideal that exists only dysfunctionally according to Derrida and
unethically according to Sartre. For Sartre
there are no double sensations. The very
effort of self-affection would require a
!
detotalization, an enforced heterogeneity.
in order to catch up with oneself sensing,
the self would have to double. And as previously noted, Sartre prohibits such
K
~-fnnnlwentserics.
~
~
~ 1 ~ 8~ 7 9 . . auto-erotic folding, declaring that "the
writer cannot read what he has just written."s2 Even more insidiously, for Derrida
the effort to catch up and hear oneself speaking (or read oneself writing) only signifies the hndamental fallacy of self-presence:
v-
I
The existence of the speech from self to self is the sign of a cut .. .The
circle turns in order to annul the cut, and therefore, by the same token,
unwittingly signifies it. The snake bites its tail, from which above all it
does not follow that it finally rejoins itselfwithout harm in this successful
auto-fellatio of which we have been speaking all along, in truth.33
Whereas Sartre will rely on the existence of a totalized self, Derrida will reveal
the self as originally divided, auto-eroticism being guilty not of creating the
body double, but of proving its split existence all along. Siding with deconstruction,
University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 13, quoted in Robert Smith, Derrida and Autobiography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 75.
ed.
30. Jean-Luc Nancy, "Finite History,"in The States of 'Theory w: History, Art and Cultural D~SCOUTSC,
David Carroll (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 153-54, quoted in Smith, Derrida and
Autobiography, p. 62.
31.
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on HurrcrlS Theory of Signs, trans. David B.
Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 78, modified and quoted in Smith, Dmida
and Autobiography, p. 76.
Sartre, 'What Is Literature?"quoted in Hollier, ThcPoliticsof P w , p. 53.
32.
Derrida, Margins ofPhihophy, trans. Alan Bass (Brighton:Harvester Press, 1982), p. 289, quoted
33.
in Smith, Derrida and Autobwgraphy, p. 77.
61
Kawara On Kawara
Kawara names this originary heterogeneity every time he writes "I." The journalistic effort to remember thus collapses in an awareness of fundamental
depersonalization. As such the tautological circle for Kawara will never end in a
closed circuit of presence, but rather
opens onto constant errancy, inscribing a
singular absence.
Janwzry 12,1970
1
On January 12, 1970, Kawara enters
the first page of his I Met binder for that
om
year. In this series, begun May 10, 1968,
Kawara types a separate sheet per day
listing the names of certain people he
met, stamps the appropriate date, and
sheathes the paper in plastic. Embossed
on the cover of the binders is the title "I
Kawam. CWT fmI Met series. 1%&79.
Met," along with the name "On &waran
underneath. So far, all evidence seems to
guarantee an identity ("I" = On Kawara), insuring that the contract outlined by
Philippe Lejeune remains intact:
I*..">
a
Q
3
?
W
The autobiographical contract is the affirmation in the text of this
identity, referring in the last resort to the name of the author on the
cover. The forms of the autobiographical contract are quite varied, but
they all manifest an intention to "honor the signature." The reader can
quibble about how much resemblance there is between the protagonist
and the author, but not about whether there is "identity." Everyone
knows only too well how much each of us values his own name.%
For Lejeune, "autobiography is not a guessing game." Its business consists
entirely of certifying that the author equals the protagonist, thus linking identity
in every instance to the proper name on the cover. As such Lejeune concludes:
"The deep subject of autobiography is the proper name."s5 This name forms the
primary connection between the individual and his discourse, as evidenced by
the infant who first learns to speak of himself in the third person, using his own
name, before he realizes that he too can call himself "I." According to Benveniste,
the speech act reconciles the ambiguities of this first person pronoun: "'I' refers
Philippe Lejeune, 'The Autobiographical Contract,"in Fnnch Literary Thaory Today, ed. Tzvetan
34.
Todorov (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 202.
35.
Ibid., p. 209.
OCTOBER
each time it is used, to the individual who is speaking and who is identified by
the very fact of his speaking."" Autobiography similarly restores this immediacy
of identity because one can assume in good faith that "I" refers to the author. At
first glance, Kawara gives no reason to suspect a perversion of this formula, and
one reads the cover of "I Met" fully confident that On Kawara occupies the subject position.
Until one stumbles on another binder in the Museum of Modern Art library
collection, listed ambiguously in their "Dadabase" under the subject heading
"parodies, imitations, etc. . . ." This one looks different from the original, covered
in black faux leather instead of fabric, but the contents are photocopied pages of
the authentic series, dating from January 12 to June 16, 1970. The title, moreover,
reads exactly the same:
I MET
ON KAWARA
The real trouble comes when one looks up the "Main Author" of this facsimile to
find listed only Kawara's wife, Hiroko Hiraoka, accompanied by this entry note:
"H. Hiraoka is the only person recorded on each day." Complete confusion
ensues. Does "I" still refer to Kawara? If so, the nature of the work changes. When
protagonist (Kawara) and author (Hiraoka) no longer coincide, instead of autobiography we are faced with a biographical structure, one which characterizes
storytelling, no less. On the other hand, if "I" refers to Hiraoka, and we read the
cover as one sentence: "I met On Kawara" (which is how the Dadabase lists the
title), the document becomes undeniably fictional, for while Hiraoka's name is
recorded on each page, Kawara's never is. The author, Hiraoka, while apparently
meeting herself, will in fact never have met On Kawara as the cover states. Still
another possibility: that the Dadabase entry is inaccurate, leaving the copy a
simple copy, with no intended disturbance of authorship or facticity. Asked about
the work, Kynaston McShine dismissed it on these grounds, as a non-original
made neither by Kawara nor his wife." Nevertheless, the copy and the clerical
error have done their damage, and we find ourselves quibbling, playing precisely
the game Lejeune's contract proscribes.
According to Lejeune the autobiographer must value propriety. The project
is one of ultimate reconciliation, "honoring the signature" as the name that
belongs to a certain individual, in the same way that the pronoun "I" belongs to
the speaker during the speech act. In complete contrast, Kawara's autobiographical
36.
Ibid., p. 197.
37.
McShine suspected that the copy (not parody) was subrnitted to the library as an example of the
kind of work included in the exhibition Irlformntion (New York: Museum of Modern Art, July
2-Septenrber 20, 1970). The library stdF informed rrle that the Dadabase entry was based on defanlt
cataloging procedures. Subseqnent to inquiries for this article, the entry was changed to reflect
Kawara as the author of the binder, along with Hiraoka.
Kawara On Kawara
investigations open the disturbance of the proper name, the difficulty, exacerbated
in autism, of "naming an individuated self."38 Rather than certifying the exclusive
possession of the signature Kawara's work exposes the susceptibility of the proper
name to instability. As Derrida observes,
The proper name is a mark: something like confusion can occur at any
time because the proper name bears confusion within itself. . . . To the
extent to which it can immediately become common and drift off
course toward a system of relations where it functions as a common
name or mark, it can send the address off course.39
Kawara sets the mark adrift, linking the name not to the immediacy of identity
described by Benveniste's analysis of the personal pronoun, but to the fundamental
improprieties signaled by Jakobson's term: shifter. As Krauss notes, the complicated
"gymnastics of the empty pronominal sign" constitute a common ground of artistic
examination, the prototypical example being Duchamp's Tu'm, which announces
the shifter's collapse, the ego's self-splitting.40 As Duchamp's autobiographical
interest produces a doubled portrait (The Large Glass), Kawara's journalistic
activities similarly foreground the degree to which the self must be represented,
essentially divided in order to be constituted. Kawara records himself to himself
meeting, reading, waking, living, as though he were another. Almost as if robbing
the Other's gaze of its uncanny imperceptibility,41 Kawara will seem to take himself from behind. The case of Hiraoka's copy exposes the dangers inherent in such
an expropriating mechanism, where doubling causes ownership of the name to
become as slippery as laying claim to the indexical marker "I." And when On
Kawara sends a telegram to Sol LeWitt on February 11, 1970, proclaiming "I AM
STILL ALIVE," his work is once again submitted to a kind of disidentification, or
undone coherence in the space of LeWitt's seventy-four unauthorized permutations,
one of which reads: "Am I Still On Kawara?"@L
May 10, 1968
On May 10, 1968, Kawara sends Kaspar Konig a postcard, on the back of
which he stamps "I GOT UP AT." As with the question of dates, Kawara's straight-
.
Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," p. 200.
39.
Derrida, Th~b.'arof the OLtwr, p. 107-8, quoted in Snrith, IIPrri& and A?~tobiogmphy,p. 37.
40.
Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part I," p. 197.
41.
Hollier renrarh that in Sartre's analysis of the Other's gale in Being and Nothingness, it is precisely
because the ga/e is nonlocalizable, inrperreivable to the subject, that it so effectively frustrates rnas~ ,119).
tery, produring the subject as a mere perreivable object (Hollier, ThePolitirs o f P r o . ~p.
42.
The telegranr-referred
to as "Confirnration" by Lucy Lippard (Six year^: The Demat~rialization
of the Art ObjrrtJrom 1966 to 1972 [Studio Vista: London, 19731)-was sent by Kawara as part of a series
of work5 for the July/Auglst 1970 issue of Studio lnt~rnational(vol. 180, no. 924). Each participating
artist was told to send "instnrctions" or situations to another artist who would then produce a submission
OCTOBER
forward designation of addressee in this case will not stop us from asking the most
obvious question: for whom is this postcard intended? The postmark assures
delivery to the customary recipient, who nonetheless cannot be the final address.
If within autobiography, as Derrida notes, "the author is the narration's first, if
not its only addressee and destination," then Kawara's missives must somehow
return to sender. That Kawara facilitates the postcards' eventual re-collection and
exhibition under his name suggests this.43 His possessiveness in certain situations
proves it. In 1994, when the Guggenheim and Yokohama museums show Japanese
Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, Kawara declines participation. His name,
while mostly stricken from the U.S. version of the catalog,44 nonetheless remains
on the cover of the Japanese edition, which reproduces a collection of twentyeight I Got Up postcards sent to John Perrault in January, 1971.45 Once more
Kawara seems to have lost control. A liability, however, to which he lays himself
bare, in the manner described by Derrida:
The master addresses to himself the text or the corpus of this simulated
engagement via the detour of an institutional telecommunication. He
writes himselJ;sends himself [s'envoie]:but if the length of the detour can
no longer be mastered, and rather than its length its structure, then the
return to (one)self is never certain, and without return to sender the
engagement is forgotten to the very extent that it becomes undeniable,
unshakable.4"
If autobiography is an effort to recall and remember oneself, Kawara chooses the
medium most likely to upset that trajectory. More than any other form, the postcard
(cheapest, most public means of private communication) is subject to what
Derrida terms "postal relay," defined as "the very thing that makes it possible for a
letter not to arrive at its destination, and that makes this possibility-of-never-arriving
divide the structure of the letter from the outset."47 Kawara, obviously aware of
either based on or rejecting that premise. Lawrence Weiner's instruction to Kawara was: "Dear On
Kawara, I rnust apologize, but the only situation I can bring myself to impose upon you would be nry
hopes for your having a good day. Fond Regards, Lawrence Weiner." Kawara responded with a
telegranr sent to LeWitt who subsequently executed seventy-four permutations of Kawara's statenrent.
4
Ren6 Block describes the arduous process involved in acquiring such work5 for exhibition in On
Kawara, 1976-1986 (Berlin: Daadgalerie, 1987), pp. 7-8.
44.
Aruano Taro's chapter in the catalog gives an account of Kawara's refusal, explaining his actions
as a for111 of institutional critique, combating the conservatism ofJapanese museums and their failure
to prornoteJapanese contemporary art. See Japanese Art A p r 1945: Srream Against the Sky, ed. Alexandra
Munroe (NewYork: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), p. 70.
45.
Spngo Nihon no z e n 4 bijitsu, ,/apan~.xeArt A j i ~ r1945: Scream Against the Sky (Yokohanra: Yumiuri
Shibonsha and Yokoharna Museurrl of Art, 1994).
46.
Derrida writes about t h e pleasure principle's subrrlission to its lieutenant-the
reality
principle-in "Notices," in Ttw Postmrd, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
pp. 282-83.
47.
Ibid., p. 324
Kawam On Kawara
65
Kawara. ZnrtaUation view of1 Got Up
Series. 1968-79.Stockholm, 1980.
that risk, quixotically tries to maintain this personal, long-distance relationship
and direct the work's final destination.48 This vigilance is confirmed by Kawara's
need to keep exact correspondence records, underscored by the mysterious memorandum written in red crayon, attached to a page (March 25, 1970) from I Met
(MoMA copy version). The note reads: "On 9/14/70 On Kawara removed this
loose page for 'safe-keeping' (?)" Although the information may be fictional, one
48.
Lawrence Weiner, by contrast, accepts completely the work's potential for errancy, as evidenced
by his statement that the work cannot be incorrectly executed (see Benjamin Buchloh's interview with
Lawrence Weiner in Alexander Alberro, Alice Zimmerman, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David
Batchelor, Lavnnce W e i m [London: Phaidon Press, 19981).
66
OCTOBER
can imagine Kawara stashing the sheet away, scandalized by the prospect of its
falling into the wrong hands. Nevertheless, left in the binder without reinforcements, the page appears dangly as ever, exposing the work once more to the
possibility-of-never-arriving,despite Kawara's surveillance attempts.
On September 17, 1979, in Stockholm, someone steals On Kawara's case of
special stamps, the ones he uses to write the postcards.4Uubsequently Kawara
stops the series I Gut Up, I Went, I Met. If Kawara takes chances, they should be his
own, not dictated by an anonymous threat. Absences/presences must be selfimposed, manipulated like the spool of thread in a child's game. Such resolve,
however, can still be analyzed in terms of compulsion rather than intention: "The
component drives are destined to insure that the organism dies of its own death, that
it follows its own, proper path toward death. That it arrives by its own step at
death (eigenen Todesweg)."50 The implications of what Derrida calls "autothanatography" are manifested by Kawara, who, in representing himself, is driven to
couple that presentation with an absence of his own design.
December 6, 8, and 11, 1969
On December 6, 8, and 11, 1969, for his submission to a Paris exhibition
organized by Michel Claura, O n Kawara sends the following telegrams:
I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE, DON'T WORRY
I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE, WORRY
I AM GOING TO SLEEP, FORGET IT
These announcements begin the series, I A m Still Alive, a phrase Teresa O'Connor
translates as a message of immanent death, signaled by the telegraphic medium
itself.51 O'Connor also observes that coupled with its cold formality, the telegram
has a low-tech quality, a susceptibility to typos, to aging paper and delivery errors.
If the notice makes a connection between sender and receiver, the link is ultramediated. Should sender and receiver be coupled on the autothanatographic
route, then flawed telegraphic movement, no less than postcard correspondence,
can indeed be risky business.
Often O n Kawara sends these telegrams as a response to inquiries from the
art world. His urgent proclamation thus takes on the quality of an automatic
response, a mechanical reminder of death not yet taking place, that should somehow
49.
50.
51.
Parts,
See Schampers, "A MentalJourney in Tirne," p. 'LOO.
See Derrida's analysis of Freud's death drive in The Postcard, pp. 355-58.
Teresa O'Connor, "Notes: O n Kawara's I Am Still Alive" (1991), as reprinted in Whole and
pp. 475-77.
NNNN
ZCZC P S V O 9 8
F R P A HL UVNY 0 1 4
r n KC NEWORK NY 14 25 2 2 0 ~EDT V I A YUI
YVON LAUBERT 15 RUE DE LECHAUDE
PARIS6
AM S T I L L ALOVE
N KAVARA
Kntunm. I Am Still Alive
S~ripg.1 969-.
OCTOBER
68
Kawam. I Am Still Alive
Series. 1969-.
serve deceptively to rob death of its cruelty. This repressive mechanism is
described in Sartre's own autobiography:
I had killed myself in advance because only the deceased enjoy
immortality. Nizan and Maheu knew that they would be savagely
attacked, that they would be yanked from the world alive, full of blood.
Whereas I, I lied to myself: in order to deprive death of its barbarity, I
had made it my goal and had made my l i e the only known means of
dying.52
In the first two telegrams, Kawara gives cause for alarm precisely because he has
not killed himself in advance. The attempt to drive himself to his proper death
proves in some way abortive, a failure remarked every time Kawara sends the
notice, "I AM STILL ALIVE." An alarming reassurance, the "still" here signifies
both a declaration of will and a fateful resignation.
52.
Jean-Paul Sanre, The Words (New York: Vintage Books, 1964). pp. 197-98.
Kawara On Kawara
January 24, 1971
On January 24, 1971, returning to Tokyo, On Kawara subtitles that day's
painting in Esperanto. Although Kawara records every other journal entry and
date painting in the language of its country of origin, when he arrives home
Kawara will not paint/write in Japanese. This marks the beginning of a refusal to
work in his native language or to be categorized as a Japanese artist. Amano Taro
explains this resistance as a plea for post-national consciousness.-53Without denying
that motive, could it be possible to inflect Kawara's policy? To consider his appropriation of other languages as symptomatic of a realization, described by Derrida:
Because the master does not possess exclusively and naturally, because,
whatever he calls his language, because whatever he wants or does, he
cannot maintain any relations of property or identity that are natural,
national, congenital, or ontological, with it, because he can give s u b
stance to and articulate [dire] this appropriation only in the course of
an unnatural process of politco-phantasmatic constructions, because
language is not his natural possession, he can, thanks to that very fact,
pretend historically, through the rape of a cultural usurpation, which
means always essentially colonial, to appropriate it in order to impose
it as "his own."54
Whereas Sartre condemns the traveling author who dares to write as a foreigner,55
Kawara allows only the possibility of working in multiple acquired languages, literally generating an "appropriative madness," a kind of jealousy without
ownership that, according to Derrida, marks all language acquisition.56 Painting
date paintings in eighty-nine cities, compulsively sending telegrams and postcards,
Kawara's exercises resemble a foiled colonization attempt that leaves the artist
perpetually restless. Exacerbating this deracination, Kawara's self-imposed alienation from Japan/Japanese reveals further that "the language called maternal is
never purely natural, nor proper, nor inhabitable."57 Again, we are reminded of
those inhospitable bathrooms, those monstrous wives and mothers of his early
work. Similarly, Derrida reveals the threat of a language gone mad precisely in
terms of the deranged mother:
The mother can become the madwoman of the home, the lunatic of
the cell, of the place of substitution where one's home [ b chez-soil is
53.
Taro in Japanere Art After 1945, p. 73.
54.
Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or thp Pmstheris of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 23.
55.
Sartre's "xenophobic" injunctions against those who write from a foreign
Hollier disc~~sses
perspective (Thp Politics of Prose, p. 14). Ironically, Sartre will himself write from a position of ambiguity,
about a social class to which he does not belong.
56.
See Derrida, Monolingualism of the Othpr, p. 24.
57.
Ibid., p. 58. Thanks to Juan Lede~rnafor this reference.
1-
Kawara. 23 Jul. 1982 (with newspapdr). 1982.
Kawara. Butcher's Wife. I952
OCTOBER
lodged, the cell or the place, the locality or location of one's home
[le cha-soil. . . .When a mother loses her reason and common sense, the
experience of it is as frightening as when a king becomes mad. In both
cases, what becomes mad is something like the law or the origin of
meaning (the father, the king, the queen, the mother).58
Kawara agrees to be exhibited as 'Japanese" only if represented by those unheimlich
images that expose an uninhabitable origin.59 Seen in this context, Kawara's refusal
to allow the later work to be placed, reconciled to his homeland, counters Lippard's
assessment of his "general direction": "The fascination of Kawara's obsessive and
precise notations of his place in the world (time and location) imply a kind of selfreassurance that the artist does, in fact, exist."@)On the contrary, Kawara's sense of
location, though jealously proprietary, is far from reassuring, never able to lay claim
to "his place in the world." For Kawara, ownershipof place, language, name,
work-is always contested, secured only by something as unbinding as a contract.
October 9, 1969
On October 9, 1969, On Kawara records the phrase "Conceptual Art" in his
I Readjournal for that year, possibly in reference to Joseph Kosuth's manifesto Art
After Philosophy." According to the I Met series, Kawara often met Kosuth and
Christine Kozlov on a friendly basis, as indicated by the date paintings' subtitles
(they saw movies together: 11/18/67, played Monopoly and ate spaghetti:
1/1/1968). In his article, Kosuth names Kawara as a pioneer practitioner of
Conceptual art, prefiguring even Kosuth's own conceptual breakthrough:
Purely conceptual art is first seen concurrently in the work of Terry
Atkinson and Michael Baldwin in Coventry, England; and with my own
work done in New York City, all generally around 1966. On Kawara, a
Japanese artist who has been continuously traveling all around the
world since 1959, has been doing a highly conceptualized kind of art
since 1964.62
58.
Ibid., p. 88.
According to Chieko Ilirano, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Kawara
59.
agreed to participate in Japanese Art After 1945 only if the curators showed the early work such as
Bathroom Series, actrlally painted in Tokyo, rather than the later "Conceptual" works, executed in a
variety of locations. This argument's logic breaks down, as Kawara refuses inclusion even of work done
in Japan, such as the I Got Up postcards (published in the catalog) which were indeed sent frorn Tokyo.
Lippard, Six Ears: The Ilematerialization ofthe Art Object, pp. 49-50.
60.
61.
"Art Af'ter Philosophy" was first pr~blishedin Studio Int~rnational178, no. 915 (October 1969),
pp. 134-37; no. 916 (November 1969), pp. 160-61; no. 917 (December 1969), pp. 212-13.
Subsequent references from the article are cited from Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1991).
62.
Ibid., p. 27.
Kawara On Kawara
Art After Philosophy specifies "purely conceptual art" as: an analytic proposition
containing n o information on any matter of fact, a tautology valuable only in
what it contributes to art's definition, a statement of the artist's intention, a
language form freed from morphological constrictions. Several years later
(1977), Kawara will try to reclaim his project, disavowing these designations
through Lucy Lippard's introduction for the Otis catalog. This almost-interview,
authenticated by the final statement, "All quotations are from the artist in
telephone conversation with the author,"ss discredits the label "Conceptual" on
every count. It reinscribes Kawara's work within the kind of metaphysical language
renounced in Art After Philosophy.64 It affirms Kawara's primary interest in painting
before language, upsetting the apology Kosuth offers for his friend's benighted
obsession.65 It makes clear that Kawara's activities are not initiated as propositions of any sort, particularly not as possible definitions of art: "When he makes
something he does not see it as art, though he is aware that later it may become
art."" Again, Kawara accedes to the fact that his work is no product of singular
intention, paradoxically claiming that he has no claim on it. As such he rejects
Kosuth's essentialized reading of the Duchampian readymade "as an act of willful
artistic declaration," an interpretation problematized by Benjamin Buchloh in
his "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the
Critique of Institutions." Kawara's Duchamp reception indeed hinges on a complex
understanding of the work of art circumscribed by an ill-secured convention that
produces any sense of ownership, intention, mastery as illusion. Hubert Damisch
writes, "That's the opinion of the Dadaists and first and foremost of Marcel
Duchamp, in whose view art ultimately has no other reality or necessity than what
culture confers on it, nor any effects but conventional if not illusory ones, all of
which are b o r n from a type of collective and deliberate hallucination."67
Damisch goes on to describe Dubuffet as the "savage" artist who tries to escape
these socialized forms in order to rediscover truth and necessity. In contrast,
Kawara's non-art activity asserts no independence from what Buchloh describes
as "an aesthetic of linguistic conventions and legalistic arrangements," bound by
the dystopian self-restriction characteristic of Conceptual art.68 But while
Kawara emphasizes the juridical versus aesthetic or psychobiographic determi-
63.
Lippard, "Justin Time," p. 362.
64.
Kawara, quoted ibid., p. 361: "I die once so I have only one life. Literally speaking, continuity
means nothing and discontinuity means existence. The Today series started and has not ended, so one
could describe it as existing and not existing work."
65.
Kosuth, Art After Philosnphy, p. 28: "His continr~eduse of 'painting' as a medir~rnis, I think, a
pun on the morphological characteristics of traditional art, rather than an interest in painting 'proper."'
66.
Lippard, 'Just in Time," p. 359.
Hubert Damisch, "Robinsonnades 11: The Rral Robinson," trans. Rosalind Krauss, October 85
67.
(Summer 1998),p. 37.
Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962-1969," p. 119.
68.
OCTOBER
nants of his practice,69 like Derrida he systematically unravels these conventions,
starting with the "autobiographical contract." Revealing the extent to which one
can separate from t h e proper name, Kawara's investigations supplement
Derrida's analysis of copyright, a structure that simultaneously checks and
explodes the proper name's schismatic tendency.
Undeniably, a degree of autobiographic refusal allies Kawara's project to the
quintessentially serial one outlined by Sol LeWitt:
The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer but to give
him information. Whether the viewer understands this information is
incidental to the artist; he cannot foresee the understanding of all his
viewers. He would follow his predetermined premise to its conclusion
avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered
forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not
attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions
merely as a clerk cataloging the results of his premise.70
Kawara's subtitles, lapsing into clerical notations of the date painting's corresponding day of the week, eventually read more like a calendar than a journal. Kawara
describes this self-censoring to Lippard in terms of a kind of mastery: "When he
began the Today Series he wanted to make paintings for ten or twenty years and
used the changing notes as subtitles in the journals to make such a task easier,
finding later that he could continue without them."" As if he had cured himself of
some unhealthy urge, Kawara's recourse to tautology will only provide a semblance
of control. The reflexive form of autobiography still underscores the seemingly
benign redundancy:
Feb. 18, 1966 "Friday."
To claim Kawara's project as a negation of authorship, an "elimination of
subjectivity," would be to ignore the autothanatographic impulses that drive his
production. The resulting isolation of his work reminds us once again of The Space
of Literature. Blanchot writes that although the author's goal is work, defined as the
intimacy between writer and reader created in the act of reading, the author will
never truly grasp this end, being left always with the solitary substitute of the book:
And what makes the book the substitute for the work suffices to make it
a thing which, like the work, doesn't stem from the truth of the world,
69.
Smith writes: "Derrida's initiative is to have discoverrd the more potent determinant of literary
practice to br judirial as opposed to aesthetic or psychobiographic-thr vrry thing which literature, as
sublime freedom of speech, as the right of latitude from the veridical, has fancied itself for a long time
to have been founded in cont~adistinctionto" (UeTTida and Autobiography, p. 70).
70.
Sol LeWitt, "Serial Project #I, 1966," Asp~n5/6 (Fall/Winter 1967).
7 1.
Lippard, "Justin Time," n.p.
75
Kawara On Kawara
but is almost vain, inasmuch as it has neither the reality of the work
nor the seriousness of genuine tasks undertaken in the wor1d.m
Kawara undermines both the reality of the work (as transparent communication)
and the seriousness of genuine tasks (as truthful necessities) by appropriating these
in a project that, failing to defend against art, submits to frustrated vanity. And
while Kawara's self-reflexivity mirrors the tautological, a-thetic structure described
by Derrida,73 it also has everything to do with a Lacanian picture that diagrams the
Imaginary relation in terms of an endless expropriation, whereby parts, inventories
of endless substitutions,74 fantastically reconstitute the figure whole.
Menu, attached to a page fnrm
Kawara. I Met Series. 1970.
Blanchot, Thc Space ofLii%mtun, p. 23.
In "Notices," Derrida analyzes Bey& the Pleasun Principle as an a-thetic text, a limping devil that
in fact gets nowhere, arriving at no final judgment (ThePosfcard,pp. 261-69).
For a discussion of the Lacanian schema, and the mechanism of Imaginary self-constitution via
74.
the ego's identificationwith its objects of desire, see Rosalind Krauss, Thc Optical U n u m s h (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), pp. 75-76.
72.
73.