ON METHOD AND MADNESS
The most popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results. But what if you did the same thing over and over, with no expectation beyond the thing itself – the action of repetition? If that was deemed insanity, then On Kawara would certainly be judged a madman.
From 1966 until his death in 2014, Kawara did the same thing over and over. Hundreds of times each year, and sometimes more than once in a single day, Kawara painted the day’s date. Meticulous white text on a dark background: JUNE 8, 1966; NOV. 13, 1969; 28 DEC. 1972; JULY 16, 2000; 3 AOÛT 2006, and so on and so on and so on. Why would someone do such a thing, if not for reasons of insanity? Then again, why does anyone do anything, day after day? Why do we mark the passage of time at all, for that matter? Is Kawara’s decision to paint the date onto a carefully selected canvas really all that different from anyone’s decision to set an alarm in the morning, brush their teeth at night, watch the football, wash their clothes, or call their mum at the weekend? All these actions are deranged repetitions, which allow us to impose order on chaos; find a method in the madness of living.
Twenty-four of Kawara’s Date Paintings are currently on display at David Zwirner’s London gallery, while a companion exhibition displaying four rarely seen early works runs concurrently at David Zwirner in Paris. Yet, if you entered each space without glancing at the artist’s name near the entrance, it would be entirely understandable if you thought you were viewing two different artist’s works. In Paris, four wonky, misshapen canvases teem with unsettling patterns and abstract shapes. In one, titled Golden Home (1956), a colourful domestic interior with densely patterned walls, floors and furniture is riddled with maggots. In another, stiff robotic arms reach out from a tangle of crimson through bars, both defiant and desperate. How can the young artist responsible for these disturbing and kaleidoscopic works, and the artist carefully sketching out the days of his life in Sans-serif be one and the same?
On Kawara, JUNE 8, 1966, 1966, from "Today" series, 1966-2013 , "Hurricane Alma has mounted to 100-mile-an-hour peak winds and is moving toward Cuba.", acrylic on canvas, © One Million Years Foundation, courtesy of One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner
“How I got the idea for this work or how I decided to express this idea are not at issue here,” Kawara said of his robot incarceration piece, Absentees (1956). “Rather I will confine myself to describing the technical process by which I created this work, because that is all I am certain of”. Yet his crawling maggots, writhing worms and groping arms speak for him. Over and over, in these early works, Kawara also seems to be reaching out from between bars – groping for a way to express not only the madness of living, but the horror of it. “The symmetrical structure of the picture plane is too weak to express the absurdity and desperate anxiety of today's society, where we ourselves are split in the midst of our social mechanism and its tremendous energy of materials,” Kawara said in 1956, while in the midst of creating the paintings now on display in Paris. Having scorned symmetrical order in this way, his decision to embark on the Today series seems absurd in itself, so controlled are the Date Paintings. It is in these works on display in London though that the connection between Kawara’s esteem for “technical process” and his desire to express the “absurdity and desperate anxiety” of modern life comes into sharper focus. From chaos to order, Kawara’s impulse across these seemingly disparate series remains the same: to capture the confounding, desperate and absurd contemporary moment without the gloss of romanticism, or the comfort of certainty. Looking at Kawara’s paintings in David Zwirner’s Mayfair gallery, another popular definition of insanity comes to mind: “Insanity is the only sane reaction to an insane society.”
Ironically perhaps, it is the discrepancies in Kawara’s formula that hint at his method (the technical process in his madness). Little slivers of chaos peep through the precision of his Date Paintings: while most of the backgrounds are dark, occasionally a canvas pops with colour – JUNE 21, 1967, for instance, is set against hot orange – and sometimes the order of the dates, or the language of the months suddenly changes. These are the exceptions that prove Kawara’s rule: the language of the text, and the format of the date, is that of the place where it was made. Perpetually peripatetic, Kawara’s ‘studio’ was often a hotel room. As well as recording six decades of Kawara’s life then, the Date Paintings also track his travels over a hundred cities in more than thirty countries. In other words, these are works of both universality and specificity; the vastness of time and the particularity of space.
Other systems of rules and exceptions kaleidoscope out from this overarching methodology. Each one is subtitled with a journal entry of sorts and registered on a One Hundred Years Calendar. When Kawara finished a painting, he glued a small swatch of the paint he used onto a chart in the journal. Under each colour, he wrote a number corresponding to the painting's sequence in that year and a letter indicating its size. Each of the paintings conforms to one of eight standard sizes – except for the three paintings, roughly five by seven feet, executed on July 16, 20 and 21, 1969: three days when the world was gripped by the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. In places where roman type is not used as the first language, Kawara used Esperanto, meaning that when he created a work in his native Japan, the text was detached from its origin – a neat way to express Kawara’s own emotional distance from the country of his birth.
Installation view, On Kawara: Date Paintings, David Zwirner London, 21 November 2024—25 January, 2025. © One Million Years Foundation, courtesy of One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner
Perhaps the most interesting system Kawara constructed though concerns the paintings when they are not on display. Kawara made a custom cardboard box for every painting, inside which he also stored a newspaper cutting from the same time and place. Together, this clipping and Kawara’s diary entry provide the contextual backdrop that the Date Painting itself intentionally erases. Some subtitles reach out to grand geopolitical or climatic conditions. JUNE 8, 1966, for instance, is subtitled "Hurricane Alma has mounted to 100-mile-an-hour peak winds and is moving toward Cuba." NOV. 13, 1969: "Three American astronauts were ready tonight to embark tomorrow on man's second voyage to land on the moon, a trip aimed at a more thorough scientific investigation into the origin and nature of the earth's only natural satellite." Others are more mundane, and therefore more intimate. NOV. 6, 1971: “I got up at 9.29 A.M. and painted this.” But, remember, for every rule, there is an exception. And, in this case, the exception comes on 28 December 1972. After this, Kawara’s careful newspaper clipping and diary entry system stops. 28 December 1972 was the last date Kawara would write anything but the day of the week as a diary entry. So, what happened? What event disturbed Kawara’s carefully organised technical process? And, more importantly perhaps, what can this rupturing event tell us about the next four decades of the Today series?
In December 1972, Kawara was an artist in residence at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He made his first Date Painting there on the 28th, and stored it in its custom-made box with the front page of Sweden’s daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, covering the Vietnam War. In a folder of press cuttings, he also stored an article on the following page, headlined ‘Bomb Terror Hanoi’. Above it, he wrote in upper case ‘Jag vet inte’, which translates to ‘I don’t know’. This is the subtitle of 28 DEC. 1972; the last subtitle, and the overarching message of Kawara’s later work.
Kawara was 12 when America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. 27 years later, now living in New York City, Kawara watched as more American bombs fell on East Asia. Having spent half a decade tracking day after day, nonetheless, he is caught in a violent loop. In the face of this ‘Bomb Terror’, Kawara’s established technical process – “all I am certain of” – falters. Despite his intention to confront the contemporary without gloss, Kawara’s last subtitle suggests that the process itself had become a comfort. From December 1972 onwards, nothing is certain. Jag vet inte. I don’t know. From this point onwards, behind Kawara’s careful dates, it is possible to sense maggots teeming. In the face of horror, order fails. And yet, the Today series continues. In the face of horror, “absurdity and desperate anxiety,” perhaps doing the same thing, over and over, with no expectation that things will turn out differently is the only sane reaction.
Installation view, On Kawara: Date Paintings, David Zwirner London, 21 November 2024—25 January, 2025. © One Million Years Foundation, courtesy of One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard wrote, in a quote that has become almost as notorious as the definition of insanity at the top of this piece. In less often quoted lines, Dillard continues by likening a schedule to “a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time,” she writes. “A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order – willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern”. Looking at Kawara’s Date Paintings at David Zwirner, these are the images that surface from the dark canvases. A net, scaffolding. A haven and a wreck; a blurred and powerful pattern. Indeed, curator Jeffrey Weiss gestured at the Date Paintings’ net-like quality, when he suggested in 2015 that “the painting attempts to hold, or seize, a given day”. Yet, at the same time, each painting represents the inevitable failure of such an attempt. “On the other hand, of course,” Weiss continues, “the day itself is something that has already passed by the time the painting is experienced by us. Time can’t be stopped.” Days can’t be caught, they can only be “willed, faked, and so brought into being”. Jag vet inte. The only certainty is the passing of time, Kawara’s works pronounce. We can’t help but look for a method in the madness of living, but it will always be “a mock-up of reason”.
On Kawara’s current exhibitons:
Date Paintings November 21, 2024–January 25, 2025
24 Grafton Street, London
Early Works
November 23, 2024–January 25, 2025
108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris
Installation view, On Kawara: Date Paintings, David Zwirner London, 21 November 2024—25 January, 2025. © One Million Years Foundation, courtesy of One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner
On Kawara Untitled, 1956 Acrylic on canvas, © One Million Years Foundation, courtesy of One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner
Installation view, On Kawara: Early Works, David Zwirner, Paris, November 23, 2024—January 25, 2025. © One Million Years Foundation, courtesy of One Million Years Foundation and David Zwirner
Text by Eloise Hendy