On Kawara

On Kawara exists in time. His existence is destined, it seems (and perhaps he would hope), to be condensed into space solely as time. His traces are purely temporal. His accumulations are all with reference to the temporal absolute he supposes.

His work is fundamentally faithful and optimistic. He accepts and acknowledges chance, but does not force the subject. By working completely within an abstracted quotation of time, he would initially seem to disable any of the more fundamental human connections he might make -- certainly he seems to disavow the material focii that have characterized painting for centuries.

If we agree that the image of painters in prior centuries have required a sense of human form and context, Kawara distills another set of assumptions. He trusts not that the visual image of a human will be referentially valid in the future of his work, but that the context of absolute time and the potential for agency will exist. He seems to assert, moreover, that they will be continuous with the current incarnations of these constructions. He gives very little by way of context; these works are fragile.

But in some sense he does not: Pollock never required his audience to know what paint is, and Kawara never requires his audience to be able to place our temporal system relative to their own. If Pollock requires only the presence of visual perception (only the ability to decipher the wavelengths of light coincident at a point), Kawara requires only the ability to decipher his glyphs.

He performs time at many levels: the powerful positioning of himself as a temporal historian (as in One Million Years) is less pronounced in the short term than his personal narrative. As current humans, we approach his work with the knowledge that he is human, that he is existing at these times, and that he is carrying out a complex and continuous personal process. All of his work makes reference to his existence in society. We empathize with his postcards (__) and find traces of his physical presence in all his works.

These traces often contain more subtle nods to the temporality of the work, and his own mortality. He necessarily works within space, encodes within space, and interfaces with the physcal world through objects. His actions specify objects, and these objects are challenged by their aging. With his Nothing, Something, Everything, we glimpse only "Something". The title, his birth, and his mortality, point to the rest of the work. Something, that which we see, is fading, and fading fast. Cracks are appearing. We know it was constructed, by his mind and hand, and there is a sense of exhilaration in our perception of the vastness of the work.

Perhaps we can find that in the aggregate, his conceptual leaps are not so impersonal as they seem. We extend ourselves into his position, and get a powerful picture of what the self is.