The first retrospective since On Kawara’s death in July 2014, On Kawara—Silence at the Guggenheim Museum presents fifty years of the artist’s work. At the core of the exhibition are the daily practices that constituted Kawara’s life and art: the conceptual rituals that produced the Today, I Got Up, I Met, I Went, and I Am Still Alive series. Each series represents a different way to catalog one’s life; each presents a different portrait of a man.

On Kawara. On Kawara—Silence, 2015; installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Photo: David Heald.

On Kawara is most closely associated with his date paintings, collectively known as Today. For each painting, Kawara chose one of five canvas sizes, ranging from intimate to monumental, and one of three background colors: red, blue, or gray. He then painted the date as white text over this uniform background, applying consistent rules of spacing, to scale. If the painting was not completed by the end of the day, he destroyed it. The resulting works embodied a process Kawara referred to as making love to the days, an intimate practice of calling the day’s name into being in the brief moment that it is alive.[1]

On Kawara. DEC. 29, 1977 (Thursday, New York), 1977, from Today series, 1966–2013; acrylic on canvas; 8 x 10 in; shown with artist-made cardboard storage box, 10-1/2 x 10-3/4 x 2 in. Photo courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

The paintings are displayed with their cardboard storage boxes, which Kawara lined with newspaper from the date of the painting. While the paintings look fresh, as if frozen in time, their storage boxes—worn, torn, yellowed, and stained—have begun to decay. In an essay in the exhibition catalog, Tom McCarthy calls the storage boxes coffins for the days.[2] While the creation of each date painting was intimately connected to a moment in time, each storage box entombed the date within a particular, often weighty, history.

On Kawara. MAY 20, 1981 (Wednesday, New York), 1981, from Today series, 1966–2013; acrylic on canvas; 8 x 10 in; shown with artist-made cardboard storage box, 10-1/2 x 10-3/4 x 2 in. Photo courtesy of David Zwirner, New York/London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

If the date paintings offer a portrait of Kawara as a man who lives in the present, I Got Up and I Am Still Alive portray Kawara as a man on the move. Between 1968 and 1979, Kawara sent postcards to friends, each stating the time he got up on that particular day. From 1970 to 2000, Kawara sent telegrams with the more sinister message, “I am still alive.” The postcards and telegrams themselves are throwaways, banal ephemera of a life on the road. The images on the front of the postcards and the texts on the cards and telegrams are not as important as the practice of creating the messages and sending them.

On Kawara. APR – 1 1969, from the I Got Up series, 1968–79; stamped ink on postcard; 6 x 9 in. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

A perpetual traveler, Kawara started each day with a bid for social connection. Scientists have recently demonstrated that the practice of structuring each day around five daily practices—including when one wakes up and first engages in social contact—can treat mood disturbances associated with disruptions to one’s circadian rhythm.[3] Decades earlier, Kawara seems to have discovered this practice on his own, as a way of preparing the ground for his rootless life.[4]

On Kawara. I Read, 1966–95; 18 clothbound loose-leaf binders with plastic sleeves and inserted printed matter; 11-1/2 x 11-3/4 x 3 in (29.2 x 29.8 x 7.6 cm), each. Collection of the Artist. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation.

Kawara’s series I Met, I Went, and I Read are three further exercises in self-documentation. I Met details the people Kawara saw each day; I Went shows Kawara’s quotidian paths through a city; I Read reproduces the daily newspaper stories Kawara consumed. These catalogs in turn reproduce On Kawara. They reveal his habits and interests, his partner’s constancy, his romantic transgressions.[5] They present a story that transcends his specific time and place, a poem that can be understood in any language.[6]

On Kawara. On Kawara—Silence, 2015; installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Photo: David Heald.

This thoughtful exhibition shows how a life revolves. On January 4, 1966, On Kawara made his first date painting, seated at a desk, hunched over a small canvas. Over the next forty-eight years, he returned to the same themes, again and again—a perpetual return beautifully manifested in the museum’s spiraling galleries.

If, as Claude Lévi-Strauss said, ritual is a medicine for the destruction of time, it is also a medicine for the rootlessness of a constant traveler.[7] Imagine belonging nowhere, arriving in a new hotel room every few days, crisscrossing the globe in a transnational existence. Would you, like On Kawara, seek structure in the pedestrian details of the everyday? Would you create artistic practices to help you stay in the present? For a visitor, this retrospective raises lingering questions: What is in the spaces between the records of the days? What more is left of a person?

On Kawara: Silence is on view at the Guggenheim Museum through May 3, 2015.

[1] On July 26, 1966, On Kawara made two date paintings. The first subtitle recants the day’s headlines; the second is subtitled “I make love to the days.” Ben Highmore, “‘I Make Love to the Days’: Accounting for On Kawara,” in On Kawara—Silence, ed. Jeffrey Weiss and Anne Wheeler (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2015), 207.

[2] Tom McCarthy, “Eighteen Semi-Connected Thoughts on Michel de Certeau, On Kawara, Fly Fishing and Various Other Things,” in On Kawara—Silence, 195.

[3] Ellen Frank, et al., “Two-Year Outcomes for Interpersonal and Social Rhythm Therapy in Individuals with Bipolar I Disorder,” JAMA Psychiatry, September 2005, http://archpsyc.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1108410#Abstract.

[4] In his catalog essay, the curator Jeffrey Weiss relates that the protagonist of a Katsusuke Miyauchi novel, seeking to lose his national identity and become stateless through constant travel, encounters a fictional On Kawara in the artist’s hotel room and is deeply impressed by him, coming to think of “Kawara” as the very model of a rootless soul. Jeffrey Weiss, “Bounded Infinity,” in On Kawara—Silence, 35–36.

[5] In the museum’s reading room, there is a limited edition of I Met—twelve volumes, representing twelve years. I flipped through the 1974 volume. One name stood out: Hiroko Hiraoka. It appeared nearly every day and was frequently the only name on days when Kawara saw no one else. It was the only name between Christmas and New Year’s Day and often the only name on the first or last few days in a new location. Without any additional information, and with more certitude than any government documentation or ritual jewelry could offer, On Kawara’s record names his life partner.

[6] I Met was Kawara’s response to a challenge from Kasper Koenig to “write a poem that can be understood anywhere.” On Kawara—Silence, 129.

[7] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966), quoted by Jeffrey Weiss, “Bounded Infinity,” in On Kawara—Silence, 25.