Publications

On Kawara

Again and Against

For On Kawara, time is a medium through which his work attains the possibility of the infinite, a web that links thought, memory and history across generations, and in this exhibition, across oceans as well. This catalogue documents the exhibitions of On Kawara's Date paintings as they appeared in four sites on four continents. At each venue, the Date paintings, spanning the years 1966-1988, were juxtaposed with the works of twenty-four other artists, each created in the year marked in one of the Date paintings. The painted Dates, as either subjective expenditure or objective representation of time, play off the fluctuations of cultural and curatorial taste revealed by the other works on display. The presence of time and its forward progress is shown by Kawara to be paradoxically both an inescapable truth and a purely haphazard construct. This dilemma is expanded on in Faust's essay, which poetically maps the complex flow of thought set in motion by the Date paintings. In addition, the curators of each exhibition provide essays giving the background on their institutions and their conceptualizations of the exhibitions.

Published in conjunction with Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Nagoya, and Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney.