February 7, 2025 • 62 mins
In this episode, Joana P. R. Neves and co-host Liberté Nuti look back on On Kawara's exhibition at David Zwirner Gallery London, Date Paintings (21 November 2024 to 25 January 2025 ).
To know more about Liberté Nuti:https://www.haerbnuti.com/
Follow her on Instagram: @libertenuti
For more information on the show:https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2024/on-kawara-london
For more information on On Kawara and One Million Years Foundation:https://www.onemillionyearsfoundation.org/
They explore the life and work of On Kawara, a significant figure in contemporary art known for his repetitive and conceptual Date Paintings (1966 - 2012).
How do you deal with an artist who did everything he could to reduce life to art, and thus preserve life's unique intangibility? How do you experience a series of works dedicated to the obsessive recording of time through craft?
"It was quite the experience"
"On Kawara is a concept, in himself"
"What else do you want?"
Music by Sarturn.
Support us on:https://exhibitionistaspodcast.com/ and go to the DONATE page.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:13):
As you know, Exhibition Nesters is 1 year old.
We're very excited with this second year and we're also
excited to welcome new Co hosts that will always bring a
contrasting position to mine, whether it's because like Emily,
they do not work in the contemporary art field or maybe
(00:34):
they have different roles withinit, which will be the case for
my hosts. Today.
We have an amazing episode. We were very inspired by the
absolutely incredible opportunity to see On Kawara's
date paintings in a very encompassing exhibition at
David's Verna Gallery in London.We do mention the foundation
(00:59):
that On Kawara founded during his lifetime, the 1,000,000
Years Foundation, and we will have the links if you want to
check it out. I also make a little mistake.
I mix the names of two very, very prominent American artists,
(01:21):
Robert Smithson and Robert Morris.
It was Robert Morris indeed, whocreated the artwork box with the
sound of its own making in 1961.So apologies for that.
And I think that's about it. Yes, we have a video version
(01:44):
now. So if you're more of a visual
person, the videos do have images.
But if you're an audio person, if you like the experience of
closing your eyes and imagining yourself at David's Vernas
gallery, do it. Audio is amazing.
So let's do this. Let's start this incredible
(02:05):
episode with my amazing cohost, Liberty Nuti.
Welcome to Exhibitionistas, the podcast where we visit
exhibitions so that you have to all so that you can experience
(02:27):
them vicariously through us. So today we have a very special
one. We are talking about the
exhibition at David's Werner Gallery in London of the date
paintings by On Kawara. It was quite the experience.
So the rule is very simple. My Co host and I visit the
(02:49):
exhibition separately and compare notes during the
recording. And today my Co host is none
other than Libertinuti, who you know from a previous episode
where she was our guest talking about art advisory.
She is indeed an art advisor specialized in modern art and a
(03:12):
tiny bit of contemporary art. But she has such an acute and
keen eye that it's going to be apleasure to talk about the
exhibition with her. Today I am Joanna PR Nevis,
contemporary art writer and curator and artistic director of
Drawing Now Paris So Liberty, thank you so much for being
(03:34):
here, for counterbalancing my more research focused experience
of contemporary art and bringingmaybe the experience and the
points of view of a more market driven job and experience in the
art world. But most of all, thank you so
much for being here and for being my Co host today.
(03:56):
So nice to be back, Joanna. We must confess to your audience
that we've made an exception to your podcast.
Oops. You are revealing the insides
and the backstage of the episodes you naughty Co host.
OK, go ahead and say it. We went together.
(04:18):
I didn't really understand the rule at the time that we went
back together and yet we look atit separately.
And when we went, I promised youI shall not share my views
during our exhibition and I saidno matter what.
And I think we did. We did.
We were very wise and very contained.
(04:39):
I'm I'm very proud of us, honestly.
But Liberty, how was your weekend culture?
I thought it was a really intense week.
First was the commemoration of the 80 years of the liberation
of the Auschwitz camp and which I watch on TV.
And I thought it was so emotional to hear the last
(05:01):
survivors who are now now in their 90s, so much hardship and
forgiveness at the same time. And really the message was from
all of them in the different ways was they want us to
remember. I watched the rise of the Nazi,
which is a three-part BBC documentaries and it really
(05:25):
shows how Germany went from a a democracy, the Vaima Republic to
a total terrorism system. And this is so interesting to
watch 100 years after it goes soquickly and it's just little
(05:45):
things which kind of brings thattype of of of regime and it
shows the. I wonder why you're speaking
about that. At this moment, nothing in the
world makes us think of the potentiality of a new form of
fascism, right? And populism, that's really and.
Populism. But what's interesting coming to
(06:05):
our subject is he also made me think of on Kahawa, who is a
child of the Second World War, is a Japanese person who
witnessed Hiroshima when he was an adolescent.
Yeah, it has a huge impact on him and it's specifically
moulded his choices as an artist.
(06:27):
Yeah. So As for myself, I've been
trying to read Liberty and it's,it's been really, really
difficult. I've been trying to reread
actually, which is something that I'm really enjoying doing
at the moment. I picked up a book I had read a
few months ago called Parade by Rachel Cusk, and I was really
(06:48):
interested in that book because all the characters, all the
central characters, I would say I are called G.
They're just a letter. She's very keen on modernist
takes on literature and nouveau homo.
And so she kind of produces these frameworks whereby she
develops the narrative and the what really made me pick up the
(07:10):
book was the fact that there's acharacter there, G maybe short
for genius, which is something that she obviously deconstructs,
and G is a painter who makes paintings upside down.
Oh, reminds me of someone. Who could that be?
And who has a very strange position about women?
As someone else that came to your mind, specifically
(07:34):
Basilitz, who said that women couldn't be painters.
So of course, critics spotted that, and that book had a sort
of echo in the contemporary art field.
Going back to On Koara Liberty, we kind of touched upon this a
little bit when you suggested doing an episode on him.
But don't you find that he's kind of a monolith?
(07:56):
And he's one of those few artists that I would never have
thought of investigating becauseit's just taken, I think, by us
spectators and even our professionals as an entity that
is completely merged with the work.
Don't you agree? Totally, I had the same feeling
(08:18):
actually. On Kawara is a concept is
himself. Even his name was a mystery when
we when I think about it. Was it his real name?
What is his first name on? And at the same time, I thought
I knew a lot about him because his work revolves around his
(08:40):
daily life and activities and you have a feeling of who he is.
Even if he's extremely elusive. At the end of of the day, you
can show us what you've discovered about him.
Artist. As I started reading, I realised
that he really was not keen on having his biography out there.
(09:02):
And he established the foundation during his lifetime
and the foundation has a website, it's called 1,000,000
Years Foundation. And when you click on his name
expecting to find the whole biography, you just have written
on the screen, a sort of very minimal and empty screen
(09:23):
biography of on Kowara 29,771 days.
And then there is a photo of hisstudio in black and white, which
is kind of midway between bureaucratic setting and an
artist studio with cupboards in the back with very high and thin
(09:47):
doors. That suggests an incredible
number of archives being kept behind them.
So someone who was very reluctant in being presented as
a life and much more keen to turn their life into art or art
(10:11):
into life, what would I do? Do I talk about his biography?
Do I talk about the work? So what I decided to do is
perhaps to start with one of hislast works and to honour this
ethos, let's say, of the artist and describe the work that he
(10:32):
started in 1993 called 1,000,000Years Past and Future.
What do you think, Libert? Did you think that's a good
idea? Yes, and I think you would have
liked. That on car, if you're
listening, this is for you. So in 197071 he started a folder
(10:52):
listing a million years from 1960 down.
Then in 1980 in another folder he listed a million years into
the future. So there's a gap between 71 and
1980, and in 1993 he joined those two works in the form of
(11:14):
readings. So two people read, 1 reads the
odd numbers, the other one readsthe other numbers.
The odd numbers are read by a male identifying person and the
other numbers are read by a female identifying person.
A non binary person can choose one of the two and these are
performative work so they read in front of an audience.
(11:38):
They take a lot of time obviously and they have been
performed all over the world. So this is just to give you an
idea of the type of materials that On Kawara was working with.
So notions as vast as time and space in some ways, and the
(11:58):
conventionalities that come attached to those two concepts.
So dates, counting lists, binders and paintings, because
obviously we're talking about anexhibition that is Paintings on
the Wall. So basically this is what we're
talking about when we're talkingabout the work of On Kowara.
(12:22):
With this project that you just described is ongoing, it's still
alive, it's not there but and it's it's going to carry on for
many years because that 1,000,000 year reading backwards
and forwards will take a long time to put together.
So on Kawara biography, he was born in 1932 in Karia, in a
(12:47):
small town in Japan, and he diedin New York in 2014.
The major episode of his life was obviously the Nagasaki and
Hiroshima bombings when he was 12 years old.
And it kind of marked a rupture in his personality.
He had been, up until then, a studious young little boy.
(13:12):
And from then onward, when he was in class and a teacher would
ask him something, he would say,I don't understand.
He was unyielding. And from that point onward, he
felt like he didn't believe anything.
So the system of belief cracked within himself.
If you compare to Yoko Ono, it'sa completely different way of
(13:35):
relating to the same horrendous episodes of Yoko Ono would
devise menus with her brother lying on the ground in the
countryside looking at the clouds and discovered the
empowering force of imagination.So very different relationships
with an event that you that would anyway have moulded your
(13:56):
personality and the way it did tells a lot about the
disposition of of the artist in question.
Then from what we understand, itreally closed down.
It kind of shut down. We I do not understand and not
wanted to move or engage in any ways.
(14:17):
So that kind of places him outside of the realm of the
disgust things because he don't doesn't understand them.
So he embraced a sort of nihilistic perspective on life.
In 1951, he moved to Tokyo. He met a number of artists in a
bookshop where, for someone who didn't understand, he read quite
(14:40):
voraciously. So he devoured Freud's writings,
Marx's writings, the existentialists, Sartre and
Camus in particular. So he was very well read.
And because he stayed in the bookshop reading, he met a
number of artists and became or started a practice as an artist.
He started painting in 1958. He moves to Mexico where he
(15:04):
spends three years. There his father was the
director of an engineering company, and so he was very
comfortably living there, going to art school, meeting all the
intelligentsia, and he also started exploring Mexico.
So I think that also was also the beginning of one of the
aspects of On Koara's biography,which is that he was a very keen
(15:27):
traveler. And I think he said to Casper
Kearney, if I'm not mistaken, that if he hadn't been an
artist, he would have been the travel agent.
There you go. Yeah.
Anyway, he then went to to Europe.
He lived between New York and Paris at a certain point.
(15:50):
A very important time before he settled in 1965 in New York, was
when he went to Spain, to Altamira, and he visited the
caves. And so that specific experience
was incredibly powerful because that experience of art that
remained in time. So that form of presence of arts
(16:12):
and of drawings and paintings and the absence of the rituals
around The Cave kind of also hadan impact on the way he would
devise his works. And so in 1965, when he finally
settles in New York, he meets all the Conceptualists,
obviously he meets the Minimalists.
(16:34):
So he comes into contact with anincredibly creative, forceful
group of people who rejected a number of things, placing the
ego or the subject or the the the personal experience at the
centre of the creative act. Symbolisms.
(16:58):
Rejecting metaphor, being literal, rejecting painting in a
lot of ways and embracing graphic expression, embracing
language, embracing even bureaucratic practices in some
ways, and also rejecting the Yeah.
(17:20):
Systematic and the series. The embracing the systematic,
the system and the series absolutely.
So on. Kowara found a like minded group
of people and in 1966 he starts the works that we saw in the
(17:41):
exhibition at David's Verner in London called The Date.
Paintings that went on he went on to make until 2012, so until
two years before his passing. So, Liberty, you are going to
talk about the Dave paintings inthe second part?
So we'll, we'll, we'll visit theexhibition together when he goes
(18:04):
to New York and really get into that group.
He's not, he's 33 years old and he's not a baby anymore.
He's, he's already done quite a lot and that's really when he's
blossoming. And I thought the age is quite
important there too. But he has a long way to go.
And also it's, it's, it's important to say that he did
(18:24):
paint even when he was in Japan,he had these paintings that were
very graphic, almost comics inspired about dire situations,
lots of bodies in, in, in difficult and painful situations
or isolated after the date paintings which bear the dates
(18:44):
of the day when he makes them. So he has 24 hours to produce a
painting that states the date when it was made.
So of course this resonates a lot with works at the time.
Robert Smithson's box with the sound of its own making comes to
(19:05):
mind, obviously, and so many other works which are self
referential. But there's an existentialist
take to Ankawara, because this is also a performative act.
He has to make the painting on that day.
Obviously, this is a very rigid structure, so there aren't
paintings for each day. If you're wondering, dear
(19:27):
listener, there's a huge gaps. But apparently he was able in
the 70s to go three months, three whole months with making a
painting each day. So there are several dimensions
for these paintings, several letterings, several fonts and
colours. But Liberty, you will explain
all of this in the second part of the episode and after the
(19:51):
break. He decides to do a painting a
day, but it is not. Some days he doesn't do one
because he can't. Some days they are destroyed
because it's he's not quick enough.
Then he takes. Some breaks, there is some
intermittence. It's continuity, but
(20:11):
intermittence, again, you have always this double force in in
the work of Onkarawa. And some days he even does 2A
day. The same dates he repeats the
same date. Yeah.
Really. I didn't know that.
You will remember when we go to the exhibition together.
(20:35):
I can't wait. So let's just go over the series
of works he made. So on Kawara was paradoxically a
very prolific artist, but had just a a small number of series
of works and a lot of them were based on postcards.
So he started in 1968, two yearsafter he started the date
(20:57):
paintings. The series I got up.
So this series of works states simply the sentence I got up and
the time when he got up, so the hour and the minutes.
He started this series in Mexicoknowing that Kaspar Kony, his
friend, loves to receive postcards, and so he sent 2
(21:23):
postcards a day for 12 years. And so again, still no
handwriting, only stamps. And The funny thing about this
series is that Kasper Koenig says in an interview that this
series stopped an anecdotally, because he he was carrying, I
(21:44):
think in Finland, the briefcase where he kept his stamps for the
series. And the briefcase was stolen.
And so that's why. And that's how.
The must have a boots count. The most absorbed those cars and
that's how the series stopped. So it's very interesting because
(22:04):
there's a, so there's a postcard, there's also an image
in the back. And in some ways the highly
personal meets the blandest and most reduced form of expression
of time and place. Because of course there's
images, but those images are fortourists.
So they are the most neutral, the most conventional images you
can have of a landscape or of a place.
(22:26):
So this series is also a bit trickier than the date
paintings, but because it is more personal, you can track on
Koara's habits. And it's interesting that it's
choose the medium of postcard because today who buys a
postcard and who sends a postcard?
It's it's, we still do it, but it's a little bit of the time.
(22:49):
And Speaking of that, we even find telegrams in his work as
well. The time.
Because the I'm still alive series started with three
telegrams sent in 1969. So I'm still alive is the same
idea. Then the I got up postcards so
he would send postcards saying I'm still alive and so he sent 3
(23:13):
telegrams, telegrams saying I amnot going to commit suicide,
don't worry. So that was the first one.
The second one it is. I am not going to commit suicide
worry. OK.
And the third one is I am going to sleep.
(23:35):
Forget it. The third one kind of is the
hinge upon which he then finds the final form of this series,
which is saying I'm still alive.The same thing with the day
paintings. It destroyed most of them, but
they were saying something. Something.
The word something. Something just one word and
(23:58):
looking like the date painting monochrome background.
Not many are left because they destroy most of them I think.
So there's this basis of a form of dread, a form of existential
dread that very quickly is overturned by the bureaucratic
(24:19):
keeping of time and a a sort of sense of humor as well.
So the I'm still alive I find absolutely hilarious because as
soon. Receives it to postcard.
Can you imagine? You'd be like, great.
But is he? I think that's the question you
ask yourself, because then you think of the possibility of the
(24:40):
opposite being also true after the postcard was made, no?
Doesn't your mind go there? Yeah, absolutely.
And it's it's very positive because I'm not going to commit
suicide. It's a very passive aggressive
either way phrase as I'm still alive is taking life with a
positive twist. And in a way there is a lot of
(25:05):
humour because what do you replyto that?
And it reassures you, even though you don't know if the
person is still alive when you receive it a week after.
I have a funny story about this series which is about a couple
of collectors. So they started by collecting
expressionistic German expressionist painting and then
(25:29):
slowly they turned towards conceptual art, minimalist art,
process art. And they loved on Koara and they
had one of the date paintings intheir living room and their
friends mocked them endlessly because of their collection and
couldn't understand why on earththey would collect postcards
(25:49):
based work, data based work. They they couldn't get it and
until one day they they were in a horrendous train accident.
And so the wife got away OK ish.But the husband was between life
(26:10):
and death for a while. And they're the funny and the
interesting story within this story is that the wife was
talking with one of their friends.
He was calling to ask about the husband and and when they were
chatting on the phone, the person said, you know what I was
(26:34):
thinking of the date paintings that you have in your living
room and that artist that you told me about.
And I never understood why you liked that work.
And now that we are in the situation of thinking of losing
the both of you, I finally understand the meaning.
Of the news of of Ankara, why isvery anchored in in the to, you
(26:58):
know, day-to-day quite mundane apostcard from this and there
just putting the date. It's quite funny.
But at the end of the day, what else?
I am still alive. This is the most important
thing. That's why we want to know about
our children, our loved 1. You are still alive.
We're OK. And that's a genius of Onkarawa.
(27:20):
And I think he got to the same conclusion at the end of the 60s
because that's the moment where he stopped talking about his art
and stopped agreeing to talk about his art most of the time.
And when he was questioned by a journalist, a student and art
critic about his work, he would send one of those postcards as a
(27:42):
response. Really.
Yes. I'm going to have to do that
too. So he started in 68 as well,
another series called I Went. So this is based on maps.
So he photocopied maps to the size of an A4 sheet of paper
that he that then kept in a binder.
(28:04):
And he just basically took a redfelt pen and he traced the
journey that he did by walking or any other form of
transportation in that specific place.
So always this relationship between time and place rather
than time and space. As I said before, probably
(28:26):
there's finally the other seriesI met from 1968 to 1979 where he
made. So he indexed to a day, a sheet
of paper to a day. And on that sheet of paper, he
would write the names of the people that he met on that day.
And the the genesis of this workis really funny because as a
(28:48):
Japanese immigrant, he very often didn't understand the
names of the people. But also as a traveler, as
someone who most of the times were, it was in countries where
he didn't speak the language as well or didn't speak it at all.
So he asked people to write downtheir names.
And so he had, he found himself with papers with names of on
them. And he decided to make this
(29:11):
series based on that sort of, again, conventional relationship
with the self and with humanity and with experience, which is to
know the name of the person you're talking to.
Basically. The work is bureaucratic.
It's mobile as well, because he can make the work anywhere in
(29:33):
the world, in his hotel room, for example.
Even the paintings they are, they travel really easily and as
you said, they have full materials.
The material is not what makes the preciousness of the work,
let's say, unless you recognize,like you just did, that time and
space and place and experience are the most precious things you
(29:53):
have. These paintings, the date
paintings, which he did everywhere, I don't think they
know exactly in how many countries, but they counted more
than 100 cities. And you can know by the language
he's using. Then he's clearly worked in in
(30:14):
very many different places to dothese paintings.
I think him and the Conceptualists really grasped, I
think, something of the times. So the in 1970 there was an
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called
Information, curated by Mcshine.And it's interesting because the
(30:38):
idea of information was in the exhibition related to
photography. There was this notion that
photography marked time and space.
It was indexical. And the whole exhibition was
about that. And we will talk about data
nowadays, right? There was this consciousness of
data. And because it was the first
(30:58):
computers, the artists were starting to look at technologies
as well and how those technologies in some ways
recorded the recorded existence and at the same time also
recorded a huge absence of what the, the sign or the symbol can
(31:21):
and cannot carry. So in I, you know, in the
exhibition, there's a, a piece by Douglas Hubler called
Location Piece just to kind of illustrate the fact that
Ankawara was certainly not the only artist thinking in terms of
place, location, time and space.So Douglas Hubler collected
newspaper photographs of local newspapers in several cities and
(31:44):
several places in the United States.
And the he chose the photos thatonly had local interests and
that reflected the space and thelife of that space of that
particular place. And in his words, his work,
quote, shifts the image away from object hood, making the
recipient the subject of the work, UN quote, which could also
(32:09):
be applied to On Kowara. But in some ways, there's also
the stripping of subject hood inon Kowara on Kowara's work.
I find there's also kind of thisnakedness of existence in in in
the work of on Kowara. And that comes this nakedness
(32:29):
you feel, I think that comes from his great humanity.
And as in all this project and series, there is attention and
an opposition with, like you say, information.
You know, that's why they did inthat exhibition.
They took many photographs because this is reality.
(32:50):
Photograph is what you see opposite to something you create
from your brain and cuttings of newspaper is the reality of the
day and Ankara use that in the way he he puts his painting in
boxes with the cuttings of the day and the recording.
(33:11):
And that's all very precise by information or that data, as you
would say now. But Ankara use a very painful,
painful thinkingly method, whichis very old fashioned.
(33:32):
He has his canvas, he will do the priming and then the first
layer and the second layers. And it's, it's very handmade.
And that creates a tension between, yes, the data, the
conceptual and the very human, the very artistic way.
Again and again you found that in all these series.
(33:53):
I cannot wait to go into the exhibition space and visit or
revisit the exhibition with you,Liberty.
So shall we go for a small breakand when we come back.
The exhibition. Yes, absolutely.
Let's do that. See you in a bit.
(34:25):
OK, so we're back after a short break and we are about to be
taken by the hand by Liberty into the exhibition.
Great, then let's push the door of the gallery and visit the
exhibition. The exhibition was at David's
(34:46):
We're Not Gallery in Mayfair. The gallery is beautiful.
It's in the spacious Georgian townhouse in the heart of
Mayfair. Just to give you some context.
The space is very elegant with high ceilings, beautiful windows
covered with white linens. It's restored to perfection and
(35:06):
I would say that it's one of themost successful contemporary
space in London. Personally my favorite because
he has this white cube, but in an old townhouse.
It's just it's a great mix and it's a perfect vessel for On
Karawa and it's wide, it's cleanand it's quiet.
(35:28):
Then what we are going to see inthe exhibition is some painting
by On Karawa. They are all coming and that's
important. They are all coming from the
foundation 1,000,000 years and they've never been seen on the
market and they are for sale. Which is quite incredible, isn't
(35:49):
it? How do you go about buying?
How do you go about pricing? These works as well.
I read an article stating that there's a specific date painting
that went up. The price shot up, probably
because two people with a personal relationship with that
date were fighting for it. But what's really interesting is
(36:10):
that in the anecdote I recountedearlier, one of the jokes that
the friends would make when theywould visit these collectors who
had the date painting in the living room was, oh, what is
this? Is this your birthday?
And they found it absolutely egregious.
They thought, why would it be mybirthday?
But then I learned that some other people will go to the
(36:32):
dates for a personal reason. So it is interesting how you
enter this kind of word, but we're jumping the gun here.
We'll still not in the exhibit. We're still signing the book at
the entrance. So Di Bertie, go for it.
I'm so curious to know how you feel in front of these
(36:53):
paintings. So I'm only is.
Well, first it's you walk in thein the main room, which is on
the ground floor and what you see there is a lineup of five
grey painting dated on front 1966 with the June, July and
(37:14):
then the, the, the, the day and these these five paintings that
66 is important because this is the year on camera was started
these day paintings. And it's exactly on the 4th of
January 1966 that he did his first one.
And then he will continue that idea or that series for the next
5 decades, as we said, until oneyear before is dead.
(37:40):
The last one recorded is on December the 3rd, 2012 and it's
#1933 in the series. We might be missing some.
You know, it's, it's not complete perfect science.
Then when you walk in, they justwant to show you, you know,
(38:01):
where it starts. And that's really the
cornerstone. And in that room, I don't know
you, but for me, when I walked in, the first thing I was
confronted is, yes, you see these squares paintings which
are monochrome with the date. And I was like, how does that
work? What's the system?
(38:22):
What does that mean? And I think I was really getting
into the nitty gritty of they don't have the same colors, they
don't have the same size. They are kind of the same, but
the writing is not really the same.
And and then my brain was getting into, I want to
understand what are the rules? What is he doing?
(38:43):
And that's kind of what happenedto me downstairs and working
with you on the podcast. I've got so many answers, which
I will try to explain how he sets a rule and how that works.
And for me, this is downstairs. How is it for you?
Well, it's really well curated, isn't it?
(39:03):
Because as you enter, if you face a painting right away, so
you face a date. And I felt a physical sensation.
I felt a sort of slight punch inthe stomach.
There's something about them, yeah.
(39:24):
Then you had the emotion. I did, yeah.
I don't know, Maybe I have a specific relationship with time
because in my kitchen I have a small set of cubes and
rectangles. Calendar.
Yeah, it's a calendar, wood calendar that you have to
manipulate yourself. So every morning I change one or
(39:45):
two cubes or the rectangle belowthat states the the month.
It doesn't have the year. And I love doing that.
It's the my, it's the first thing I do in the morning.
I go to the kitchen, have my breakfast, change the date and I
feel like I'm starting the day. I'm I'm I'm, I'm unlocking
(40:08):
another level of the video game,if if you will, and I love doing
that. It's your ritual.
It's my ritual and when I leave on holiday, no one else does it
in the house. So when I come back to the
house, yeah, I'm frozen in time.So I don't know.
And I that's it. You'll have this wooden thing
because it's so obsolete in a way, you know, we all have
(40:30):
phone, they update immediately, we have time everywhere.
But who? Who has a wooden calendar?
And who makes paintings with dates when you have at the time
you started having electronic devices that would tell you the
time and you can even call, I don't know if you remember that
you could call a line that wouldtell you the exact time of the
(40:53):
day. Do you remember?
That I do about the, the making of the paintings and how the
whole project works. Please bear with me.
It's a little bit technical, butnot so much.
But it's very interesting, I think when you know, because
that gives you a very different reading.
(41:15):
Then when you walk in, you see all these painting which are the
same, but not quite the same because of course there is a
date, but also they vary a little bit with colors, with
everything. And then that gives a, it's not
really a constant that, that, that, that that gives some
variety to to the work. Then the way he does it, then a
(41:37):
date painting is a monochromaticpainting on canvas.
He's using 3 colours only, grey,red and blue.
And then when he's done the background, the monochromatic
background, he will inscribe thedate with some cherry font of
(41:59):
the day the painting was made and the date is done with a
ruler. He kind of calibrates it that it
sits in the middle. And then he will paint it in
with white paint. If the painting is not finished
by the end of the day, it will be destroyed.
There will be no painting with the date of that day.
(42:21):
With the colours he make them himself.
He will mix them. Then the the the most common
colour is the grey which is veryvery dark Gray.
It nearly on photos he can look black.
It looks black in photos, yes. And it was quite interesting
when I met one of your friend who was an artist we discussed,
I said, oh, what did you see? And you say, oh, I love the
(42:44):
colours. It was even 1 green.
It was like green. And then when we went back, it's
the screen. The the third one on this 1966
is kind of a very dark khaki tree green, but actually it's
Gray. And then I think it's just the
way mixed the the paint and thenmaybe the light of the gallery
and she really saw it as green, but it is not green.
(43:06):
But that gives you an idea of. There's a hue of green because
the thing that we discussed withthe person who was there at the
gallery at the time is that whenyou have 3, three colors for
your paintings, they will change.
If you change brands, For example, if one of the brands
discontinues the color you use, it's going to affect and it's
(43:26):
going to you're going to have slight variations of the colors.
Yeah, and he's making, he's mixing the color every day.
And don't forget it is travelling.
And in a way it's, it's a way ofmeditation, you know, because it
will take a few hours to complete because in between if
you do layers, you do a two layers of ground, then you do
(43:47):
the colors you need the paint todry in between.
And that's then there is a real craftsmanship.
And if you look at the painting very carefully, there is some
little bubbles, there is some little corrections.
They look very clean. There is a little accident which
makes which makes them very human.
(44:08):
The canvases they come in several sizes.
There are 8 possible sizes you can choose from on the day they
go from the small one which is 8to 10 inches or the very large
one which will be 61 by 89 inches in the room.
The 1966 They are medium sized canvases.
(44:31):
They are 26 by 24 inches, which is about 60 sixty 70cm by 90
centimeters to give you an idea and they're always 5cm deep,
which is 2 inch, which gives especially on the small 1.
I don't know if you've noticed it gives an idea more of a more
(44:51):
of a box than of a painting. It's an object because I and I
didn't understand why when I sawthe exhibition when I went back
and I noticed the 5 centimeters.That is why it's it's just more
physical than the usual canvases.
Yes, yeah, they have a real presence in space.
(45:13):
Then this painting he will buildon the day.
He will build a box, a cardboardbox where they go in when they
are not exhibited, and the cardboard box.
And that's where he gets very onCarawa and cereal.
He's blind with the newspaper ofthe day, and then he will give a
(45:36):
subtitle which is generally taken from that newspaper, which
you will write on the upper right corner you follow.
Yes, it's it's interesting because now I remember that when
you were there, you asked why they weren't shown with the
(45:57):
boxes. They they it's it's a curator if
you editorial choice here. They wanted to keep a very clean
look. I think it's only about the the
painting, but the paintings are going with the box, which are
going with the cutting and the subtitle.
And of course, this is all recorded in the book.
Of course, if he moves to another country, he will be in
(46:20):
the language of the country. And if if it's not an English,
no, if it's not a Latin alphabetbased country like his own
country Japan, who has a, you know, has a.
Ideographic, yeah. Actually the if you take the
(46:41):
Arabic countries the E brilliantlanguage then he will switch to
Esperanto which is invented language.
Did he speak Esperanto? I don't think so.
Who does eat today? A a few people there, there's
still that. There is still an ongoing
(47:02):
desire. Well it it does exist it hasn't
really take off. I think it was bigger before
then for the generation I was 4 kids.
Then The date is ever changing with the language and he has
always to write it in a way thatit's very calibrated between the
(47:25):
left and the right. Then there is a real kind of
exercise of design in a way for each day.
And it has chosen the English language as kind of a base in
the Latin alphabet. And then the first time he's
using it is in 1963 with the painting, the names.
(47:46):
And then the painting is called something, and that's the first
time he's using English. And that's very interesting.
As a Japanese person, that is. That's his choice.
Also, when you think of the history of Japan, the bombing
and the American presence, and then suddenly he finds himself
in New York in a context that isso important to him in
(48:08):
conceptual terms and in artisticterms, that's one of those
ironies of history, I guess. Yeah, but that's an important
key. I think that the choice of the
of the language and in the in that ground floor you go in the
in the base kind of a side room where you have other paintings
and there we could find your favorite 1 and it was your
(48:32):
favorite because it says 20 space ABR in capital .68.
Then can you translate that for us and can you explain?
So, so my personal relationship with that painting is that
(48:54):
immediately I read it as Trinta dia Brionel of Sensistenta,
which is my language, Portuguese, like my mother
tongue. And it's interesting because
like my, that's, that's where mybrain goes.
But it actually was produced in Mexico as far as I remember, and
it's Treinta de Avril de Milo a Ciento SE Centa.
(49:15):
So it's interesting because suddenly it kind of connects
the, the history of those two languages, the differences
between them. So they are linguistically very
close. And at the same time, when you
speak them as I just did, they are so different.
And I remember how excited you were like a kid because it's
(49:36):
your language were they were great dark grey and made on the
same day. Then that also shows you that
some days he doesn't do it, someday it does it that the
continuity and the exception, which I really like.
And I think that comes with if it's your date or the date of
someone you know and your colourand your language.
(49:56):
And that's very personal. And that's where from a very
conceptual dry project, you get something very, very personal.
And I love seeing you kind of reacting to that.
And then we did a selfie there and I was like, OK, that's
concept part. We go back to the making of it.
(50:16):
Then on the this painting will go in a box and then on the top,
this box will be lined with the newspaper of the place it will
be on. And he will choose what he calls
subtitle, which we will write atthe top right corner in in the
book. And they are generally the title
(50:38):
is choosing either the main title of the day or they can be
about the weather. It's really about the news.
Sometime it's about him or his friends.
Then he can also go in his personal life.
It's, it's, it's rarer, I would say.
Then I'll give you a few examples of the titles.
(50:59):
Then one is 8 June 1966. Hurricane Alma has mounted to
100 miles an hour peak winds andhe's moving towards Cuba. 22
July 1966 Russian specialists have developed the first live
vaccine against mumps. It can be either a long phrase,
(51:21):
it can be two words, it can be two sentences.
It really varies. And actually there is a podcast,
it's a couple and they just readthe titles and the dates.
And it's very interesting because you are transported
directly. They read the date and then the
title, and then you're transported in 19, in the 60s.
(51:44):
They are timeless, but they are of the day.
And that's really reinforced by this cutting and this subtitle.
But it's funny because you startseeing time as LED these layers
and layers and layers of facts, feelings relating to those
facts, and how some things kind of come to the surface again,
(52:07):
like the Hurricanes. And the war and the politics,
when you hear that this, this this fun podcast, well, I found
it funny. It's the same of the same in a
way. And in 1972 in December is going
to drop the subtitles. Do you know why, Joanna?
No clue. OK, then a little bit like the
(52:29):
story with the stolen briefcase.He's in 1972 Ankara was an
artist in residence in the Moderna Museum in Stockholm.
And at the time that's there wassome bombing in Vietnam by the
Americans and that was related in the newspaper.
(52:51):
And apparently he did some cut out of this major event and one
had the title Bomb Terror Hanoi,which is put in a folder and he
wrote about above that cutting yag vet inte which translates
(53:13):
from Swedish I do not know. And this is the type the
subtitles of 28th of December 1972.
I do not know in Swedish and from the 29th December 1972, the
subtitle just a day of the week,Friday and then Saturday and
(53:40):
Sunday. And that's from 72, no more
funny subtitle. It's only it kind of shrink
again. And that really reminds me of
the story you told us about whenhe was young.
I don't understand. I do not know.
Frozen in time is just blocking it.
It doesn't want to interpret it's thesis and the subtitle I I
(54:03):
giving a big clue here. It's funny because it's making
me think of the rawness of trauma with that generation.
You lived horrendous things. You went through horrible
hardships, but there's it's thatgeneration, the pre boomers
almost because he was born before the Second World War.
(54:24):
You recompose your personality, you readjust and you keep on
going. And that's, there's something
really striking about that, thisreduction of your experience to
a date and at the same time thisdeath of your experience with
(54:54):
the date as well. There's this idea of death.
The dates always made me think of the idea of dying every day
and being born every day. And there's something to it that
I find very positive. And then there's something which
is akin to trauma and but also the positive and the negative
(55:16):
aspects of trauma as well. That kind of trauma connects you
to a raw, existential, almost delirious joy of being alive.
And at the same time, it's reminds you constantly of the
possibilities of hardship and death.
There's there's something reallypuzzling and hard to put into
(55:40):
words in in the work really and.You said he put it away, but in
a way he didn't because he became an artist.
And it's the whole, he's the whole life is dedicated to
overcome that trauma and and making something of it.
He's closing down the words. He doesn't want to explain, but
(56:04):
he does a painting a day and that's his meditation.
This is a turning the calendar. He's very positive he's
restarting every day no matter what.
Are you the one who is positive?We don't know if he was or not.
You, Liberty, are a very positive person.
Possibly. But you, you need, you know, you
need a little light every morning to start a new painting
(56:29):
every day. There's something about
dislocating the ego in in art practices at the time and taking
yourself out of the picture. And I realize that when I see
one of those paintings, I immediately think of him.
And so you do think of the crafts and you do think of the
patients, and you do think of the meditation, and you do think
(56:52):
of this idea of keeping time while laughing in its face.
It's this idea of containing within a very simple gesture a
sort of absurdity of, or contradictory or paradoxical
aspects of a moment in time. And so it is quite traditional
(57:15):
in terms of. Traditional.
Philosophy and very innovative at the same time, like the
Altamira caves. But I suggest now that we go on
the second floor. We're still see.
Imagine if we had talked in the exhibition.
We're so chatty. Let's go to the second floor and
(57:35):
and wrap it up. The Beautiful because we're in
our gallery, they have this fantastic restored staircase,
which is really staircase to heaven and that brings you on
the, the, the men most beautifulfloor, which is a second floor
where there for me, it was a complete different emotional
(58:00):
story. When I I walk in the same 1 long
room and one room on the side you walk in and there is a whole
wall with a painting area, whichmeans 10 paintings there.
Now I've got the system, then 1970, then 1971, then
(58:22):
197219731974, 1979. Then you move on the side and
there is a large blue painting which is very beautiful, 1982
and just on the side room where you can slide to, there's
another painting 1971 then on the next wall, 2000 and finally
(58:45):
2006. And for me, there I was totally
hit. It was like the ruthlessness of
time. Every you realize it just never
stops. It's like a rabbit hole.
It just goes on and on and on. And for me, the last painting,
when I looked at 2006, I just saw my death.
(59:10):
I was like, that's it. And my reaction was to rush back
and just say what's important? What do I have to do today?
Who am I just like really? And he was so emotional and I
was like, this guy is a genius. I know you hate the word genius
(59:30):
but it's he was from something quite technical on the 1st row
to a very, very meaningful, deepand emotional reaction which
really made me question myself. And for that, I'm so grateful to
on Karawa. What about you?
Well, I, it's funny because I had more of an impact downstairs
(59:53):
and the second floor for me was rushed.
There was an acceleration towards a time where I was
already here. Because that's the thing.
I think maybe the impact was also you're looking at a time
right before you were was like 10 years before I was born and
(01:00:14):
rather than bearing an image to make you.
To connect with you, to tell youa story.
It just has the time on it when it was made.
It's so reflected onto itself that it really places you after
that. So, but I think I, for me, the
paintings have more impact when they're isolated.
(01:00:34):
And that's why for me was more impactful downstairs, because
the calendar sense of things, pages of a calendar being leafed
through, it doesn't give me the same impact in a sense.
How different we are on that reaction.
Yeah. And look at at the at what
(01:00:56):
people buy. Of course, you know, if you have
the big painting, the colourful are, you know, we'll have a
premium, I guess. But the other thing which come
in big prices is when you buy them in groups as a decade.
So funny, and it's funny that you are buying chunks of time.
(01:01:18):
I just wanted to give a little anecdote about the whole meaning
of the exhibition. Then when I was waiting for you
on the bench, have a very civilized bench downstairs at
the as we are now, which is in the kind of in between places.
There was a visitor who asked a reception.
(01:01:38):
He said, is that it? Is there anything else to see?
I was like, who else do you want?
And I was like in that kind of trance about meaning of life.
And when the person say, is there anything else, then I'll
leave you on that note. But.
(01:02:00):
That's beautiful, is there anything else?
Lee Betty, thank you so much fordoing this first episode as a Co
host. It has been wonderful and I hope
you come back. Thank you and thank you for
listening. Bye bye.
As you know, Exhibition Nesters is 1 year old.
We're very excited with this second year and we're also
excited to welcome new Co hosts that will always bring a
contrasting position to mine, whether it's because like Emily,
they do not work in the contemporary art field or maybe
(00:34):
they have different roles withinit, which will be the case for
my hosts. Today.
We have an amazing episode. We were very inspired by the
absolutely incredible opportunity to see On Kawara's
date paintings in a very encompassing exhibition at
David's Verna Gallery in London.We do mention the foundation
(00:59):
that On Kawara founded during his lifetime, the 1,000,000
Years Foundation, and we will have the links if you want to
check it out. I also make a little mistake.
I mix the names of two very, very prominent American artists,
(01:21):
Robert Smithson and Robert Morris.
It was Robert Morris indeed, whocreated the artwork box with the
sound of its own making in 1961.So apologies for that.
And I think that's about it. Yes, we have a video version
(01:44):
now. So if you're more of a visual
person, the videos do have images.
But if you're an audio person, if you like the experience of
closing your eyes and imagining yourself at David's Vernas
gallery, do it. Audio is amazing.
So let's do this. Let's start this incredible
(02:05):
episode with my amazing cohost, Liberty Nuti.
Welcome to Exhibitionistas, the podcast where we visit
exhibitions so that you have to all so that you can experience
(02:27):
them vicariously through us. So today we have a very special
one. We are talking about the
exhibition at David's Werner Gallery in London of the date
paintings by On Kawara. It was quite the experience.
So the rule is very simple. My Co host and I visit the
(02:49):
exhibition separately and compare notes during the
recording. And today my Co host is none
other than Libertinuti, who you know from a previous episode
where she was our guest talking about art advisory.
She is indeed an art advisor specialized in modern art and a
(03:12):
tiny bit of contemporary art. But she has such an acute and
keen eye that it's going to be apleasure to talk about the
exhibition with her. Today I am Joanna PR Nevis,
contemporary art writer and curator and artistic director of
Drawing Now Paris So Liberty, thank you so much for being
(03:34):
here, for counterbalancing my more research focused experience
of contemporary art and bringingmaybe the experience and the
points of view of a more market driven job and experience in the
art world. But most of all, thank you so
much for being here and for being my Co host today.
(03:56):
So nice to be back, Joanna. We must confess to your audience
that we've made an exception to your podcast.
Oops. You are revealing the insides
and the backstage of the episodes you naughty Co host.
OK, go ahead and say it. We went together.
(04:18):
I didn't really understand the rule at the time that we went
back together and yet we look atit separately.
And when we went, I promised youI shall not share my views
during our exhibition and I saidno matter what.
And I think we did. We did.
We were very wise and very contained.
(04:39):
I'm I'm very proud of us, honestly.
But Liberty, how was your weekend culture?
I thought it was a really intense week.
First was the commemoration of the 80 years of the liberation
of the Auschwitz camp and which I watch on TV.
And I thought it was so emotional to hear the last
(05:01):
survivors who are now now in their 90s, so much hardship and
forgiveness at the same time. And really the message was from
all of them in the different ways was they want us to
remember. I watched the rise of the Nazi,
which is a three-part BBC documentaries and it really
(05:25):
shows how Germany went from a a democracy, the Vaima Republic to
a total terrorism system. And this is so interesting to
watch 100 years after it goes soquickly and it's just little
(05:45):
things which kind of brings thattype of of of regime and it
shows the. I wonder why you're speaking
about that. At this moment, nothing in the
world makes us think of the potentiality of a new form of
fascism, right? And populism, that's really and.
Populism. But what's interesting coming to
(06:05):
our subject is he also made me think of on Kahawa, who is a
child of the Second World War, is a Japanese person who
witnessed Hiroshima when he was an adolescent.
Yeah, it has a huge impact on him and it's specifically
moulded his choices as an artist.
(06:27):
Yeah. So As for myself, I've been
trying to read Liberty and it's,it's been really, really
difficult. I've been trying to reread
actually, which is something that I'm really enjoying doing
at the moment. I picked up a book I had read a
few months ago called Parade by Rachel Cusk, and I was really
(06:48):
interested in that book because all the characters, all the
central characters, I would say I are called G.
They're just a letter. She's very keen on modernist
takes on literature and nouveau homo.
And so she kind of produces these frameworks whereby she
develops the narrative and the what really made me pick up the
(07:10):
book was the fact that there's acharacter there, G maybe short
for genius, which is something that she obviously deconstructs,
and G is a painter who makes paintings upside down.
Oh, reminds me of someone. Who could that be?
And who has a very strange position about women?
As someone else that came to your mind, specifically
(07:34):
Basilitz, who said that women couldn't be painters.
So of course, critics spotted that, and that book had a sort
of echo in the contemporary art field.
Going back to On Koara Liberty, we kind of touched upon this a
little bit when you suggested doing an episode on him.
But don't you find that he's kind of a monolith?
(07:56):
And he's one of those few artists that I would never have
thought of investigating becauseit's just taken, I think, by us
spectators and even our professionals as an entity that
is completely merged with the work.
Don't you agree? Totally, I had the same feeling
(08:18):
actually. On Kawara is a concept is
himself. Even his name was a mystery when
we when I think about it. Was it his real name?
What is his first name on? And at the same time, I thought
I knew a lot about him because his work revolves around his
(08:40):
daily life and activities and you have a feeling of who he is.
Even if he's extremely elusive. At the end of of the day, you
can show us what you've discovered about him.
Artist. As I started reading, I realised
that he really was not keen on having his biography out there.
(09:02):
And he established the foundation during his lifetime
and the foundation has a website, it's called 1,000,000
Years Foundation. And when you click on his name
expecting to find the whole biography, you just have written
on the screen, a sort of very minimal and empty screen
(09:23):
biography of on Kowara 29,771 days.
And then there is a photo of hisstudio in black and white, which
is kind of midway between bureaucratic setting and an
artist studio with cupboards in the back with very high and thin
(09:47):
doors. That suggests an incredible
number of archives being kept behind them.
So someone who was very reluctant in being presented as
a life and much more keen to turn their life into art or art
(10:11):
into life, what would I do? Do I talk about his biography?
Do I talk about the work? So what I decided to do is
perhaps to start with one of hislast works and to honour this
ethos, let's say, of the artist and describe the work that he
(10:32):
started in 1993 called 1,000,000Years Past and Future.
What do you think, Libert? Did you think that's a good
idea? Yes, and I think you would have
liked. That on car, if you're
listening, this is for you. So in 197071 he started a folder
(10:52):
listing a million years from 1960 down.
Then in 1980 in another folder he listed a million years into
the future. So there's a gap between 71 and
1980, and in 1993 he joined those two works in the form of
(11:14):
readings. So two people read, 1 reads the
odd numbers, the other one readsthe other numbers.
The odd numbers are read by a male identifying person and the
other numbers are read by a female identifying person.
A non binary person can choose one of the two and these are
performative work so they read in front of an audience.
(11:38):
They take a lot of time obviously and they have been
performed all over the world. So this is just to give you an
idea of the type of materials that On Kawara was working with.
So notions as vast as time and space in some ways, and the
(11:58):
conventionalities that come attached to those two concepts.
So dates, counting lists, binders and paintings, because
obviously we're talking about anexhibition that is Paintings on
the Wall. So basically this is what we're
talking about when we're talkingabout the work of On Kowara.
(12:22):
With this project that you just described is ongoing, it's still
alive, it's not there but and it's it's going to carry on for
many years because that 1,000,000 year reading backwards
and forwards will take a long time to put together.
So on Kawara biography, he was born in 1932 in Karia, in a
(12:47):
small town in Japan, and he diedin New York in 2014.
The major episode of his life was obviously the Nagasaki and
Hiroshima bombings when he was 12 years old.
And it kind of marked a rupture in his personality.
He had been, up until then, a studious young little boy.
(13:12):
And from then onward, when he was in class and a teacher would
ask him something, he would say,I don't understand.
He was unyielding. And from that point onward, he
felt like he didn't believe anything.
So the system of belief cracked within himself.
If you compare to Yoko Ono, it'sa completely different way of
(13:35):
relating to the same horrendous episodes of Yoko Ono would
devise menus with her brother lying on the ground in the
countryside looking at the clouds and discovered the
empowering force of imagination.So very different relationships
with an event that you that would anyway have moulded your
(13:56):
personality and the way it did tells a lot about the
disposition of of the artist in question.
Then from what we understand, itreally closed down.
It kind of shut down. We I do not understand and not
wanted to move or engage in any ways.
(14:17):
So that kind of places him outside of the realm of the
disgust things because he don't doesn't understand them.
So he embraced a sort of nihilistic perspective on life.
In 1951, he moved to Tokyo. He met a number of artists in a
bookshop where, for someone who didn't understand, he read quite
(14:40):
voraciously. So he devoured Freud's writings,
Marx's writings, the existentialists, Sartre and
Camus in particular. So he was very well read.
And because he stayed in the bookshop reading, he met a
number of artists and became or started a practice as an artist.
He started painting in 1958. He moves to Mexico where he
(15:04):
spends three years. There his father was the
director of an engineering company, and so he was very
comfortably living there, going to art school, meeting all the
intelligentsia, and he also started exploring Mexico.
So I think that also was also the beginning of one of the
aspects of On Koara's biography,which is that he was a very keen
(15:27):
traveler. And I think he said to Casper
Kearney, if I'm not mistaken, that if he hadn't been an
artist, he would have been the travel agent.
There you go. Yeah.
Anyway, he then went to to Europe.
He lived between New York and Paris at a certain point.
(15:50):
A very important time before he settled in 1965 in New York, was
when he went to Spain, to Altamira, and he visited the
caves. And so that specific experience
was incredibly powerful because that experience of art that
remained in time. So that form of presence of arts
(16:12):
and of drawings and paintings and the absence of the rituals
around The Cave kind of also hadan impact on the way he would
devise his works. And so in 1965, when he finally
settles in New York, he meets all the Conceptualists,
obviously he meets the Minimalists.
(16:34):
So he comes into contact with anincredibly creative, forceful
group of people who rejected a number of things, placing the
ego or the subject or the the the personal experience at the
centre of the creative act. Symbolisms.
(16:58):
Rejecting metaphor, being literal, rejecting painting in a
lot of ways and embracing graphic expression, embracing
language, embracing even bureaucratic practices in some
ways, and also rejecting the Yeah.
(17:20):
Systematic and the series. The embracing the systematic,
the system and the series absolutely.
So on. Kowara found a like minded group
of people and in 1966 he starts the works that we saw in the
(17:41):
exhibition at David's Verner in London called The Date.
Paintings that went on he went on to make until 2012, so until
two years before his passing. So, Liberty, you are going to
talk about the Dave paintings inthe second part?
So we'll, we'll, we'll visit theexhibition together when he goes
(18:04):
to New York and really get into that group.
He's not, he's 33 years old and he's not a baby anymore.
He's, he's already done quite a lot and that's really when he's
blossoming. And I thought the age is quite
important there too. But he has a long way to go.
And also it's, it's, it's important to say that he did
(18:24):
paint even when he was in Japan,he had these paintings that were
very graphic, almost comics inspired about dire situations,
lots of bodies in, in, in difficult and painful situations
or isolated after the date paintings which bear the dates
(18:44):
of the day when he makes them. So he has 24 hours to produce a
painting that states the date when it was made.
So of course this resonates a lot with works at the time.
Robert Smithson's box with the sound of its own making comes to
(19:05):
mind, obviously, and so many other works which are self
referential. But there's an existentialist
take to Ankawara, because this is also a performative act.
He has to make the painting on that day.
Obviously, this is a very rigid structure, so there aren't
paintings for each day. If you're wondering, dear
(19:27):
listener, there's a huge gaps. But apparently he was able in
the 70s to go three months, three whole months with making a
painting each day. So there are several dimensions
for these paintings, several letterings, several fonts and
colours. But Liberty, you will explain
all of this in the second part of the episode and after the
(19:51):
break. He decides to do a painting a
day, but it is not. Some days he doesn't do one
because he can't. Some days they are destroyed
because it's he's not quick enough.
Then he takes. Some breaks, there is some
intermittence. It's continuity, but
(20:11):
intermittence, again, you have always this double force in in
the work of Onkarawa. And some days he even does 2A
day. The same dates he repeats the
same date. Yeah.
Really. I didn't know that.
You will remember when we go to the exhibition together.
(20:35):
I can't wait. So let's just go over the series
of works he made. So on Kawara was paradoxically a
very prolific artist, but had just a a small number of series
of works and a lot of them were based on postcards.
So he started in 1968, two yearsafter he started the date
(20:57):
paintings. The series I got up.
So this series of works states simply the sentence I got up and
the time when he got up, so the hour and the minutes.
He started this series in Mexicoknowing that Kaspar Kony, his
friend, loves to receive postcards, and so he sent 2
(21:23):
postcards a day for 12 years. And so again, still no
handwriting, only stamps. And The funny thing about this
series is that Kasper Koenig says in an interview that this
series stopped an anecdotally, because he he was carrying, I
(21:44):
think in Finland, the briefcase where he kept his stamps for the
series. And the briefcase was stolen.
And so that's why. And that's how.
The must have a boots count. The most absorbed those cars and
that's how the series stopped. So it's very interesting because
(22:04):
there's a, so there's a postcard, there's also an image
in the back. And in some ways the highly
personal meets the blandest and most reduced form of expression
of time and place. Because of course there's
images, but those images are fortourists.
So they are the most neutral, the most conventional images you
can have of a landscape or of a place.
(22:26):
So this series is also a bit trickier than the date
paintings, but because it is more personal, you can track on
Koara's habits. And it's interesting that it's
choose the medium of postcard because today who buys a
postcard and who sends a postcard?
It's it's, we still do it, but it's a little bit of the time.
(22:49):
And Speaking of that, we even find telegrams in his work as
well. The time.
Because the I'm still alive series started with three
telegrams sent in 1969. So I'm still alive is the same
idea. Then the I got up postcards so
he would send postcards saying I'm still alive and so he sent 3
(23:13):
telegrams, telegrams saying I amnot going to commit suicide,
don't worry. So that was the first one.
The second one it is. I am not going to commit suicide
worry. OK.
And the third one is I am going to sleep.
(23:35):
Forget it. The third one kind of is the
hinge upon which he then finds the final form of this series,
which is saying I'm still alive.The same thing with the day
paintings. It destroyed most of them, but
they were saying something. Something.
The word something. Something just one word and
(23:58):
looking like the date painting monochrome background.
Not many are left because they destroy most of them I think.
So there's this basis of a form of dread, a form of existential
dread that very quickly is overturned by the bureaucratic
(24:19):
keeping of time and a a sort of sense of humor as well.
So the I'm still alive I find absolutely hilarious because as
soon. Receives it to postcard.
Can you imagine? You'd be like, great.
But is he? I think that's the question you
ask yourself, because then you think of the possibility of the
(24:40):
opposite being also true after the postcard was made, no?
Doesn't your mind go there? Yeah, absolutely.
And it's it's very positive because I'm not going to commit
suicide. It's a very passive aggressive
either way phrase as I'm still alive is taking life with a
positive twist. And in a way there is a lot of
(25:05):
humour because what do you replyto that?
And it reassures you, even though you don't know if the
person is still alive when you receive it a week after.
I have a funny story about this series which is about a couple
of collectors. So they started by collecting
expressionistic German expressionist painting and then
(25:29):
slowly they turned towards conceptual art, minimalist art,
process art. And they loved on Koara and they
had one of the date paintings intheir living room and their
friends mocked them endlessly because of their collection and
couldn't understand why on earththey would collect postcards
(25:49):
based work, data based work. They they couldn't get it and
until one day they they were in a horrendous train accident.
And so the wife got away OK ish.But the husband was between life
(26:10):
and death for a while. And they're the funny and the
interesting story within this story is that the wife was
talking with one of their friends.
He was calling to ask about the husband and and when they were
chatting on the phone, the person said, you know what I was
(26:34):
thinking of the date paintings that you have in your living
room and that artist that you told me about.
And I never understood why you liked that work.
And now that we are in the situation of thinking of losing
the both of you, I finally understand the meaning.
Of the news of of Ankara, why isvery anchored in in the to, you
(26:58):
know, day-to-day quite mundane apostcard from this and there
just putting the date. It's quite funny.
But at the end of the day, what else?
I am still alive. This is the most important
thing. That's why we want to know about
our children, our loved 1. You are still alive.
We're OK. And that's a genius of Onkarawa.
(27:20):
And I think he got to the same conclusion at the end of the 60s
because that's the moment where he stopped talking about his art
and stopped agreeing to talk about his art most of the time.
And when he was questioned by a journalist, a student and art
critic about his work, he would send one of those postcards as a
(27:42):
response. Really.
Yes. I'm going to have to do that
too. So he started in 68 as well,
another series called I Went. So this is based on maps.
So he photocopied maps to the size of an A4 sheet of paper
that he that then kept in a binder.
(28:04):
And he just basically took a redfelt pen and he traced the
journey that he did by walking or any other form of
transportation in that specific place.
So always this relationship between time and place rather
than time and space. As I said before, probably
(28:26):
there's finally the other seriesI met from 1968 to 1979 where he
made. So he indexed to a day, a sheet
of paper to a day. And on that sheet of paper, he
would write the names of the people that he met on that day.
And the the genesis of this workis really funny because as a
(28:48):
Japanese immigrant, he very often didn't understand the
names of the people. But also as a traveler, as
someone who most of the times were, it was in countries where
he didn't speak the language as well or didn't speak it at all.
So he asked people to write downtheir names.
And so he had, he found himself with papers with names of on
them. And he decided to make this
(29:11):
series based on that sort of, again, conventional relationship
with the self and with humanity and with experience, which is to
know the name of the person you're talking to.
Basically. The work is bureaucratic.
It's mobile as well, because he can make the work anywhere in
(29:33):
the world, in his hotel room, for example.
Even the paintings they are, they travel really easily and as
you said, they have full materials.
The material is not what makes the preciousness of the work,
let's say, unless you recognize,like you just did, that time and
space and place and experience are the most precious things you
(29:53):
have. These paintings, the date
paintings, which he did everywhere, I don't think they
know exactly in how many countries, but they counted more
than 100 cities. And you can know by the language
he's using. Then he's clearly worked in in
(30:14):
very many different places to dothese paintings.
I think him and the Conceptualists really grasped, I
think, something of the times. So the in 1970 there was an
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called
Information, curated by Mcshine.And it's interesting because the
(30:38):
idea of information was in the exhibition related to
photography. There was this notion that
photography marked time and space.
It was indexical. And the whole exhibition was
about that. And we will talk about data
nowadays, right? There was this consciousness of
data. And because it was the first
(30:58):
computers, the artists were starting to look at technologies
as well and how those technologies in some ways
recorded the recorded existence and at the same time also
recorded a huge absence of what the, the sign or the symbol can
(31:21):
and cannot carry. So in I, you know, in the
exhibition, there's a, a piece by Douglas Hubler called
Location Piece just to kind of illustrate the fact that
Ankawara was certainly not the only artist thinking in terms of
place, location, time and space.So Douglas Hubler collected
newspaper photographs of local newspapers in several cities and
(31:44):
several places in the United States.
And the he chose the photos thatonly had local interests and
that reflected the space and thelife of that space of that
particular place. And in his words, his work,
quote, shifts the image away from object hood, making the
recipient the subject of the work, UN quote, which could also
(32:09):
be applied to On Kowara. But in some ways, there's also
the stripping of subject hood inon Kowara on Kowara's work.
I find there's also kind of thisnakedness of existence in in in
the work of on Kowara. And that comes this nakedness
(32:29):
you feel, I think that comes from his great humanity.
And as in all this project and series, there is attention and
an opposition with, like you say, information.
You know, that's why they did inthat exhibition.
They took many photographs because this is reality.
(32:50):
Photograph is what you see opposite to something you create
from your brain and cuttings of newspaper is the reality of the
day and Ankara use that in the way he he puts his painting in
boxes with the cuttings of the day and the recording.
(33:11):
And that's all very precise by information or that data, as you
would say now. But Ankara use a very painful,
painful thinkingly method, whichis very old fashioned.
(33:32):
He has his canvas, he will do the priming and then the first
layer and the second layers. And it's, it's very handmade.
And that creates a tension between, yes, the data, the
conceptual and the very human, the very artistic way.
Again and again you found that in all these series.
(33:53):
I cannot wait to go into the exhibition space and visit or
revisit the exhibition with you,Liberty.
So shall we go for a small breakand when we come back.
The exhibition. Yes, absolutely.
Let's do that. See you in a bit.
(34:25):
OK, so we're back after a short break and we are about to be
taken by the hand by Liberty into the exhibition.
Great, then let's push the door of the gallery and visit the
exhibition. The exhibition was at David's
(34:46):
We're Not Gallery in Mayfair. The gallery is beautiful.
It's in the spacious Georgian townhouse in the heart of
Mayfair. Just to give you some context.
The space is very elegant with high ceilings, beautiful windows
covered with white linens. It's restored to perfection and
(35:06):
I would say that it's one of themost successful contemporary
space in London. Personally my favorite because
he has this white cube, but in an old townhouse.
It's just it's a great mix and it's a perfect vessel for On
Karawa and it's wide, it's cleanand it's quiet.
(35:28):
Then what we are going to see inthe exhibition is some painting
by On Karawa. They are all coming and that's
important. They are all coming from the
foundation 1,000,000 years and they've never been seen on the
market and they are for sale. Which is quite incredible, isn't
(35:49):
it? How do you go about buying?
How do you go about pricing? These works as well.
I read an article stating that there's a specific date painting
that went up. The price shot up, probably
because two people with a personal relationship with that
date were fighting for it. But what's really interesting is
(36:10):
that in the anecdote I recountedearlier, one of the jokes that
the friends would make when theywould visit these collectors who
had the date painting in the living room was, oh, what is
this? Is this your birthday?
And they found it absolutely egregious.
They thought, why would it be mybirthday?
But then I learned that some other people will go to the
(36:32):
dates for a personal reason. So it is interesting how you
enter this kind of word, but we're jumping the gun here.
We'll still not in the exhibit. We're still signing the book at
the entrance. So Di Bertie, go for it.
I'm so curious to know how you feel in front of these
(36:53):
paintings. So I'm only is.
Well, first it's you walk in thein the main room, which is on
the ground floor and what you see there is a lineup of five
grey painting dated on front 1966 with the June, July and
(37:14):
then the, the, the, the day and these these five paintings that
66 is important because this is the year on camera was started
these day paintings. And it's exactly on the 4th of
January 1966 that he did his first one.
And then he will continue that idea or that series for the next
5 decades, as we said, until oneyear before is dead.
(37:40):
The last one recorded is on December the 3rd, 2012 and it's
#1933 in the series. We might be missing some.
You know, it's, it's not complete perfect science.
Then when you walk in, they justwant to show you, you know,
(38:01):
where it starts. And that's really the
cornerstone. And in that room, I don't know
you, but for me, when I walked in, the first thing I was
confronted is, yes, you see these squares paintings which
are monochrome with the date. And I was like, how does that
work? What's the system?
(38:22):
What does that mean? And I think I was really getting
into the nitty gritty of they don't have the same colors, they
don't have the same size. They are kind of the same, but
the writing is not really the same.
And and then my brain was getting into, I want to
understand what are the rules? What is he doing?
(38:43):
And that's kind of what happenedto me downstairs and working
with you on the podcast. I've got so many answers, which
I will try to explain how he sets a rule and how that works.
And for me, this is downstairs. How is it for you?
Well, it's really well curated, isn't it?
(39:03):
Because as you enter, if you face a painting right away, so
you face a date. And I felt a physical sensation.
I felt a sort of slight punch inthe stomach.
There's something about them, yeah.
(39:24):
Then you had the emotion. I did, yeah.
I don't know, Maybe I have a specific relationship with time
because in my kitchen I have a small set of cubes and
rectangles. Calendar.
Yeah, it's a calendar, wood calendar that you have to
manipulate yourself. So every morning I change one or
(39:45):
two cubes or the rectangle belowthat states the the month.
It doesn't have the year. And I love doing that.
It's the my, it's the first thing I do in the morning.
I go to the kitchen, have my breakfast, change the date and I
feel like I'm starting the day. I'm I'm I'm, I'm unlocking
(40:08):
another level of the video game,if if you will, and I love doing
that. It's your ritual.
It's my ritual and when I leave on holiday, no one else does it
in the house. So when I come back to the
house, yeah, I'm frozen in time.So I don't know.
And I that's it. You'll have this wooden thing
because it's so obsolete in a way, you know, we all have
(40:30):
phone, they update immediately, we have time everywhere.
But who? Who has a wooden calendar?
And who makes paintings with dates when you have at the time
you started having electronic devices that would tell you the
time and you can even call, I don't know if you remember that
you could call a line that wouldtell you the exact time of the
(40:53):
day. Do you remember?
That I do about the, the making of the paintings and how the
whole project works. Please bear with me.
It's a little bit technical, butnot so much.
But it's very interesting, I think when you know, because
that gives you a very different reading.
(41:15):
Then when you walk in, you see all these painting which are the
same, but not quite the same because of course there is a
date, but also they vary a little bit with colors, with
everything. And then that gives a, it's not
really a constant that, that, that, that that gives some
variety to to the work. Then the way he does it, then a
(41:37):
date painting is a monochromaticpainting on canvas.
He's using 3 colours only, grey,red and blue.
And then when he's done the background, the monochromatic
background, he will inscribe thedate with some cherry font of
(41:59):
the day the painting was made and the date is done with a
ruler. He kind of calibrates it that it
sits in the middle. And then he will paint it in
with white paint. If the painting is not finished
by the end of the day, it will be destroyed.
There will be no painting with the date of that day.
(42:21):
With the colours he make them himself.
He will mix them. Then the the the most common
colour is the grey which is veryvery dark Gray.
It nearly on photos he can look black.
It looks black in photos, yes. And it was quite interesting
when I met one of your friend who was an artist we discussed,
I said, oh, what did you see? And you say, oh, I love the
(42:44):
colours. It was even 1 green.
It was like green. And then when we went back, it's
the screen. The the third one on this 1966
is kind of a very dark khaki tree green, but actually it's
Gray. And then I think it's just the
way mixed the the paint and thenmaybe the light of the gallery
and she really saw it as green, but it is not green.
(43:06):
But that gives you an idea of. There's a hue of green because
the thing that we discussed withthe person who was there at the
gallery at the time is that whenyou have 3, three colors for
your paintings, they will change.
If you change brands, For example, if one of the brands
discontinues the color you use, it's going to affect and it's
(43:26):
going to you're going to have slight variations of the colors.
Yeah, and he's making, he's mixing the color every day.
And don't forget it is travelling.
And in a way it's, it's a way ofmeditation, you know, because it
will take a few hours to complete because in between if
you do layers, you do a two layers of ground, then you do
(43:47):
the colors you need the paint todry in between.
And that's then there is a real craftsmanship.
And if you look at the painting very carefully, there is some
little bubbles, there is some little corrections.
They look very clean. There is a little accident which
makes which makes them very human.
(44:08):
The canvases they come in several sizes.
There are 8 possible sizes you can choose from on the day they
go from the small one which is 8to 10 inches or the very large
one which will be 61 by 89 inches in the room.
The 1966 They are medium sized canvases.
(44:31):
They are 26 by 24 inches, which is about 60 sixty 70cm by 90
centimeters to give you an idea and they're always 5cm deep,
which is 2 inch, which gives especially on the small 1.
I don't know if you've noticed it gives an idea more of a more
(44:51):
of a box than of a painting. It's an object because I and I
didn't understand why when I sawthe exhibition when I went back
and I noticed the 5 centimeters.That is why it's it's just more
physical than the usual canvases.
Yes, yeah, they have a real presence in space.
(45:13):
Then this painting he will buildon the day.
He will build a box, a cardboardbox where they go in when they
are not exhibited, and the cardboard box.
And that's where he gets very onCarawa and cereal.
He's blind with the newspaper ofthe day, and then he will give a
(45:36):
subtitle which is generally taken from that newspaper, which
you will write on the upper right corner you follow.
Yes, it's it's interesting because now I remember that when
you were there, you asked why they weren't shown with the
(45:57):
boxes. They they it's it's a curator if
you editorial choice here. They wanted to keep a very clean
look. I think it's only about the the
painting, but the paintings are going with the box, which are
going with the cutting and the subtitle.
And of course, this is all recorded in the book.
Of course, if he moves to another country, he will be in
(46:20):
the language of the country. And if if it's not an English,
no, if it's not a Latin alphabetbased country like his own
country Japan, who has a, you know, has a.
Ideographic, yeah. Actually the if you take the
(46:41):
Arabic countries the E brilliantlanguage then he will switch to
Esperanto which is invented language.
Did he speak Esperanto? I don't think so.
Who does eat today? A a few people there, there's
still that. There is still an ongoing
(47:02):
desire. Well it it does exist it hasn't
really take off. I think it was bigger before
then for the generation I was 4 kids.
Then The date is ever changing with the language and he has
always to write it in a way thatit's very calibrated between the
(47:25):
left and the right. Then there is a real kind of
exercise of design in a way for each day.
And it has chosen the English language as kind of a base in
the Latin alphabet. And then the first time he's
using it is in 1963 with the painting, the names.
(47:46):
And then the painting is called something, and that's the first
time he's using English. And that's very interesting.
As a Japanese person, that is. That's his choice.
Also, when you think of the history of Japan, the bombing
and the American presence, and then suddenly he finds himself
in New York in a context that isso important to him in
(48:08):
conceptual terms and in artisticterms, that's one of those
ironies of history, I guess. Yeah, but that's an important
key. I think that the choice of the
of the language and in the in that ground floor you go in the
in the base kind of a side room where you have other paintings
and there we could find your favorite 1 and it was your
(48:32):
favorite because it says 20 space ABR in capital .68.
Then can you translate that for us and can you explain?
So, so my personal relationship with that painting is that
(48:54):
immediately I read it as Trinta dia Brionel of Sensistenta,
which is my language, Portuguese, like my mother
tongue. And it's interesting because
like my, that's, that's where mybrain goes.
But it actually was produced in Mexico as far as I remember, and
it's Treinta de Avril de Milo a Ciento SE Centa.
(49:15):
So it's interesting because suddenly it kind of connects
the, the history of those two languages, the differences
between them. So they are linguistically very
close. And at the same time, when you
speak them as I just did, they are so different.
And I remember how excited you were like a kid because it's
(49:36):
your language were they were great dark grey and made on the
same day. Then that also shows you that
some days he doesn't do it, someday it does it that the
continuity and the exception, which I really like.
And I think that comes with if it's your date or the date of
someone you know and your colourand your language.
(49:56):
And that's very personal. And that's where from a very
conceptual dry project, you get something very, very personal.
And I love seeing you kind of reacting to that.
And then we did a selfie there and I was like, OK, that's
concept part. We go back to the making of it.
(50:16):
Then on the this painting will go in a box and then on the top,
this box will be lined with the newspaper of the place it will
be on. And he will choose what he calls
subtitle, which we will write atthe top right corner in in the
book. And they are generally the title
(50:38):
is choosing either the main title of the day or they can be
about the weather. It's really about the news.
Sometime it's about him or his friends.
Then he can also go in his personal life.
It's, it's, it's rarer, I would say.
Then I'll give you a few examples of the titles.
(50:59):
Then one is 8 June 1966. Hurricane Alma has mounted to
100 miles an hour peak winds andhe's moving towards Cuba. 22
July 1966 Russian specialists have developed the first live
vaccine against mumps. It can be either a long phrase,
(51:21):
it can be two words, it can be two sentences.
It really varies. And actually there is a podcast,
it's a couple and they just readthe titles and the dates.
And it's very interesting because you are transported
directly. They read the date and then the
title, and then you're transported in 19, in the 60s.
(51:44):
They are timeless, but they are of the day.
And that's really reinforced by this cutting and this subtitle.
But it's funny because you startseeing time as LED these layers
and layers and layers of facts, feelings relating to those
facts, and how some things kind of come to the surface again,
(52:07):
like the Hurricanes. And the war and the politics,
when you hear that this, this this fun podcast, well, I found
it funny. It's the same of the same in a
way. And in 1972 in December is going
to drop the subtitles. Do you know why, Joanna?
No clue. OK, then a little bit like the
(52:29):
story with the stolen briefcase.He's in 1972 Ankara was an
artist in residence in the Moderna Museum in Stockholm.
And at the time that's there wassome bombing in Vietnam by the
Americans and that was related in the newspaper.
(52:51):
And apparently he did some cut out of this major event and one
had the title Bomb Terror Hanoi,which is put in a folder and he
wrote about above that cutting yag vet inte which translates
(53:13):
from Swedish I do not know. And this is the type the
subtitles of 28th of December 1972.
I do not know in Swedish and from the 29th December 1972, the
subtitle just a day of the week,Friday and then Saturday and
(53:40):
Sunday. And that's from 72, no more
funny subtitle. It's only it kind of shrink
again. And that really reminds me of
the story you told us about whenhe was young.
I don't understand. I do not know.
Frozen in time is just blocking it.
It doesn't want to interpret it's thesis and the subtitle I I
(54:03):
giving a big clue here. It's funny because it's making
me think of the rawness of trauma with that generation.
You lived horrendous things. You went through horrible
hardships, but there's it's thatgeneration, the pre boomers
almost because he was born before the Second World War.
(54:24):
You recompose your personality, you readjust and you keep on
going. And that's, there's something
really striking about that, thisreduction of your experience to
a date and at the same time thisdeath of your experience with
(54:54):
the date as well. There's this idea of death.
The dates always made me think of the idea of dying every day
and being born every day. And there's something to it that
I find very positive. And then there's something which
is akin to trauma and but also the positive and the negative
(55:16):
aspects of trauma as well. That kind of trauma connects you
to a raw, existential, almost delirious joy of being alive.
And at the same time, it's reminds you constantly of the
possibilities of hardship and death.
There's there's something reallypuzzling and hard to put into
(55:40):
words in in the work really and.You said he put it away, but in
a way he didn't because he became an artist.
And it's the whole, he's the whole life is dedicated to
overcome that trauma and and making something of it.
He's closing down the words. He doesn't want to explain, but
(56:04):
he does a painting a day and that's his meditation.
This is a turning the calendar. He's very positive he's
restarting every day no matter what.
Are you the one who is positive?We don't know if he was or not.
You, Liberty, are a very positive person.
Possibly. But you, you need, you know, you
need a little light every morning to start a new painting
(56:29):
every day. There's something about
dislocating the ego in in art practices at the time and taking
yourself out of the picture. And I realize that when I see
one of those paintings, I immediately think of him.
And so you do think of the crafts and you do think of the
patients, and you do think of the meditation, and you do think
(56:52):
of this idea of keeping time while laughing in its face.
It's this idea of containing within a very simple gesture a
sort of absurdity of, or contradictory or paradoxical
aspects of a moment in time. And so it is quite traditional
(57:15):
in terms of. Traditional.
Philosophy and very innovative at the same time, like the
Altamira caves. But I suggest now that we go on
the second floor. We're still see.
Imagine if we had talked in the exhibition.
We're so chatty. Let's go to the second floor and
(57:35):
and wrap it up. The Beautiful because we're in
our gallery, they have this fantastic restored staircase,
which is really staircase to heaven and that brings you on
the, the, the men most beautifulfloor, which is a second floor
where there for me, it was a complete different emotional
(58:00):
story. When I I walk in the same 1 long
room and one room on the side you walk in and there is a whole
wall with a painting area, whichmeans 10 paintings there.
Now I've got the system, then 1970, then 1971, then
(58:22):
197219731974, 1979. Then you move on the side and
there is a large blue painting which is very beautiful, 1982
and just on the side room where you can slide to, there's
another painting 1971 then on the next wall, 2000 and finally
(58:45):
2006. And for me, there I was totally
hit. It was like the ruthlessness of
time. Every you realize it just never
stops. It's like a rabbit hole.
It just goes on and on and on. And for me, the last painting,
when I looked at 2006, I just saw my death.
(59:10):
I was like, that's it. And my reaction was to rush back
and just say what's important? What do I have to do today?
Who am I just like really? And he was so emotional and I
was like, this guy is a genius. I know you hate the word genius
(59:30):
but it's he was from something quite technical on the 1st row
to a very, very meaningful, deepand emotional reaction which
really made me question myself. And for that, I'm so grateful to
on Karawa. What about you?
Well, I, it's funny because I had more of an impact downstairs
(59:53):
and the second floor for me was rushed.
There was an acceleration towards a time where I was
already here. Because that's the thing.
I think maybe the impact was also you're looking at a time
right before you were was like 10 years before I was born and
(01:00:14):
rather than bearing an image to make you.
To connect with you, to tell youa story.
It just has the time on it when it was made.
It's so reflected onto itself that it really places you after
that. So, but I think I, for me, the
paintings have more impact when they're isolated.
(01:00:34):
And that's why for me was more impactful downstairs, because
the calendar sense of things, pages of a calendar being leafed
through, it doesn't give me the same impact in a sense.
How different we are on that reaction.
Yeah. And look at at the at what
(01:00:56):
people buy. Of course, you know, if you have
the big painting, the colourful are, you know, we'll have a
premium, I guess. But the other thing which come
in big prices is when you buy them in groups as a decade.
So funny, and it's funny that you are buying chunks of time.
(01:01:18):
I just wanted to give a little anecdote about the whole meaning
of the exhibition. Then when I was waiting for you
on the bench, have a very civilized bench downstairs at
the as we are now, which is in the kind of in between places.
There was a visitor who asked a reception.
(01:01:38):
He said, is that it? Is there anything else to see?
I was like, who else do you want?
And I was like in that kind of trance about meaning of life.
And when the person say, is there anything else, then I'll
leave you on that note. But.
(01:02:00):
That's beautiful, is there anything else?
Lee Betty, thank you so much fordoing this first episode as a Co
host. It has been wonderful and I hope
you come back. Thank you and thank you for
listening. Bye bye.
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