1. SO: TRY TO SAY NOW. I mean, now: try to say it. Not just to say it, but to mean it too. To truly mean it: mean it in the sense of it being true. It’s just not possible. No sooner has the word been formed—a peristaltic movement that breaks down into a grinding of the tongue against the wet and gummy place where palate and incisors meet, a corresponding dropping of the lower jaw, contraction of the cheeks, and curling outward of the lips (a scornful gesture, as though they, the lips, were sneering at the very content they’re delivering)—no sooner has this word been manufactured and expelled than it’s already late and, in its lateness, false: as its sound rises to your ears, it’s not now anymore. And if you speak it once again, taking another shot, hoping to hit it, snag its true-ness, on the rebound, then the failure is compounded; you’re just consoling yourself: Now, now. And if you say it multiple times, over and over again in rapid-fire succession, setting up a field of pulses one of which (you hope) will coincide with one or other of the actual nows that float and slip through this same field—well, then you end up sounding like an air force corporal sending parachutists from a plane: urgent, almost hysterical: Now! Now! Now! Now! Now! And even then, the word unpacks itself, unfurls—each time—too late, drags languidly behind its passenger, and arrives at its destination after him as well, to crumple, as redundant as an afterthought, on indifferent ground.
2. For Ingeborg Bachmann, it’s Today that’s the impossible word. It “sends me flying into an anxious haste,” she writes; pronouncing it, “my breathing grows irregular and my heart beats a syncopation which can now be captured on an electrocardiogram, although the graphs do not show that the cause is precisely my Today, always urgent and new; however, I can prove this diagnosis is correct. To use the confusing code of medicine, the disorder precedes acute phobia; it renders me susceptible, it stigmatizes me.” As for the word’s notation: “anything written about Today should be destroyed immediately, just like all real letters are crumpled up or torn up, unfinished and unmailed, all because they were written, but cannot arrive, Today.” The only person who should be allowed to use the term in any form, she tells us, is the suicide.
3. Yet On Kawara paints Today. Over and over again, thousands of times, in the notational shorthand of a host of languages. OCT.15, 1973. 6 MRT.1991. 1 MAR.1969. To paint a date is not to paint the contents of a day, but simply to affirm: Today. “This painting itself is January 15, 1966,” the subtitle for JAN.15, 1966 reads. He crafts a little box for each one of these works, its own small coffin, inside which he places a newspaper clipping from the day on which the work was painted, the Today it speaks or iterates. Why does the practice seem familiar? Who else does this? Why, kidnappers, of course: they photograph their victim holding up The New York Times, or have them read onto a tape: Today, Prime Minister H. Wilson of Great Britain called on Soviet Leaders; or, In Sasebo, Japan, policemen battled with several hundred leftist students this morning near the main entrance to the US naval base as the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Enterprise arrived. What they’re affirming, from inside the caskets in which they’ve been prematurely placed, is simply: I Am Still Alive.
4. Who has On Kawara kidnapped? The world leaders, sportsmen, astronauts, and film stars peopling his quasi-funerary newsprint hieroglyphics? (Melville’s Queequeg, Richardson’s Clarissa may have written on the outside of their coffins, but the Egyptians took as much care over the interiors: after all, that’s where the principal reader was situated.) Or is it the bit players whom he’s taken hostage: the crime victims and missing soldiers, centenarians and birth-weight-record-breaking babies? Or the extras who don’t even get named: the three hundred killed by the typhoon that ravaged Tokyo, the 14,400 striking union employees of General Electric Corp, the millions who’ll lose their houses in the stock-market crash? Or is it, in fact, precisely the other way round: is it, perhaps, not they but On Kawara himself who has been kidnapped? His own persona, thoughts, intentions, his experience on any given day, that is, Today, his whole reality—have these been hijacked or abducted, interned or interred, live-buried, by the paintings’ formulaic and po-faced neutrality, the dates’ typographic stonewall that reveals precisely nothing? No one seems to know a thing about the man. The only anecdotal tidbit that I recall ever reading about him—about him, that is—is that he likes fly fishing. He never goes to his own shows; never gives interviews or comments on the work; never releases photos; any of that stuff. His “biography” consists of no more than the number of days he has clocked up: on December 15, 1991, this amounted to 21,540.
5. Fly fishing. Let’s imagine him, whoever he is, doing this. The patience, the reflection (doesn’t on, in Japanese, mean “water”?); the ongoing possibility that something might break surface, show itself—but always tempered by the fact that it’s the possibility itself, not the event’s occurrence, that actually animates the whole pursuit, although then animate’s not the right word. Fills it with stillness, maybe. Fills its stillness. With what? Stillness. Yeats: “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/His mind moves upon silence.”
6. The Date Paintings each take a day to paint. If On Kawara hasn’t finished one by midnight, he destroys it, since it’s no longer a painting of Today. But then, of course, it’s no longer a painting of Today in any case: as soon as the paint’s dry, let alone by the time it’s viewed, exhibited, or sold, it’s already yesterday, last month, last year. And even while it’s being painted, or in the few hours, or minutes, that remain till midnight, it’s still not a painting of Today. “This painting itself is January 15, 1966,” the painting claims, when actually the exact opposite is true: the painting is everything but January 15, 1966; the essence or reality of January 15, 1966, is what has been left behind, excluded by the painting in its passage to completion, as a precondition of its permanent existence. What the painting iterates is its own time, minus the time. What has actually been kidnapped, held to ransom, by the work is time. Just like in Proust: the work sends us in search of the time that it itself has lost.
7. Is On Kawara a writer? If the answer to this question’s Yes, then what does that make me? Certainly, he’s obsessed, like any writer, by the question of narrative. I Got Up . . . I Went . . . I Met . . . I Read . . . These are the base units of any narrative, its opening move, Pawn to King Four gambit. He writes—rewrites, or overwrites—The Old Man and the Sea, reducing it to blank pages spread out to form a grid. A novel, continues the inscription. Could all his work be thought of as a novel? As a parenthetic, or peripatetic, epic in which On Kawara plays the role of both narrator and main character or “hero”? He’s so unheroic, though. I Got Up at 8.12 A.M., he reports from Oklahoma. That’s it. I Got Up at 8.29 A.M.—from Detroit. From Mexico City: I Got Up at 1.17 P.M. What kept him in bed so late in Mexico City? Or we’re given the route, marked out across a map, he followed through the streets of New York, Berlin, or Quito, Stockholm, Casablanca, Freetown. What happened at the corner of Twenty-third Street and Eighth Avenue, or by the synagogue on Kungsträdgårdsgatan? The work, in its repetitiveness, its monotony, doesn’t just withhold the answer; it renders the very question meaningless, irrelevant; it sacrifices its own hero, heroism itself, on the altar of monotony and repetition. On Kawara is heroically unheroic. He’s Bloom minus the shadow of Odysseus—minus even the shadow of the shadow.
8. Michel de Certeau dedicates his thinking to “the ordinary man,” those figures “who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one . . . an Other who is no longer God or the Muse, but the anonymous.” He carries on: “The straying of writing outside of its own place is traced by this ordinary man, the metaphor and drift of the doubt which haunts writing, the phantom of its ‘vanity,’ the enigmatic figure of the relation that writing entertains with all people, with the loss of its exemption, and with its death.” This has to do, he tells us, “with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics.” On Kawara in a nutshell.
9. Who’s writing, though? On Kawara himself writes very little; almost nothing. Whenever he can, he outsources the actual act of writing—of taking up a pen and scribbling down words—to a telegraph clerk, or an adjustable rubber stamp. Or to those giant adjustable rubber stamps, the printing presses. “Two students shot in Santo Domingo.” “65 people in Harlem for Malcolm X.” “The fire of Mineola Hotel.” “The killer of Wendy Sue Wolin, 7, is still hiding somewhere.” Stories, each of which would fuel a nineteenth-century novel, become, in the uniformity of their appearance, the endlessness of their procession, repetitive and monotonous as well, flattened down to a neutral, rolling screed of race riots, assassinations, royal visits, civil wars, devaluations, massings of refugees, hijackings, arms deals, uranium-enriching treaties, tenement fires, troop movements, hurricanes, more arms deals, prison riots, currency flotations, earthquakes, air disasters—and (yes) kidnappings. “The Brazilian Government agreed today to a second demand by the kidnappers of the Japanese consul general, Nobuo Okuchi, and said his safety was now in the hands of his captors.” “Argentine guerillas kidnapped the British honorary consul in Rosario, Stanley M. Sylvester, today and said he would be ‘tried before a people’s court of justice.’ ” The world is writing itself, already, all the time.
10. January 23, 1970: “A death mask stolen, of James Joyce.”
11. De Certeau talks about “scriptural systems.” Just like Kafka’s prisoners, we’re stuck inside a giant writing machine (the main feature of Kafka’s one is the incising “harrow”—so the term harrowing is voided of emotional implications, denoting instead simply the action of groove cutting, of mark making). These systems are another name for power, for control. It’s not so much that language is political; rather, the other way around: politics is a linguistic issue. “Users”—that is, consumers, citizens, who play the role of colonized “natives”—make their own paths, their parole-acts, through the langue of capitalist culture. “Even statistical investigation,” writes de Certeau, “remains virtually ignorant of these trajectories, since it is satisfied with classifying, calculating, and putting into tables the ‘lexical’ units which compose them but to which they cannot be reduced.” Elusive, slippery, parole-acts are raw, wild, “crazy” even; and the strategy of langue, the MO of the Man, is to recuperate these tactics and these moments of subversion, sanitize them, make them “sane” or rational, index and grid them, generally reign them back into the overall scriptural project, the project of power. “What is audible, but far away, will thus be transformed into texts in conformity with the Western desire to read its products.” Is On Kawara parodying this strategy and this desire, this tyrannical mania for making legible? Is he mining the citadel of power with tactical speech-gestures, speech-devices? Or is he just crazy?
12. Perhaps Kawara’s a next-generation Félix Fénéon. The midwife of the fin-de-siècle avant-garde was so elusive that his friends called him L’Homme Invisible, L’Homme qui Silence (hidden inside that second moniker, The Man Who Silences, is L’Homme qui s’y Lance: The Man Who Throws Himself Into It—but what is “it”?). And at the same time he was everywhere: man about town, perpetually drifting down the boulevards, hanging around the cafés (“I Met . . . ”), as he amassed his copy for La Revue Blanche—the White, or Blank, Review. Fénéon invented, in Le Figaro, the three-line news-haiku. “It was his turn at nine-pins when a cerebral hemorrhage felled M. André, seventy-five, of Levallois. While his ball was rolling, he ceased to be.” He once left a bomb on the windowsill of a café that was frequented by diplomats and bankers. It went off while he sipped an absinthe at another café round the corner (his route, on that day as on any other, would, if marked, have looked just like an On Kawara map). Arraigned and put on trial, he called, as a character witness, (who else?) Mallarmé: pioneer of blank space, herald of the end of narrative, of figuration, of all art—its end, or rather its overhaul into the always in-progress or to-come project that he (Mallarmé) would simply call The Book. Fénéon, despite his self-evident guilt, was acquitted. He claimed that the explosives found in his writing desk were for stunning fish.
13. De Certeau talks about the practice of perruque. Perruque is when the little guy, the worker, does something for his own ends under the guise of obediently serving his employer. When a cabinetmaker uses a lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living room, that’s perruque; so is when a market researcher or ad-agency employee abandons himself to reverie for half an hour. Whacking off on the boss’s time. Or going fly fishing. What perruque pilfers, or reclaims, is not material or funds, but simply time. De Certeau links this tactic to invention, and to ethics, and to art. To bring perruque to bear upon the everyday, he writes—to do this in the form of writing—“would be to practice an ‘ordinary’ art, to find oneself in the common situation, and to make a kind of perruque of writing itself.”
14. Ten years, that is, 3,650 or so days, ago, I took part in an iteration of Kawara’s ongoing performance piece One Million Years. I sat inside a glass box in Trafalgar Square and read the years out, one by one, into a microphone. 48896 BC 48894 BC 51700 A D 51702 A D. I read alternate years, since On Kawara had decreed that one man and one woman should sit in the box, side by side, speaking the dates in turns, like newsreaders. It lasted for a week, around the clock, with teams reading in relay, two-hour stints. I took the morning slot: at about 10 a.m. I’d report to a room (I don’t recall the number) in a swish hotel (I don’t recall the name) just off the square. Each morning, when I got there, I would be regaled by stories of the night before. These tales were never firsthand: the dead-of-night-shift readers would be long in bed by now. Nor were they even secondhand, since their relief-shift would have finished hours ago as well. The stories were like Chinese whispers, urban myths started that very day, Today: about nightclubbers throwing kebabs at the box; drunk girls flashing their breasts; boys pissing against the glass . . .
15. He wants you to read it soberly, reflectively, we were told. How will we know if we’re doing it right? I wondered out loud. He’ll be watching, one of the other volunteers said. You think so? I asked. Yeah, he answered: read it too fast, or frivolously, and this mad old Japanese guy will pop up from the crowd and shout: You done it wrong! I tried to remain neutral and indifferent. When I got to the years that ended 1970, 1972, 1974, and so on, though, this became difficult. Although the numbers had at least one other digit at their front, they still recalled for me the 1970s, when I’d been a small child: 1972 was when my brother was born; ’75 my sister. So I’d see these little babies, and their lives, what they’d become, all set against the savagery of dinosaurs, the mineral indifference of bubbling, sulfurous pools and meteorites, the brutal amnesia of eons. Nabokov: “the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold.”
16. Perruque. One morning, bored of the stale croissants and bad coffee that the Arts Council or Zwirner Gallery or whoever it was organizing the whole operation were serving up in the room, I went down to the hotel’s five-star restaurant and ordered a full breakfast. It was great. When the waiter brought me the bill, I wrote down the room number; but he asked me for a name as well. It’s not under my name, I told him; maybe the Arts Council, Zwirner. . . . But we need a person’s name, he said, politely but insistently. I thought for a while, then signed it: On Kawara.
17. To say I Am Still Alive is, ultimately, banal. To state I Am Dead, though: to be able to say that and mean it, to affirm its truth—that would be something else, something amazing. Blanchot describes facing a firing squad as a young man during the war, and, at the final moment, as the soldiers raised their guns and aimed, feeling exhilaration at the thought of fully experiencing the instant of his death, of both being possessed by and possessing it, living its time as present and as presence—and goes on to describe his enormous disappointment when, at the last minute, the event failed to happen, and he realized that this consummation had eluded him. He lived to ninety-six, or 34,850 days, forever in the shadow of this moment, this nonmoment, with “the instant of my death henceforth always in abeyance”: l’instant de ma mort désormais toujours en instance.
18. “To speak one’s own death,” says de Certeau, would be “to open within the language of interlocution a resurrection that does not restore to life.” This opening is not afforded the dying one, he concedes—“and yet,” he continues, “my death defines more clearly than anything else what speaking is.” He seems to be on the verge of articulating something quite momentous, of performing some great, Lazarus-like miracle of thought and reason—but he pulls away, and shifts his attention back to “the murmuring of everyday practices.” These, he says, “do not form pockets in economic society. They have nothing in common with these marginalities that technical organization quickly integrates in order to turn them into signifiers and objects of exchange. On the contrary, it is through them that an uncodable difference insinuates itself into the happy relation the system would like to have with the operations it claims to administer. Far from being a local, and thus classifiable, revolt, it is a common and silent, almost sheeplike subversion—our own.” Everyday practices, he concludes, institute their own time: “casual time.” And casual time, scattered all along duration, is eternal.
2015