See on RATION

​

One of the foremost reasons for why On Kawara’s Oct. 31, 1978 (see fig. 1) at the Art Institute of Chicago is intriguing is the absence of the newspaper, that one newspaper from the date in question, in company. Without being accompanied by the newspaper, the installation of Oct. 31, 1978 seems to have failed in expressing one of the key themes of the painting, which is the social and political context surrounding the making of the painting. In other words, the context that traditionally takes a passive or implicit role in constituting an artwork but is one of the central theses that Kawara engages with goes unacknowledged, since the museum does not provide the newspaper.

​

The monographic exhibition of On Kawara’s date paintings, "On Kawara–Silence", at the Guggenheim, New York, in 2015 seems to have provided the antithesis to the installation at the Art Institute of Chicago. The general impression of the exhibition could be described as solemn and packed with history, literally (see fig. 2), and the company of newspapers to paintings was directly responsible for such an impression. In figure 2, one can observe that next to the painting, there rests a display case in which the newspaper from the date depicted is showcased. The display case is parallel to the floor and extends out from the wall, making a distinct contrast with the almost perfectly smooth, thereby very two-dimensional, painting. Based on its visual distinctiveness, the display case is performative as it generates curiosity and invites the action of the viewer coming toward. Inside the display case, the newspaper of off-white yet black and white colors – signs of seemingly simultaneous historicity and facticity – lies flat. However, facticity is not guaranteed, since the history is present in a meditated form, its primal materials cherry-picked first by the newspaper, then by the artist, and again by the curators; it is also present in a mediated form, as it is dominant in the interpretation of the painting but still nominally in service of the painting. One could say that the history here, in its highly curated appearance, is at once omnipresent and invisible.

​

Such a history-infused presentation of the paintings from the Today series is consciously or unconsciously negated at the Art Institute of Chicago, whose installation of Oct. 31, 1978 occurred (probably) after the exhibition at the Guggenheim. There are no other paintings from the same series, no spiral ramp to walk up, and no newspaper to frame a historical discourse around the painting. Instead, we have a survey-style showcase of some contemporary artworks in a square-shaped gallery. Oct. 31, 1978 faces the door but is treated with no further distinction in terms of lighting and wall space. Most differently, the historical implication of Kawara’s paintings heightened by the installation at the Guggenheim is absent here, particularly because of the nonappearance of the newspaper. As if it is reinforcing the absence of the newspaper, the label accompanying the painting only gives tombstone information, thereby forcing the viewer to focus on the painting itself. In this condition, one might ask oneself, what does the date painted in a typeface signify? Why does the artist paint the date in the print typeface “Futura,” and why does he choose to paint it so perfectly with only two colors of paint and no wet-in-wet painting? Furthermore, one could even feel annoyed at the impenetrability of the painting unaided by the lack of “background” information – the painting with its black-and-white opacity is already frustratingly void of the illusory window that viewers tend to associate with paintings (even modern and contemporary ones, as many of them are considered equipped with “visual depth”), but why is the historical window unavailable as well?

 

Much as the viewer could be frustrated, interpretations of the painting other than the historical ties come to be possible at precisely when the newspaper becomes physically unavailable. In the absence of media represented by the newspaper, another common understanding of Kawara’s date paintings that does not always rely on media arises to claim the popular vote – that is the personal identification with the date depicted. October 31, 1978, is not as historically momentous as June 16, 1969, the day of the lift-off of Apollo 11, which Kawara has painted as well. The supply of the newspaper from October 31, 1978, would have greatly enriched the historical implication of this painting. However, since the viewer is without the aid of the newspaper, the painting naturally implicates personal relationships the viewer has with the date depicted. Even though public events are likely to be intertwined with individual memories of a certain date, the specific moments of the events remembered and the extents to which the events are recollected tend to vary by individual. Not having gone through the standardizing filter of media – the newspaper – Oct. 31, 1978 installed in Chicago manages to retain its ability to engender personal connectivity.

 

Another interpretive advantage generated by the nonappearance of the newspaper is a possible thematic connection that forms between Oct. 31, 1978 and its spatial counterpart within the same gallery, Marcel Broodthaers’s Museum-Museum (see fig. 3). Situated on the wall across from Oct. 31, 1978, Museum-Museum is composed of two screen prints, whose juxtaposition of sixteen gold bullion bars representing established artists in history and another sixteen gold bullion bars representing commodities suggests and mocks a profound modern equivalence between the two notions. Sharing with Museum-Museum both the gallery and the clean-cut appearance, and no longer under the domination of the specific history reserved for the painting, Oct. 31, 1978 could take on the parodist dimension evident in the former.

 

Despite the various interpretations that emerge as probable once the newspaper disappears, it is not the goal of this essay to praise the curatorship of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, for their action could be out of convention and convenience rather than originarity. Neither is the goal to suggest a greatness associated with the interpretive malleability of Oct. 31, 1978, for the artist does not need another mystic emblem in that respect. The goal is to point out the malleability that is a vulnerability of meaning on the flip side. Neither the Art Institute of Chicago nor the Guggenheim presents Kawara’s painting(s) from the Today series as objectively as it intends to, since whether to include the newspaper(s) or not actually signifies an inevitable bifurcation and thereby the innate incompleteness of institutional interpretation. With the magical malleability claimed of Kawara’s paintings questioned, hopefully, the mystique surrounding the locus that connects Kawara’s paintings with his personality – the spiritual connection that is unexamined yet intuitively understood between Kawara’s seeming restraint on canvas and his reclusiveness – could also collapse to reveal its inner projects.

 

It is fathomable that the solo exhibition of Kawara at the Guggenheim overwhelmed its visitors with historical details, even though the newspapers are original to the work of Kawara. That exhibition marks an opportunity in which Bal and Bryson’s post-structuralist semiotic critiques on the concepts of context and authorship could come, as the exhibition has high regard for both of these concepts. On the other hand, admittedly questionable, the ingenuity inadvertently shining through the display at the Art Institute of Chicago probably will not be realized purposively in a solo exhibition; this is largely due to the discipline’s obsession with monographs, the project of making individual legends whom the discipline purports as capable of characterizing their social and historical milieus. Kawara’s date paintings prove to be particularly interesting cases to study in light of today’s rapid development and proliferation of museum practice, since they function more as mirrors that reflect institutional habits than as specimens that provide concrete evidence for their sources: the artist, etc.