Японский художник Онома Кавара: Жизнь и творчество

Japanese artist (1932–2014)

was a Japanese conceptual artist who lived in SoHo, New York City, from 1965. He took part in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.

Kawara was born in Kariya, Japan on December 24, 1932. After graduating from Kariya High School in 1951, Kawara moved to Tokyo. Kawara went to Mexico in 1959, where his father was the director of an engineering company. He stayed three years, painting, attending art school and exploring the country. From 1962 to 1964 he moved back and forth between New York and Paris. He travelled through Europe before settling in 1965 in New York City, where he was an intermittent resident until his death.

Kawara belonged to a broadly international generation of Conceptual artists that began to emerge in the mid 1960s, stripping art of personal emotion, reducing it to nearly pure information or idea and greatly playing down the art object. Along with Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Hanne Darboven and others, Kawara gave special prominence to language. Esperanto is used when the first language of a given country does not use the Roman alphabet (“6 AŬG. 1993”, from Tokyo). The series is an example of word art. The paintings, executed in Liquitex on canvas, conform to one of eight standard sizes, ranging from 8x10 inches up to four by six feet, are always centered on the canvas and painted white, whereas the background colors vary; the paintings from the early years tend to have bold colors, and the more recent ones tend to be darker in tone. For example, Kawara briefly used red for several months in 1967 and then returned to darker hues until 1977. Four coats of paint are carefully applied for the ground and each allowed enough time to dry before being rubbed down in preparation for subsequent coats. Eschewing stencils in favor of hand drawn characters, Kawara skillfully renders the script, initially a sans serif, elongated version of Gill Sans, later a quintessentially modernist Futura. Each work is carefully executed by hand. Some days he made more than one. When Kawara was unable to complete the painting on the day it was started he immediately destroyed it. Each Date Painting is registered in a journal and marked on a One Hundred Years Calendar. When Kawara finished a painting, he applied a swatch of the paint mixture he used to a small rectangle that was then glued onto a chart in the journal. Under each colour is a number showing the painting's sequence in that year and a letter indicating its size. The 48 journals in more than 112 cities worldwide in a project that was planned to end only with his death.

Much like the Today series, Kawara uses the number of days followed by the date the work was executed as his life dates. So the piece entitled Title at the National Gallery of Art has Kawara's life dates as 26,697 (January 27, 2006) which, when calculated, place Kawara's birthdate at December 24, 1932. Other series of works include the I Went and I Met series of postcards sent to his friends detailing aspects of his life, and a series of telegrams sent to friends and neighbors bearing the message "I AM STILL ALIVE". Between 1968 and 1979, On Kawara created his information series, I Got Up, in which he sent two picture postcards from his location on that morning. All of the 1,500 The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months; the gesture's repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist's peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty eight cities).

One Million Years is one of the artist's best known works about the passage and marking of time. It lists each year for the one million year period leading up to the artwork's conception and the million years that follow it. The work listing the past million years is dedicated to "all of those who have lived and died", and the work for the future million years is dedicated to "the last one". It is sometimes performed, during which pairs of performers (typically one male and one female for each segment) read dates from each list in order, simultaneously performing One Million Years [Past] and One Million Years [Future]. The artwork was first made in 1969, the year of the Woodstock music festival, major civil protests against the Vietnam War and man's first landing on the Moon. The first audio presentation of the reading of One Million Years occurred in 1993 during Kawara's yearlong solo exhibition “One Thousand Days One Million Years” at Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Visitors could hear One Million Years [Future] being read, while viewing One Million Years [Past] and a group of date paintings. In 2002 Oliver Augst and Christoph Korn directed the radio production of the Hessischer Rundfunk of One Million Years (consisting of 32 CDs). The longest public reading from One Million Years took place at documenta 11 in 2002, where male and female participants sat side by side in a glass enclosure taking turns reading dates for the duration of the 100 day exhibition, switching between [Past] and [Future]. In 2004, the project traveled to Trafalgar Square in London for a continuous outdoor reading lasting 7 days and 7 nights. Since then, readings and recordings have taken place in cities around the world.

For his one hundred year calendars, Kawara, starting with the date of his birth, systematically marks each day of his life with a yellow dot on the calendars, and registers a completed date painting with a green dot (red dots signify that more than one painting was completed on that given day).

Kawara's first exhibitions include the first Nippon Exhibition, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, in 1953, and at the Takemiya and Hibiya galleries the following year. Kawara's first comprehensive retrospective, “On Kawara—Silence” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, was installed in 12 sections according to a plan devised by himself. Two years before his death, the artist offered the exhibition curator Jeffrey Weiss a list of oblique titles—including “48 Years,” “Self Observation” and “Monologue”—for each of the sections. The exhibition was held February 6 through May 3, 2015, and also featured a live reading of Kawara's “One Million Years.”

In 2007, one of Kawara's "Date Paintings" was sold for $1.8 million at Christie's New York.

Kawara died in New York on July 10, 2014, at the age of 81. Kawara's published obituaries state that he was alive for 29,771 days rather than giving dates of birth and death. Kawara's ″100 Years Calendar″ indicates that he was born on December 24, 1932, not on 2 January 1933, as was officially recorded. This would make the date of his death, June 27, 2014.