Perhaps the most challenging thing for me to wrap my head around at Dia:Beacon was On Kawara’s Date Paintings. Kawara painstakingly created up to nearly 3,000 of these paintings, featuring the dates which they were made on. They are all rendered in the same typeface, adapting the orthography of whichever country that Kawara was in when he completed the painting. If he couldn’t finish it by midnight, the painting was destroyed.
As a conceptual artist, Kawara indeed focused on the idea and the information more so than the artwork, but I wondered about including him within the walls of Dia. After spending a half hour with the work, I started to feel what I think Kawara was trying to portray: the flattening of time, the attempt to change its scale to fit a human life.
I found a painting that corresponded with my brother’s birthdate and wondered how many other people had stood in the room and had the same experience – how each painting held a multitude of meanings dependent on those who stood before it. Yet, at the heart of each painting was Kawara’s hand itself, essentially rendering each canvas into a journal entry. I struggled the most with the inherent inconsistencies of undertaking such a series: the attempt to flatten cosmic time down to human scale; the attempt to portray the infinite via banal and everyday (literally) terms.