“On January 4, 1966, Kawara made the first of his “Today” series, of which the work in this collection, April 24, 1990, is an example. Each consists of a neatly hand-lettered canvas commemorating the day of its creation. The canvases are stored in specially made cardboard boxes containing pages from a local newspaper of the same day and from whatever place the peripatetic artist happened to find himself in when he made the painting. Kawara does not paint every day—in the first year of this series, he made 241 such works—nor are all his canvases identical; the background tone varies from grays to reds to blues, and the typeface changes as well….”
-MOMA
I didn’t think much about Today when I spent time at Dia: Beacon back in college, but Kawara’s been on my mind lately. Due to a lifelong interest in personal routines, as well as a recent general listlessness on my part, the “Life’s Work”, whose content is time but whose trajectory will ultimately be curbed by time, strikes my fancy. The growing importance of documentation, and the pervasiveness of new media that facilitate it, has me thinking about why we do it, how we do it, and how it insinuates itself into the very content of everyday life that it claims to represent. Documentation as content.
Gosh, Lil Mommika is so smart.
This is something I think about a lot as well. I worry a lot about my inability to document things well and the idea that memories fade and run together is pretty depressing to me.
I’ve managed to get over that a little bit, though, and not let it upset me… It helps to think about documenting as content, like this, rather than an attempt to beat back time and hold on to things.
Maybe it’s better to let memories fade to a general feeling of each life phase- time, place, routine and people. I’ve moved around a lot in the past six years. I am restless too.
