On Kawara, serial dater
Rowland Bagnall | Apollo | 5th December 2024
At the time of his death, Kawara would have put his age at 29,771 days. On quite a few of those days he made a text painting of the date. For over 30 years, he also sent occasional telegrams to friends saying “I am still alive”. And then there were the eleven years of daily postcards declaring “I got up”. Kawara was obsessed with the passing of time and “the slow ebbing away of life”. Differences in his “date” paintings are only minor but enough to remind us of the question “what are the traces we leave behind”?