On January 4, 1966, the conceptual artist On Kawara made a painting recording that day’s date. The work, Jan. 4, 1966, with white letters and numbers on a solid blue background, was begun and finished that day, signed on the reverse, and placed in a handmade box with a clipping from the New York Times.
Repeating the same format and process, Kawara made 12 more paintings in January, 16 in February, 23 in March, and so on, for nearly five decades. He made between 63 and 241 of these date paintings each year, almost 3,000 by the time of his death in 2014, marking the passage of time.
Kawara had an exacting set of rules for the works, collectively known as the Today series. Each painting consists of the date it was made, and if one was not complete before midnight it was destroyed. The letters and numbers are always white, in a sans-serif font, capitalized, and centered. The months (other than May, June, and July) are abbreviated, and the languages and date formats correspond to the places where the paintings were made. The backgrounds are always solid, usually dark, painted with four coats of Liquitex acrylic. The canvases are one of eight standard sizes, ranging from eight by ten inches to four by six feet, all horizontal in orientation. The exceptions are three larger paintings, five by seven feet, made on July 16, 20, and 21, 1969, during the time of the Apollo 11 lunar mission.
When a date painting is not exhibited, it is stored in a custom-made cardboard box lined with a newspaper clipping from the city in which the painting was made. Kawara documented the works in journals – 48 in total, one for each year of the series – indicating the size, color, sequence within the year, and the newspaper headline. In his One Hundred Years Calendar, he noted the specific days on which date paintings were made, as well as the number of days since his own birth.
While the Today series marks the passage of specific days, Kawara’s One Million Years is another precise but more expansive representation of time. In two large volumes, Kawara lists one million years into the past and one million years into the future. The first book, Past, is dedicated to “all those who have lived and died” and lists the years from 998,031 BC to 1969 AD, the year when the artist first began the work. The second book, Future, is dedicated to “the last one,” beginning with 1993 and ending with 1,001,992 AD.
The beginning and ending years vary among editions because Kawara originally began the project with 24 works: 12 Past books, with dates ending the year prior, and 12 Future books, with dates starting the year following each one’s creation. The years from 1971 to 1980 are not represented in any book.
Each volume comprises 10 binders, each binder contains 200 pages, and each page counts 500 years. The pages are aligned in block format with 10 columns and 10 sequential dates across each line. Lines are grouped in blocks of 10 that each contain 100 years, with five blocks on each page, on and on across 2,000 typed pages, counting one million years.
In 1993 Kawara expanded One Million Years to include public readings of the work. He defined a format in which a pair of readers, one male and one female, read dates from the volumes, always in English, and always beginning where a previous reading ended, until each year has been read aloud. To date, 45 readings of One Million Years have taken place in 31 cities, with the longest one taking place at Documenta 11 in 2002, where dates were read during the entire 100-day exhibition.
Like Yayoi Kusama, with whom On Kawara shared a studio in the 1960s, his work is vast while full of self-imposed limits. As Kusama represents micro and macro with dots that signify both particles and stars, Kawara documents time – days and millennia, past and future, individual and universal. His own life measured 29,771 days, which would span about six of the 4,000 pages in One Million Years.