I am still alive. Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara sent these telegrams to friends throughout the 70s. He's most famous for his date paintings, in which he paints the day's date on canvas before midnight. His book series I Met is a 12 volume list of the people he met in the '60s and '70s. His ten volume One Million Years (Past and Future) comprises books with every one of 1,000,000 years (998,031 BC-1969 AD (past) and 1980-1,001,980 AD (future) listed. Reading One Million Years is a series of installations of readings from the books. One was placed in Trafalgar Square, and in a further wrinkle in time, this guy caught it with his pinhole camera. Here is a short essay about Kawara's existentialism, and here's a longer essay (Google cache) about Kawara's art's ontology. (PDF)
posted by OmieWise on Apr 10, 2006 - 51 comments