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1/22/2009

On Kawara: One Million Years

Late last year a friend forwarded me an email requesting volunteers to participate in a new recording of On Kawara's One Million Years at David Zwirner's gallery in Chelsea. I immediately submitted my request to volunteer.

I've long been drawn to Kawara's work, which deals primarily with human consciousness and the means by which we mark, interpret and process the inexorable passage of time. Kawara is probably best known for his ongoing series of paintings, Today -- small monochromatic canvases, each meticulously painted with the date on which they were created. The Dia:Beacon museum in upstate New York features a room devoted to the series. Another, more playful example of his work is the series I Got Up At, which consists of typical tourist postcards Kawara sent to numerous friends. The back of the (typewritten!) cards feature only the recipient's address, the date and the time Kawara awoke that day ("I got up at 7:23 AM," for example). Other cards are still more droll, bearing the simplest affirmation of existence: "I am still alive."

Like many conceptual artists who came of age in the 1960s, Kawara's work might be superficially dismissed as arch, academic, or unpleasantly clinical. But upon closer examination, the artist's work has a powerfully human resonance. For the current exhibition at David Zwirner, a glass-fronted recording booth has been installed in the center of the gallery. Inside, a male and female reader sit side by side, taking turns reading aloud a series of years from the distant past. Their voices are broadcast into the gallery space over loudspeakers, and recorded by a sound engineer positioned at a table in the corner of the gallery. The edited results will eventually be compiled and made available as a limited edition set of (no doubt prohibitively expensive) CDs.

Skeptical friends scoffed when I excitedly told them I planned to spend Saturday afternoon sitting in a booth reading a series of numbers from a book for absolutely zero pay. The tedium, they exclaimed. Wouldn't I be happier playing ping-pong, or reading an old copy of US Weekly? As the day of the reading approached, I began to wonder if they might be right. But my enthusiasm was renewed as I entered the recording booth, donned the headphones and looked down at the page, neatly organized into small rows and columns of black figures on a white ground. Each page represented an almost unfathomable span of time, exponentially longer than my own tiny lifespan. The audio engineer began the digital recording, and I began to read.

For the first few minutes, I concentrated primarily on the elocution of the numbers themselves. It’s not difficult to comprehend the number 962,433 BC, and it only requires a little attention to successfully speak it out loud. The act of reading ordinarily belies an understanding of the thing one reads. But I was surprised to find how active and engaged I had to remain in order to successfully read the numbers aloud in a long succession. Secondarily, I concentrated on finding a rhythm between my voice and that of my female partner, a pleasant person and complete stranger. As we developed a common, looping cadence, something unexpected happened. I had imagined the reading would grow more and more automatic as we continued -- the numbers would melt away and my mind would begin to wander, I would scrutinize the gallery visitors milling about the space. Eventually, the reading would become effortless and I would maybe even grow bored.

In reality, the exact opposite occurred. As the minutes ticked on, the numbers grew ever stranger and more powerful, commanding total focus and dominating more and more of the real estate of my consciousness. An odd thing was transpiring: years, decades and centuries were being truncated and condensed into seconds, moments, and minutes. So-called "real time," meanwhile, was slipping further out of my grasp. It began to seem unreal, pliable, distended. My awareness of time was was occurring at multiple, discrete speeds, and the cumulative effect was overwhelming and dizzying. For a few moments the veil was, as they say, torn asunder, leaving me painfully aware of how little real meaning there is in the numerical system humans have devised to mark time. I was also aware, however, that some such system is essential and indispensable to life as we know it, even as it temporarily ceased to apply.

Suddenly, finally, the audio engineer’s voice came over the headphones, announcing we had accumulated enough material. I felt simultaneously very light and totally exhausted. I looked at my partner. She seemed similarly bewildered and disoriented by what had gone on. I realized with something of a shock that there now existed an undeniable intimacy between us, and yet we had not communicated directly at all. I knew nothing about the details of her life. We had simply sat together, our voices in awkward counterpoint, simultaneously marking the passage of minutes and centuries. I felt there was something very human and universal about our shared experience, and also almost indescribably sad.

I wonder how the experience affected the few people who wandered into and out of the gallery during the reading. Like all good museum goers, their expressions revealed a socially correct, vaguely meditative blankness as they politely observed the proceedings. I probably would have adopted the same distant stance had I been on the other side of the glass. How grateful I feel to have been positioned before the mic instead. It’s not often that one has the opportunity to become actively immersed in an artist’s project; too often art maintains a divide between observer and observed that cannot be breached, regardless of the emotional content of the work. How unexpected that an istallation as superficially tedious and dry as One Million Years could engender such a disorienting and potent suspension of normal lived experience. As I pulled on my coat and wandered out into the frigid January afternoon, I thought of the famous quote from Borges: "Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."

On Kawara: One Million Years is on display through Feb. 14.

http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/