If Opalka’s paintings are to be considered
as Details of a single work and
Kawara’s date paintings can be similarly understood, then the sense of a
separate art object is loosened, in spite of the stand-alone, highly-crafted
aspects of the two series.
The status of the art object is further
undermined if the separate manifestations are part of an ongoing work, an opus, which is virtually inseparable
from the course and conduct of a life. The individual paintings become evidence
of a life, in and out of art, in which the act of painting is central but only
indicative.
Opalka’s insistence on the photographic
self-portraits which accompany the paintings and Kawara’s equal insistence on
avoiding photography are both tactics for binding art to life, for the one in
the other, for art as life or life as art. In Opalka’s case, the art is
accompanied by an inevitable mortality that the photographs document. While
numbers are untroubled by time, this is far from the case for the artist who
paints numbers.
For Kawara, the absence of a photograph of
the artist perhaps suggests the ineffability of experience, of a life that
stretches beyond any and every self-image. The inclusion of newspapers behind
the paintings is an indication that art and life take place in a world, in a
political, historical and cultural context. While individual date paintings
indicate a day in a life, when any number of date paintings are placed together, paintings and artist and world are inextricably entwined.