Lining each cardboard box that holds an On Kawara date painting is a copy of that day's local newspaper. It is information that may be unpacked with the unpacking of the painting itself. Behind the abstraction of the date, there is a seething of events.
A room of these paintings can be very beautiful, a narrow range of colours and sizes changing occasionally across the years. But appreciation of their minimal aesthetic is soon drowned out in a bubbling up of content once individual dates are recognised and begin to yield their store of private and public memories and associations. Quite as much as the artist, we are contemporary with these paintings, living along with them. The dates are triggers, sharply particular in significance or carrying a more muted sense of a cultural era.
Kawara's abandoned 'I am still alive' series may be subsumed into the date paintings, but in a more sombre tone. While the telegrams registered surprise or cheery persistence, in the paintings Kawara is a survivor and a witness.
Yet whatever is happening in the news, outside the artist's control, commitment to the act of painting is constant. Most days of any year since he began this series in 1966, On Kawara has been at work, preparing a canvas, mixing paint, laying out the letters and numbers of the date, maintaining a practice through the flux of events.