- Venue
- Ikon Gallery
- Location
In ‘Eternal Return’, an exhibition by On Kawara at Ikon Gallery, a series of his Date Paintings spill out from the centre of the gallery in a large spiral, beginning with ‘JANUARY 30, 1966’ and ending with dual paintings from ‘AUG, 23, 1998’, whose double presence functions like a conspicuous semi-colon, offering a sense of pause and of paintings that may still follow. On encountering the exhibition, the initial feeling of being witness to a cool conceptual act of repetition gives way to the haunting awareness of human presence or trace. A critical glance in which the intellectual rigour of the work is measured and historically contextualised slips to reveal a strangely insistent sense of subjectivity and human endeavour that emerges in the gaps and omissions between the dates. Or rather, it becomes located at the site of the painting, ‘JANUARY 30, 1966’. Here the sense of conceptual objectivity and something altogether more personal and more intimate seem to collide or become conflated.‘JANUARY 30, 1966’ is not the same as any other date: it seems charged with a potency or agency; its letters feel somehow declarative, like a statement or gesture of intent. Yet it also seems marked by not just a little indecision, not just a little unfamiliarity of gesture. The white font here is most definitely hand-painted, sketched out without a gauge or standardised script, unlike many of the other paintings, which could be mistaken for a template or as productions of mechanical means. A longer glance however reveals other variations and ruptures in the act of repetition: in other Date Paintings the order of letters and numerals change; punctuation flutters in and out of the date’s inscriptions, and linguistic and typographical inconsistencies allude to the geographical locations where the individual work was painted. The work begins to resonate perhaps with a sense of the specificity of time and place, even with political or personal influence and expressive investment. Some might argue that this is a misrepresentative projection of subjectivity onto an otherwise conceptual work, for the date paintings do of course perform in the manner of intellectual and anti-subjective conceptualism articulated by Sol Lewitt for whom, “the idea becomes a machine that makes art”. However, ‘JANUARY 30, 1966’, still seems somehow haunted by other readings; still stirs with other residual possibilities. Undoubtedly, the decision to indefinitely repeat an action is no slight matter; and waiting to begin the infinite task must register with uncertain gravitas. The voluntary move to repeat a rather banal, or inherently meaningless gesture, as such is not one that should be taken lightly. Would Sisyphus have begun to roll the rock had he not been under orders? Even with the myth’s promise of the kind of transcendental happiness brought about only through such actions of eternal recurrence; a doubt persists. Would he have wavered, might he not have ventured forth? At some stage, the repetitious act will become ritualised or occupy the status of a habit – but for some time it must feel at odds with the body, akin to the pain of trying to wear in new shoes. Even in this project there might have remained a hiatus between concept and action; a moment of pause or waiting; of human anticipation before the cogs of the conceptual ‘machine’ began to roll. Perhaps it is this, which registers in the slightly hesitant, uncertain strokes of ‘JANUARY 30, 1966’. For whilst the production or execution of a conceptual work might well operate with the systematic and impersonal precision of a machine, the decision to begin will perhaps always be marked by a sense of human, all too human deliberation.
