Empathic thinking is a very important skill that engaging with art can teach you. It does this through the active effort involved in understanding the motives of the artist. It's not through immediate communication that art is able to solicit feelings of social understanding and empathy, but it happens rather when the audience actively engages with the work. The audience then ponders why another person, the artist, would make the work and why it could possibly be important to them.
It is only through a viewer who curiously engages with the unfamiliar other, that art is able to train us to view the world from somebody else's perspective and thus broaden our world-view.
In many ways I feel like this is emphatic ability is best represented by the work of On Kawara. This is the case even if his work is most often seen as hardcore conceptualism, focussed on the essentials of language with a minimalist aesthetic, and thereby stripped of any emotional connection to the human condition.
I believe the work of On Kawara only appears this way if a spectator has no empathy and no ability to understand what others do with their life when they are not around.
An important first step in an empathetic engagement with art is that you trust that the artist has presented something for you that is worthy not only of their, but also your, time and consideration. This is unfortunately not always the case, but as a viewer you must nevertheless trust that it is so.
At first glance the works of On Kawara may not appear as worthy of any attention. After all, they are simple facts presented in simple forms; telegrams with the text 'I am still alive', paintings of a date in white letters on a coloured background, a book that lists one million years. Without actively thinking about the context of the work and the person who made it, these objects may appear as straightforward statements of no importance whatsoever.
Yet, if we understand more about how the work came into being, the more we see that it's a complex work of many considerations, all of which undoubtedly were of some importance to the artist.
Let's consider the date paintings of the 'Today' series. These paintings have a few simple rules; each painting displays the date on which it was made. If the painting isn't finished in a single day, it is destroyed. The date is always centered and written in white, sanserif, lettering on a coloured background. The language of the date is adjusted to the language of the country where the painting is made. And if the country does not use the Latin alphabet, Esperanto is the language of choice. After completion, the painting is placed in a box with a clipping from a newspaper of that day, from the locality the painting was made in.
At first glance, these rules seem like a straightforward method to create a formalistic language and develop an artistic style. Upon closer inspection, essentially all of these choices are significant within the context in which these choices were made.
At the beginning of any artwork there are the technical means by which it was created. For the Today series, this is Liquitex acrylic paint on canvasses of various size. This seems insignificant, because who cares what paint the artist used for such simple declarative statements, right? Yet as we have seen, Kawara must finish each painting in a single day. As these paintings are necessarily made up of multiple layers of paint, one needs a paint that dries fast enough in order to achieve this. Liquitex was the first water based acrylic paint and only came to market in
1956, ten years before started his Today series. Only this kind of water based acrylic paint dries fast enough to reasonably finish such a painting in single day. Therefore it was essentially impossible to make these paintings under these conditions only ten years earlier.
The paintings are also displays of a reasonable amount of technical skill on behalf of the artist. It took a number of years for Kawara to obtain a degree of mastery over the process, which can clearly be seen when early paintings of similar sizes are compared to later ones:
It's therefore easy to see that the works, although simple in their appearance, are interesting from a mere technical viewpoint, even without any 'conceptual' interpretation.
The method Kawara employs, where the same technique is repeated over and over until one has achieved mastery of their craft, is also a distinctively Japanese persuasion. In the West much emphasis is placed on the new and the novel, especially in art, while in Japan constant refinement of techniques over years or decades has been, and still is, valued in many aspects of society. An obvious and almost clichéd example are the many rock gardens that require precise maintenance by literal monks.
Furthermore, there is a genuine risk of failure in these paintings. Any other painting, can, at least in theory, be reworked, remodelled or repurposed to become something of value. Yet Kawara's self-imposed rule that any painting must be executed in a single day provides a framework whereby the artist realistically only gets one attempt at creating a particular painting. In this sense it's akin to calligraphy, where an artist has only one chance to make a mark on a particular piece of paper.
Looking beyond the technical aspects, the written content of the paintings is of course not unimportant.
The subject of the work is consistently a single date that is formatted per the customs of the country where the painting was made, but always in the Gregorian calendar and Latin alphabet. This use of the Gregorian calendar gives the work an international outlook during a time when Japan was still very much recovering and re-defining its international relationships after the catastrophic end of the second world war. In the years after the second world war, the relationship between Japan and the West, largely embodied by the USA, was far from simple and many aspects of Japanese culture and government had changed under Western occupation in the two decades prior to the start of the Today series. For a Japanese artist to embrace the Gregorian calendar as the works only exponent is therefore anything but the evident and neutral course of action it is sometimes perceived to be.
In addition, there is something to be said about the differences in a historical conception of time between Japan and the West, or rather between Christian and Buddhist traditions. In Christianity, the time one spends on earth is linear and ends in an 'eternal' afterlife, while for a Buddhist your presence on earth is a cycle of rebirth, which may one day cumulate in Nirvana as a state without time. The implications of this difference are too large to fully explore here, but it does make one think about how the two traditions could ascribe different values to a painting of a date.
These simple remarks are thus a strong indication of the social implications of Kawara's work and his own keen sense of them. More direct evidence of Kawara's own dedication to the social implications of his work can be seen in a project Kawara called 'Pure Consciousness'. For this project, Kawara placed seven date paintings, comprising a full week in the Gregorian calendar, inside classrooms of various elementary schools throughout the world.
This places the date paintings in a direct relationship with a place of learning, during a period when the children are familiarised with the concepts that the day paintings exemplify, which in turn highlights the artificial construction of their subject. Although a calender is based on some natural phenomena from the relative positions of celestial objects, like a day and a year, the subdivision of a year into seven days is arbitrary to an extent. Yet this arbitrary subdivision guides much of our lives with the idea of a work week and so on. Children are taught these arbitrary rules, but without the ability to reflect on them, these children become adults for whom these ideas are so ingrained they are fundamental to how they perceive the world.
Through placing the date paintings in an environment where learning is done by open minds without reference, Kawara shows that to him the date paintings are not a straightforward affirmation of a simple fact, but rather a way to reflect on a complex social construct that has many hidden implications.
Throughout Kawara's career he also went through great lengths to obfuscate any information about himself as a person. No biographical information is made available, other than what is known from works such as 'I am still alive' and no photographs of the artist have ever been officially published. Yet unlikely artists like stanley brouwn, Ian Wilson, or more recently Tino Seghal, who extended such tactics to the work itself, making it paradoxically covetable and mysterious, Kawara has always allowed extensive and generous publishing of the work itself. He therefore simply acknowledges the importance of the work over the artist as an individual.
While in Western modernity a lot of emphasis is placed on the individual, best exemplified in the shape of the artistic genius, Japanese tradition places greater emphasis on one's place within a greater society. Kawara's self-removal from the works image thus can once again be seen as a keen awareness of differences in social constructions that are present in the world and what is often described as a claim to 'objectivity' in art-historical texts, is therefore just as much a simple demonstration of how one can be sensitive to the experience of others.
Therefore I'd like to conclude with the statement that if one wishes to learn about the complex understanding of others one can glean from art, then you need to look no further than the of On
Kawara. In all its superficial simplicity, his work explicates many aspects about Kawara's own philosophical
attitude towards the world, as well as more general aspects of Japanese
culture and its changing relationship towards the west during the 20th
century.
It can both be read as a personal accounting, as well as an
description of the universal. It is both steeped in traditional
Japanese values, as well as a comprehensible expression of globalisation
after the second world war.
And perhaps most important is the fact that the only way to see and appreciate
the breath of his work is to look beyond one's own limitations and have
a genuine, unprejudiced, interest in what may have motivated the artist to
record such obvious and self-evident facts with a high degree of
discipline.
