Paper Machines

“On January 4, 1966, Kawara made the first of his “Today” series, of which the work in this collection, April 24, 1990, is an example. Each consists of a neatly hand-lettered canvas commemorating the day of its creation. The canvases are stored in specially made cardboard boxes containing pages from a local newspaper of the same day and from whatever place the peripatetic artist happened to find himself in when he made the painting. Kawara does not paint every day—in the first year of this series, he made 241 such works—nor are all his canvases identical; the background tone varies from grays to reds to blues, and the typeface changes as well….”

-MOMA

I didn’t think much about Today when I spent time at Dia: Beacon back in college, but Kawara’s been on my mind lately.  Due to a lifelong interest in personal routines, as well as a recent general listlessness on my part, the “Life’s Work”, whose content is time but whose trajectory will ultimately be curbed by time, strikes my fancy.  The growing importance of documentation, and the pervasiveness of new media that facilitate it, has me thinking about why we do it, how we do it, and how it insinuates itself into the very content of everyday life that it claims to represent.  Documentation as content.