Pure Timelessness

On Kawara's paintings in a kindergarten.

On Kawara, Pure Consciousness, Ostend, 2011. Photo: Kristien Daem

We all have at least one artwork stored in our memory that we think about on a regular basis— an artwork that remains in the background and sometimes resurfaces in our mind in some way, presenting unresolved questions that sometimes we can’t even get to fully formulate. In my case, that work is On Kawara’s Pure Consciousness.

I was unaware of the existence of this work until one day, several years ago, when Phillip Van den Bossche, then director of the MU.ZEE in Ostend, Belgium,  emailed me a photo of it. We had met a few years back during a conference I had organized about pedagogy where he spoke about the work of conceptual artist Jef Geys, and we have continued our dialogue over the years. I was at the time researching the Reggio Emilia Approach, the early childhood education system and its relationship to art making.

The photo he sent me was of the 2011 installation he conducted in Ostend of an ongoing conceptual project titled Pure Consciousness by artist On Kawara, consisting in hanging seven of the artist’s date paintings inside a kindergarten classroom.  The instructions for the project are as follows:

1.     Seven date paintings (JAN. 1, 1997 (A), JAN. 2, 1997 (B), JAN. 3, 1997 (A), JAN. 4, 1997 (B), JAN. 5, 1997 (B), JAN. 6, 1997 (A), JAN. 7, 1997 (B)) should be hung in a kindergarten classroom. The paintings should be hung high to prevent children from touching them. They should not be put in vitrines.

2.     Only children aged 4-6 may see the exhibition. Or rather, live in the exhibition. The teacher must not explain the paintings to the children even if asked. They should not even respond.

3.     The exhibition is open to the public during weekends or other days when the children are not present.

4.     The exhibition period should be from one day to approximately two months.

5.     No one should ask the children about their reactions to the paintings. The purpose of the exhibition is simple: to allow the children to look at the paintings as they are. Nothing more. Some children may form a memory in their minds, some may not. Education generally has a social purpose. In that regard, this exhibition is not educational.

6.     Do not make any exhibition announcements or press releases.

I wanted details from Van den Bossche  on how this project unfolded in Ostend.

He wrote me the following:

 “On Kawara proposed the project to me, through his gallery in Belgium (Micheline Szwajcer). I selected the kindergarten. It's in the street where we live in Ostend, and where our children also went to school (although they were already older and not in kindergarten anymore). As I knew some of the teachers and the school director everything happened really fast.”

Van den Bossche followed the artist’s instructions faithfully. “We never talked about this [i.e., to the school children]. The date paintings were installed when school was out. I never mentioned the insurance value of the art works to the school director (paid by the museum). With Micheline Szwajcer I visited the children in their class
room. We stayed for an hour, talking with them, but not about the date paintings.”

”There was no (art) public moment [i.e., opening] in Ostend. The last weekend was the
annual school party with parents and family. The school director mentioned the project in his speech and said the class could be visited, but if I remember well, except for my wife, children and I nobody followed his invitation and stayed at the school party.”

When I first saw the image, I was profoundly moved by the work, especially because On Kawara had passed away recently at that time and I was struck by the fact that this late work, specifically created for 4–6-year-old children, was conceived by an artist then nearing his 70s. I had many questions about it, for example: why had he chosen a kindergarten to present this work?

The text that accompanies this work, available on the website of the One Million Years Foundation that supports and promotes the legacy of On Kawara, states:

“The consecutive dates are like a counting exercise, for example, and the seven-day span represents that building block of the calendar, the week. The paintings also illustrate size relations, bigger and smaller, as Kawara alternates between formats that differ by just a few square inches, and the slight changes in hue express a subtle but significant relationship between repetition and variation.”

The idea for Pure Consciousness seemingly emerged from a conversation between the artist and the curator Jonathan Watkins, as they were planning Kawara’s inclusion in the Sydney biennial in 1997, titled Every Day, as described by Watkins himself in an essay. They picked the kindergarten of Darlinghurst Public School for the first iteration of this project. It has travelled all over the world, including the 2011 installation in Ostend and continuing even  now, years after Kawara’s passing.

On Kawara is a towering artist of the post-war era, and his work is as ubiquitous in museum collections as it is known for its utter consistency and conceptual rigor. Even those who are not familiar with contemporary art might recognize his famous date paintings. But for all his ubiquity, he was also a famously self-effacing artist.  As Ann Wheeler, program director of the One Million Years Foundation told me, after I inquired about this:  “ Kawara did not speak or write about any of his work, this piece included; he did not grant interviews, make public appearances, use written correspondence, allow his photo to be taken, etc. So yes, it is entirely accurate to describe him as "elusive," as he was very deliberately so.”

As someone so elusive, we of course don’t have any insights from the artist about his own work. When I asked Wheeler about what she thought of the work herself, she replied: “For me, as a scholar, Kawara's definitive refusal to divulge personal information or anything about "artists’ intent" is part of the beauty in his work, and part of what continues to draw me—and you, I imagine—into wanting to know more. Nothing is explained to us, like nothing is explained to the kindergarteners: I think you can draw (and already seem to be drawing) many parallels there. You ask for my opinion […] but my opinion also doesn't really matter; it's more interesting what YOU think about it.”

In examining my own first reactions about the work, I recall inevitably thinking about the relationship between  time and childhood.

One of the most important aspects of On Kawara’s work is the act, and the process, of memorialization of the present. The gesture of permanently marking a fleeting moment— writing a date into a painting that will exist for a long time— is not only a way to bring awareness of that fleeting day, but to retain it in some way, as official record, as history.  The juxtaposition of the date paintings with the world of childhood is meaningful in the sense that time, for the child, does not exist in the way that it exists for adults, as Piaget once argued. As the psychologist Wilfried Lippitz characterizes Piaget’s view,  “The child does not recognize succession as a structure; it manifests itself to the child in the form of processes of movement of intuitive objects: two or more objects which have different speed, and which overtake one another are compared with one another.”

Part of the child’s understanding of time as the way in which one activity succeeds another belies the fact that there is no larger intellectual understanding of time, i.e. an abstract understanding— setting aside the fact that this concept is anyway one of the most difficult even for philosophers to define.

For those of us who have been parents or caretakers or otherwise have been very close to the daily life of a child, we know that time for a child is not so much a concatenation of past and future days but rather a constantly unfolding present, where every single moment is lived fully and often joyously. Having a daughter, I was fascinated by how every single day that she lived as a toddler was a whole world onto itself: an everlasting present.  Young children don’t have to carry the weight of the past nor do they feel anxiety for the future as adults do.

I then recalled another example of another deliberately elusive (or rather, reclusive) artist who did an exhibition for children: Joseph Cornell in 1972 at Cooper Union, curated by art historian and Cornell’s friend Dore Ashton. A deeply shy man, Cornell nonetheless opened up to children and was fascinated with the possibility of communicating with them. As Deborah Solomon once wrote, Cornell “retained an exalted vision of childhood”. The works in that exhibition were installed at a low level so that the young visitors could see the works and speak with the artist about what they saw.

Joseph Cornell talking with children visiting his exhibition at Cooper Union, 1972

Thinking of that example of an artist so eager to fully engage with children, and after reading the instructions for Pure Consciousness, as a lifelong educator I confess I was initially bothered by the apparent contradiction, inherent in the instructions for the piece, in stating that “education generally has a social purpose” while adding that “the teacher must not explain the paintings to the children even if asked.” To me that was a decidedly harsh, anti-social position.

However, I later reflected that this piece is not meant to be in a museum context with all its support and mediation mechanisms. The works are presented outside any artistic frame, simply there as a presence that may be interpreted by the child in whichever way they want. In a sense, the date paintings hanging in the classroom are not meant to be pre-identified as art works, but just objects that are present: objects with numbers, things to look at and experience in a non-verbal way, “living with the works” as it is described in the foundation’s text on its website.

The art historian Anne Rorimer, in her oft-referred to essay about the Date paintings in 89 Cities from 1992-93, quotes an illuminating reflection by Tolstoy:

I have keenly experienced consciousness of myself today, at 81 years, exactly as I was conscious of myself at 5 or 6 years. Consciousness is motionless. And it is only because of its motionlessness that we are able to see the motion of that which we call time. If time passes, it is necessary that there should be something that remains static. And it is consciousness of self that remains static.

In a way, Pure Consciousness is a project not just outside of the frameworks of art but also outside of time, or perhaps entering that extended present of childhood that in a way could truly befit its descriptor of “pure consciousness”.

The fact that this is one of the only works that can continue being produced after the artist’s passing seems significant to me, bolstering the argument that this work is about a form of timeless continuity. Or, as Van Den Bossche told me, “It's amongst other [things] about past, present and future (generations) of children, parents
(themselves), time and finding your own words.”

Now that I have finished writing this, I will now put the work on the back of my mind again, so it can remain silently hung in there, unarticulated in words, in that pre-alchemical, unadulterated form. But I am sure it will come back to my conscious mind, just as it is meant to go back to yet another kindergarten classroom somewhere in the world.