On Kawara: One Million Years (Reading)

November 17, 2018–March 10, 2019

A reading of On Kawara’s epic One Million Years took place at Museum MACAN in Jakarta. On Kawara: One Million Years (Reading) was last performed during the first three months of the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Documenting the passage of chronological time, One Million Years is a monumental twenty-volume collection comprising One Million Years [Past], noting each year over an entire millenium from 998,031 BC, and One Million Years [Future], noting each year over an entire millenium through 1001997 AD. Together, these volumes make up 2,000,000 years. The first live recording of readings from One Million Years was made at David Zwirner in 2009.

"Mr. Kawara . . . assiduously avoided the art world spotlight, dedicating his creative life to measuring the passage of time," Roberta Smith wrote in a New York Times review of the artist’s retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2015. "His tallying took the form of paintings of numerical dates made on the one they depicted; telegrams announcing that he was still alive; postcards recording the time he arose that morning (the I Got Up series), as well as sundry maps, calendars and lists—starting with ones detailing the people he encountered in a given day and culminating in three-ring notebooks enumerating hundreds of thousands of years, past and future."

Images: Installation view, On Kawara: One Million Years (Reading), Museum MACAN, Jakarta, 2018