Performance
On Kawara
Reading One Million Years

As part of the performance program, the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is pleased to be the first institution in Austria to present the work One Million Years by the artist On Kawara in a performative reading. This will take place on two days, Friday, February 28, and Saturday, March 1, from 6 to 10 p.m. and is open to the public.
 

The Japanese-born artist On Kawara (1932 – 2014) dedicated his work to the phenomenon of time and how we experience it. His idiosyncratic work has been a central contribution to conceptual art and makes him one of the main proponents of this movement. He is perhaps best known for his Today series, also known as Date Paintings. A Date Painting is a monochrome canvas in red, blue or grey on which the date of creation is inscribed in white. The date is written in the language and convention of the place where Kawara painted the picture. The pictures were created in hours of painstaking work following a series of steps that never changed. If a painting was not finished by midnight, he destroyed it. Over five decades, it also reflects the artist’s life. One Million Years is perhaps his most fluid work. Formed of two parts entitled One Million Years: Past and One Million Years: Future, respectively, the work comprises two sets of ten binders with a total of two thousand pages of text. Each page contains five hundred years printed in ten columns and fifty lines. The folders containing the past years were created in 1970 and 1971 and their lists end with the year preceding their compilation. The folders containing future dates, were created between 1980 and 1998, and begin with the year after they were made. The ten years between 1971 and 1980 are not represented in either group of works. In total, Kawara produced both parts in an edition of twelve pieces each.

In 1993, Kawara expanded One Million Years to include live and recorded readings, allowing the project to be preserved and continued through public recitation. Each new session begins where the previous one ended – counting slowly from the past into the present or from the present into the future until the contents of all ten volumes of both works have been read aloud and the work – at least in this activated state – comes to an end. After more than thirty years and readings at around fifty locations, the sheer volume of both works is still not exhausted. 

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is delighted to be the first institution in Austria to participate in this unique and distinctive project in order to present one of the most outstanding artists of the past decades in a special way and, in coordination with the New York One Million Years Foundation, to actively contribute to keeping On Kawara’s practice as alive as possible.

Exhibition Page