*from the zine, Since Covid, published by Peng Wu
On Sunday May 3 I had a dream I was on a very tall ladder in a large white room with high ceilings, carefully installing On Kawara's “Today series” paintings, hundreds of them, in a grid. A row of rectangular windows were close to the ceiling and the paintings were below the windows. The light had a late morning haze to it. Perfect lines, all of them a deep cadmium reddish color with the stark, white dates. OCT.27.1967. FEB.04.1985. 30.DEC.1951 and so on. I slowly went down the very tall ladder. It was thin and narrow and I focused to keep my balance. When I reached the ground I picked up an On Kawara painting, and brought it up the ladder carefully to set onto the silver nails in the wall. I leveled the painting, which seemed to be about 8x10 inches. And again, slowly went down the very tall ladder. I slid the ladder over to the right a little, and climbed back up with another date painting to hang on the next set of nails. The painting I had previously leveled suddenly tilted on the wall, the bottom left corner rising up. I went down the ladder, going a little faster, and shifted it back to the place that it had been. There was no sound in the room. All of the date paintings started to tilt, the grid disrupted, waving. I looked back at all of the labor. There was no sound in the room. They started to fall off the wall, bleeding. It was alarming, all of this precious art and labor, contorting, failing. I woke up. My heart ran races in my chest.
A beautiful panic dream. The last time I saw On Kawara work was in September at mia. One Thing was part of the exhibition “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965 - 1975”. A tryptic: the left read “ONE THING”, the center, “VIET-NAM”, and the right “1965”, relayed a message of the surrounding circumstances of the war. His painting style changed afterward, the surrounding circumstances left out, and he solely focused on the dates from then on - a solemn reflection of living and breathing another day.
Five years ago I saw his retrospective, Silence at the Guggenheim. I was invited to New York with a friend for an art fair - she went to work all day at the fair and I walked around Manhattan. At the park I had my palm read by a fortune teller; she told me in another life that I had hung myself, and that is why my mother had a difficult labor with me (she did not know, that in fact, my neck was wrapped in my umbilical cord during labor and my heart slowed. Nurses prepared my mother for a c-section. A cool doctor entered the hospital room and told everyone to calm down and wait, they watched as I untangled myself and then came into the world). I wanted to experience the inside of the museum and found myself at what seemed like a funeral procession. Visitors dressed in black, silently winding up the museum structure from date painting to date painting. I learned that Kawara would paint one date painting per day, in sans serif text meticulously executed with acrylic paint and no use of stencils. A compulsion. Some say it was a result of traumatic stress from living in Japan during and after the war. If he couldn’t finish a day’s painting by midnight, he destroyed it. He housed the finished date paintings in tailor made cardboard boxes, lined with the day's newspaper, usually the New York Times.
The dream wouldn’t leave my mind, the collapse was so vivid. I thought it could be a subconscious confrontation with the current events of the world. The collapse of the grid represented the disruption in nearly every aspect of daily life due to the pandemic. ‘Normal’ was no longer available to us, anxiety was heightened. In May I quarantined for weeks because I thought I had the virus. I had never experienced the level of fatigue. My muscles felt like stones. I couldn’t stay awake either, and slept nearly 16 hours in one day. This was prior to available citywide testing, so I did a telehealth check up, logging into my account and submitting my symptoms to ‘Lindsay’. I was in the ‘could be the flu or corona virus’ category, because I did not have respiratory symptoms. With four days of rest my strength came back. Months later, when antibodies tests were available, I tested in person at a clinic one block from my house. A man named Randy took my blood. Randy was broad shouldered with facial hair and large forearms. He wore a face shield, no mask. Randy used his breath, not his voice, to walk me through every step he would take before and after putting the needle inside of my vein. The whisper made me feel taken care of in a way I had never felt at the doctor. I went home and wrote Randy a very positive online review about his breathiness and gentle nature. It was probably unnecessary information for the clinic, but at that point person-to-person interactions were limited and non-intimate. We were all dancing spatially in public now, no brushing past or hello hugs to friends, all gaze - no smile, muffled voices behind paper masks. A whisper felt like deep cherished care.
Maybe the dream is a reflection of my own repetitive days blurring together. When the pandemic reached the US, my mornings began with tangerine tea, scrolling the coronavirus reports and maps, and running three miles around my neighborhood. I consistently ran past a woman with short blonde hair, mid-fifties, briskly walking each day. We waved at each other. She wore a black mask and sunglasses. In the summer she started to wear a baseball cap with a rearview mirror on it so she could see if someone was coming up behind her. This surprised me but I imagined she may have a preexisting condition or lives with a parent. In August she suddenly had a ponytail coming out of the cap with the rearview mirror. This also surprised me and now I even wonder if it is the same woman. Stepping on the same wheat shadows on the concrete, past the archery targets, under the train tracks, and up the hill of sumac. At first I ran to relieve anxiety and move my body a bit because I was doing a lot of sitting, working from home. Running became something to put on my calendar that I felt I could actually control. My distance increased to six miles, then nine, thirteen. Exhaling felt like the only truth.
The dream could represent the complicated visual obituary of the pandemic: seeing the interactive maps on the screen grow from orange to red day after day as the death toll rises. Bodies. Numbers. Days. I have read that when faced with a massive crisis, humans go through psychic numbness, meaning that as the number of victims in a tragedy increases, our empathy reliably decreases. Our brains can’t fathom the millions of people dead - massive crisis becomes abstract thought. The numbness of numbers. I thought about On Kawara’s paintings in relation to this as a recording of his very existence through numbers and language anonymity. Art historians have written about the paintings as conceptual and stripped of emotion, a sort of mechanomorphic way of being, or, machine quality projected onto the human. (Kawara could have been projecting the ever increasing mechanomorphism we see today in our ever present merge with technology).
But beyond the number is the human being, steadily hand lettering the painting, living for the day. They appeared as a chronological artifact, but were actually a sign of Kawara’s life, the country he was in, the box he handmade, the newspaper he read. They all held a secret memory - something invisible. The virus has an invisibility too - captivating, unseen, unsure. We don’t know if it is here or there or if we even have it when we have it. We enter an abstract frame of mind to comprehend it. I imagine it on the surface of my mail, the door handle, the sunbutter. I used to clean every grocery item with bleach wipes. But if I am truly honest it was more about the performance of cleaning than it really was about eliminating the virus from the item. If I had been certain it was on the jar of sunbutter I would have treated it like toxic waste with tongs and a full suit on. The cleaning was to exit the feedback loop of my mind questioning whether or not the item was a potential infector.
Yet, some people don’t even believe the virus is anywhere at all; so the dream could be about the fragmentation of our reality. Kawara’s paintings represent time itself as consciousness. But somehow they are only partial truths as documents of linear time: each date, painted in a 24 hour time frame. Month, day, year. The archive of the arrow of time, the form of reality that the larger majority of human life agrees upon. The name COVID-19 is a time capsule: many think that there is a before, during, and after COVID-19 in some kind of hopeful linearity. Western culture favors the extractive, destructive mental concept of linear time which in a way ignores bodies (heartbeat, respiration, circadian rhythms, sleeping, waking) and ecosystems in favor of a time that is successive: time-is-labor-is-money. And the dream is perhaps about the disruption of our understanding of time. The teleological mistake we have made. The reality is, the earth and its microbiome is for life, and the virus reveals to us that human life is disrupting the health and ecology of animals and other life forms. So this linear system is perhaps failing, because it does not recognize that we revolve and radiate, and that our impact always affects and relates to something else in a circular way. Circular time, which is nature's motivation, is not an adopted concept of western culture because it does not appear progressive. If we redirect and realign, perhaps we can reflect on ourselves as light beings with a high consciousness in our moment of space and time - developing humility and creating equanimity with the microbiome. I thought of the cyclical while I was filming a cicada on the side of my house emerging from its nymph exoskeleton. It was pulsating, uncurling slowly. A chime of cicadas would sweep loudly as it moved, luring it out. Its wings grew, inflating with fluid. Cicadas sing and lay eggs in a tree. The eggs hatch and then they fall to the ground and suck onto a root of a tree for its sap nutrients and grow underground for 2-17 years. They need bacteria to make amino acids, so they form a relationship with fungus to survive. They emerge from the earth, shed their exoskeleton, mate, lay eggs, and die. The circle starts all over again - a magical relationship of beings. Perhaps we have found ourselves emerging from the nymph-like stage pulsing toward a new time.
I thought of Kawara’s unfinished day paintings. I imagine him trying to outpaint the clock from wherever he was, the restraint of the imaginary line of midnight. The clock moves its hand just before the last few brushstrokes and he bends his neck, pauses. Maybe he even sets a timer. In disappointment, he rips the painting. Or burns it. Or Kawara opens the window and gently throws it into the garbage behind his apartment, it spins down, the partial date blurs. And this garbage is full of these failed date paintings and eggshells and tissue. Or maybe he buried them all, in a tailor made box, complete with a newspaper and the earth and the arthropods use it for sustenance. These details are unknown. What we do know is that for Kawara, time was an emotional and imaginary relationship. Because that is what time seems to be. We give it meaning to try to understand the complexity of the system as a whole. So it is also just an appearance. Just like a painting. Just like a dream.