Unit 2 Discussion Paper

I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA

In 1970 Japanese artist On Kawara, began sending a series of telegram messages to carefully chosen friends and professional colleagues around the world with the words “I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA” with the city and date. These simple works followed the profound agenda he set for himself and his work and anticipated many of the art world trends and movements we have seen play out over the next forty years including how our society increasingly casts artists as media celebrities. His artworks also highlight several key aspects and values relating to my MA in Digital Arts web project: http://nonsite.com.

My nonsite.com project dovetails with the mobility of my own creative process in that it enables me to work on it from pretty much anywhere: I am able to post an observation, reflection, comment, image or drawing that reflects my thinking at that moment and also locates where I am geographically. It fits my mobile life and my desire to realize an artwork that I can work on while traveling. For the purposes of this discussion paper, I want to focus on that key aspect of On Kawara’s art making: his mobility.

As a quintessential itinerant artist, On Kawara was mythologized and canonized as a peripetetic artist. He is a mythic conceptual art celebrity, who travels widely and bases his artistic production on the daily reality and routines of his life. “I GOT UP” records the time he woke up; “I WENT” documents the walks he took; “I READ” notes what he read; the “Date Paintings” he makes of the date on the day that they were painted, and “I MET” a record of the people he met during a particular day.

From 1968 until 1979, On Kawara sent “I GOT UP” postcards to friends and colleagues announcing the time he got up on that particular day, and his location. These postcards revealed where he was staying and tracked his travels. Implicit within On Kawara’s “I AM STILL ALIVE” telegrams and the “I GOT UP” postcards are four underlying ideas: 1) he was in fact still alive and also thinking about the person he sent that telegram or postcard to on that day; 2) the postcards and telegrams are self-referential: the picture on the card is from the location where it is mailed from and announces not only what time he got up but that ‘I was here’; 3) they are also intentionally made as art, in that he is aware that through these actions he is creating works of art; 4) while the postcard or telegram has little intrinsic value, in a certain context as a work of art, due to On Kawara’s notoriety and relative market scarcity, it has a great value.

On Kawara’s postcards, telegrams, lists, and maps extends an intellectual tradition dating back to Aristotle’s walks, and continues through Baudelaire’s description of a flaneur as a ‘person who walks the city in order to experience it’. The walk remains discursive, predicated on an intellectual leisure class with the time and inclination to stroll through the city and the countryside, self-consciously recording their thoughts and reflections, as well as their routes and actions. Guy Debord’s Lettrist International (LI) group, active in Paris from 1952-57, and the Situationist International (SI) in France as well as an in other parts of the world, took this to a more contemporary existential position. One key concept for the Situationists was the dérive, (literally translated ‘drift’ in the nautical sense) was:

‘a matter of opening one’s consciousness up to the (so to speak) unconsciousness of urban space; the derive meant a solo or collective passage down city streets, a surrender to and then pursuit of alleys of attraction, boulevards of repulsion, until the city itself becomes a field of what the LI called “psychogeography,” where every building, routs, and decoration expanded with meaning or disappeared for lack of it.’ (Marcus. p127)

A walk can range from a planned event with a set route to a transcendent, aimless drifting ramble through the urban environment as valorized by the LI and the SI.

Walking as artwork can be found in the practices of many artists, from Richard Long and Hamish Fulton’s well planned multi-day country walks that have been well documented since the 1960s. A contemporary peripatetic artist that continues to extend this tradition is Belgian artist Francis Alys who travels lightly, making contingent works based on the situations and circumstances he is confronted with in the various cities he finds himself working in. London’s Artangel recently commissioned, documented and published his ‘Seven Walks’ (Alys, 2005)

I am interested in creating the contemporary equivalent of On Kawara postcards and telegrams, extending these qualities into digital arts. On Kawara was a prototypical blogger. Weblogs are essentially a digital version of his postcards: they record in simple yet profound ways that the author is still alive, walking, meeting people and thinking. The heart of any weblog is essentially a comment based on an observation, the time and date it was written and often accompanied by an image.

Nonsite.com is an internet art project that records short comments, with images and GPS locations that link to Google maps. I am using a plug-in that also allows me to add the GPS co-ordinates. My aim is to create a virtual sense of place, to make an experimental website that creates a sense of location and time through writing and images. I want to create a psychogeography of place through reflections, observations and images.

This project works well in terms of my core values for digital arts. For me, digital arts refer to works that not only utilize digital technologies but are predicated on them. Nonsite.com suits my own creative process as an artist in that I can work on this project from anywhere with an internet connection. I travel a great deal and it fits my peripatetic lifestyle and my desire to realize a project that I can continue to work on from pretty much anywhere.

References and Bibliography:

Debord, G. 1957. Rapport sur la construction des situations, Mille et Une Nuits, Paris

Watkins, J. 2002. On Kawara, Phaidon, London

Marcus, G. 1989. Guy Debord’s Memoires: A Situationist Primer, IN: On the Passage of a Few People Through  Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1957- 1972. Sussman, E. ICA Boston, MIT Press p127

Alys, Francis. 2004-5. Seven Walks. Ed. Lindwood, J. Artangel, London.