On Kawara

On Kawara interests me because he frames time, existence, and consciousness in a way that I have not encountered in my adventures in artist reports/papers. I guess you could say I adhere to a lot of modernist or deeply self-expressive works or straight up strange participatory ones

and On Kawara’s pieces are just, no where in between those. I guess they’re more participatory because its asking viewers to really engage with them on a more or less philosophical level, but at the same time, you do feel this objective kind of self-expressiveness, when you consider yourself, amongst millions of others who have their own unique self-expressiveness. Questions that I’m really reaching when I continue to think of this artist’s work because its kind of out of body: am I important? How do my cognition and emotive capacities compare when I’m compared to 10 others? 100? 1 billion? 

Am I just supposed to not think of how colossal this universe is and just live in it? Do we want to notice how big or small our environments and how that affects our everyday thoughts and actions? Some people more self-conscious than others, but also others are just brought up differently so they don’t really care who notices them? Well, I’d say Kawara did a pretty good job then