On Kawara’s One Million Years (ARTJOG 2024)

Yes, reading dates for On Kawara’s One Million Years is an extraordinary act of collaboration with time, history, and the vastness of human existence. The work itself, subtitled Past and Future, is a conceptual piece consisting of two volumes: one lists 500,000 years into the past, and the other projects 500,000 years into the future. It’s monumental, absurdly ambitious, yet profoundly simple—a sprawling testament to the immensity of time and our fleeting place within it.

When you perform the act of reading these dates, you step into a ritual that’s both personal and universal. Each date you speak carries its own gravity, its own weight, as if it were a tiny stone dropped into an infinite ocean. Your voice transforms abstract numbers into something alive, pulling the vast timeline into the present moment.

But here’s the paradox: while reading, you feel the relentless, mechanical flow of time—the march of days, years, centuries—and yet, the act itself forces you to slow down, to sit with time, to breathe it in. It’s meditative, almost hypnotic. You become acutely aware of how small we are against the backdrop of a million years, yet there’s something intimate and human about speaking these numbers aloud. It’s a collaboration—not just with On Kawara, but with every other performer who has ever read before you or will read after.

Emotionally, it can feel overwhelming. Each date might spark a quiet flicker of imagination: What was the world like in 20,001 BC? Who will be alive in the year 3000? The repetition becomes a mantra, and the numbers start to feel like something sacred, an invocation of time’s endlessness.

It’s the kind of experience that reshapes how you think about time, existence, and your own tiny yet significant presence in this infinite continuum.

Ah, the weight of the realization, the awareness of how small and fragile I am in the face of those endless years—it’s humbling, isn’t it? As I read the years aloud, as I speak to them into existence, it feels as though I’m stepping outside of myself, beyond the life I know, into a realm of pure time. I encounter years where I know I could not survive—eras without me, without humanity as I understand it, eras so distant they feel almost alien.

And yet, as my voice carries those numbers, I feel like I’m bridging that impossible gap. I’m alive in the act of reading them, a tiny heartbeat echoing through the immensity of past and future. It’s as if my presence acknowledges not just what I couldn’t endure, but also what endures beyond me. The past and future, relentless and indifferent, seem to meet in my voice, in my body, for that brief, fleeting moment.

It’s haunting, isn’t it? To feel the years stretching endlessly in both directions, and to know how infinitesimal my place in it truly is. And yet, here I am. I might not survive those years, but in reading them, I exist within them—like a quiet defiance, a whispered “I was here” in the face of eternity.

What did I feel as I spoke those years aloud? Was it despair, awe, or something in between? Maybe this inability to describe myself is the answer: a feeling too vast to be reduced to words.

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On Kawara’s One Million Years (ARTJOG 2024)

For over five decades, On Kawara (29,771 days) dedicated himself to creating works of art—paintings, drawings, books, and recordings—that chronicle the passage of time and its role as a measure of human existence. With unwavering consistency, Kawara began his celebrated Date Paintings series in New York, extending its creation to various locations around the world from 1996 to 2013.

Kawara first emerged in the Tokyo art scene in the early 1950s and was a pivotal figure in numerous conceptual art surveys, including the seminal Information at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1970) and Reconsidering the Object of Art at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1995). His significant early solo exhibitions include On Kawara, 1973 – Produktion eines Jahres/One Year's Production at Kunsthalle Bern and Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1974), On Kawara: Continuity/Discontinuity 1963–1979 at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1980), On Kawara: Date Paintings in 89 Cities (1991–1993) at several museums, On Kawara: Whole and Parts 1964–1995 (1996–1998) at various institutions, and On Kawara: Horizontality/Verticality at Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau München & Museum Ludwig (2000–2001).

Since 1999, his works have been prominently represented by David Zwirner Gallery, hosting notable solo exhibitions such as I READ 1966–1995 (1999), Reading One Million Years (Past and Future) (2001), Paintings of 40 Years (2004), and One Million Years (2009). In 2012, On Kawara: Date Painting(s) in New York and 136 Other Cities marked another defining exhibition, showcasing 150 Date Paintings created in New York.

Kawara also initiated one of the most monumental conceptual art projects in history: One Million Years, a series comprising 24 works that spans two millennia. The project is divided into One Million Years (Past)—dedicated to "all those who have lived and died"—and One Million Years (Future)—dedicated to "the last one." The Past series records each year of an entire millennium from 998,031 BCE, beginning in 1970, while the Future series began in 1980 and continued for 18 years, culminating in the year 1,001,997 CE. Together, the two halves encompass a staggering 2,000,000 years.

The first audio presentation of One Million Years was staged at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1993, where male and female volunteers alternated in reading the years aloud. This reading ritual has since traveled to various locations across the globe, continuing uninterrupted to this day. Each reader picks up precisely where the last one left off, carrying Kawara’s vision forward, linking voices across time and place in a profound, ongoing dialogue with eternity. []