Los años de On Kawara
On Kawara-Silence es una retrospectiva del artista en el Guggenheim de Nueva York (hasta el 3 de mayo. Hay que darse prisa) que incluye una performance de una de sus obras más curiosas: One Million Years.
En realidad, lectura de una parte, porque One Million Years es una serie de veinticuatro obras (dividas en pasado y futuro) que detallan fechas (2 millones de años en total, un millón de años para el pasado y un millón para el futuro). La performance consiste en que dos personas van leyendo las fechas.
Brendan and I read at a steady pace, he the odds and I the evens (Kawara’s instructions), a healthy pause hanging in the air between each one. This seems fitting given that each number represents a whole year, each line an entire decade. We read and swiftly cross out our numbers with pencils as we go, using rulers to keep ourselves on track, but even then we stumble. Brendan says “seven thousand seven three …” by accident, and I look down at the abyssal page, suddenly struggling to find my number and remember how it’s actually spoken. “Seven — hundred — seventy-three … ” And then as quickly as we trip, we regain our stride.
So much performance art is built on a foundation of inspired persistence, and one of the beauties of One Million Years is that it offers that experience to those who would normally just watch. Thirty minutes into my hour I had to pee and still hadn’t figured out how to sit comfortably in my chair, but I knew I had signed an invisible contract with On Kawara (as well as a physical one with the Guggenheim), so I continued reading years. There is a kind of freedom in being forced to stick with something past the point when you’d normally quit. You adapt and crudely make your own meaning. I tried, as much as I could, to look up when I spoke my years, making eye contact with museum visitors, offering them my numbers as I would my hand: a gesture of affinity. And I tried to enunciate, projecting the unfathomable past into the mystical modernist spiral, hoping my delivery would be worthy of these pre-human years, of the artist who brought them into the present, and of the building that’s currently serving as their home.
Como añadido, decir que siempre he creído que On Kawara era un artista que habría que tener muy en cuenta en conjunción con la idea de Big Data.