On Kawara

The three sets of books that comprise Trilogy (I Got Up, I Went, and I Met) document three aspects of the daily life of Conceptual artist On Kawara: where he awoke, where he went, and whom he met.  The 36 books compile these particular details for twelve years of the artist’s life as he traveled around the world and thus, arguably at least, could pose any number of certainly unanswerable questions about time and space, the significance or lack thereof of the mundane details of a single person's life.  Clearly, of course, at the very least, they question the nature and the meaning of an artist's obsession.

During this period, the globetrotting Kawara mailed postcards to friends and colleagues, stamping them with the time at which he arose each day and the address at which he was staying. The 12 volumes of I Got Up reproduce these postcards as a collection.  For the I Went part of his project, Kawara marked in red ink on a black and white photocopied map with the route he travelled each day and then stamped the map with the date.  For I Met, Kawara made a list of all the people he talked to during the day arranged in the order in which he talked to them. The 12 volumes in I Met compile these lists.  Gray dividers within each book note changes in location as Kawara travelled to cities around the world. 

Each set of books was published in a total edition of 100 copies, including 90 copies and 10 A.P. copies. The twelfth volume within each set is numbered 89/90 and initialed by the artist on the colophon.