The scarce facsimile of On Kawara’s I Went, I Met, I Read, and Journal series for the year 1969, published by Walther König on the occasion of Kawara’s receiving the Kunstpreis Aachen. Kawara (29,771 days, i.e., 1932-2014) centered his artistic practice on the documentation of daily life: where he went, the people he met, and what he read. These notes were then compiled into three unique sets of binders. By the end of these pieces, I Met (1968-79) and I Went (1968-79) amounted to 4772 pages in 24 binders, and I Read (1966-95) totaled 3272 pages in 18 binders. Kawara’s Journal filled 48 volumes, recorded from 1966 to 2013. The present volumes reproduce Kawara’s life in 1969, which he spent in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Manaus, Panama City, Mexico City, and for the most part New York City.
In Artists Who Make Books, Claire Lehmann writes: “The books collectively illustrate Kawara’s peripatetic lifestyle…While perhaps not intended to actually be read — either to completion or in sequential order — these encyclopedic collections emphasize the power of regular, methodical habit. No simple diaries, they required the sourcing and reproducing of local maps, the typing up of names, the careful cutting and gluing and annotating of newspaper articles, day after day after day, for a decade or more. The books propose a sort of progress — miles walked, friends met, news consumed — but also a kind of circularity or sameness, in which each day, no matter its texture or richness, is treated with the same secretarial rigor, which flattens all of life’s chance encounters into uniform data.”

Literature:

Roth, Aarons, & Lehmann, eds., Artists Who Make Books (2017), pp. 136-40 (pictured) & Catalogue no. 71.

A. Moeglin-Delcroix, Esthétique du Livre d’artiste: Introduction à l’art contemporain (2nd ed.: 2012), pp. 163 (pictured) & 430.