The Japanese artist On Kawara uses time as a medium in his art. Kawara is not interested in the narrative passage of time—say, as in a story that has a beginning, middle and end--but rather in time as a series of almost arbitrary blips in a vast and interminable infinity. So, in a sense, his date paintings are at once temporal and spatial. The three moon landing paintings—July 16, 1969 “Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., Michael Collins,” July 20, 1969 “Man Walks on the Moon,” July 21, 1969 “Apollo 11 at the Distance of 238,857 Miles from the Earth"—document historical dates within the very material space of canvas stretched on wood. Kawara painted the dates, each on a separate canvas, in a sans-serif font in white acrylic paint on a black matte surface. Accompanying the paintings are three shallow boxes containing newspapers from each day. Time is all but unhinged from the warp and woof of chronological order as moments exist without attachment to before and after. In the mind’s eye, they tumble through space like flat black asteroids.

The greater goal of Kawara’s documentation of days, months and years is to reinforce the minute role of human beings in the larger passage of time. The One Million Years Project is a list of numbers: dates originally typed on loose leaf paper and placed in grey three-ring binders, then published on onion paper in small, limited edition books, and finally recorded in spoken form and realized as an audio installation. The project begins with the year 9998031 B.C. and ends in 1001992 A.D. All three forms can be experienced, seen, held and heard at the Dallas Museum of Art. Arbitrary blips, we humans are like atoms and our events are but the movement of freefall in perpetuity. There was something before humans and there will be something after.

Aesthetically speaking, obsessive-compulsive mania couples with tedium in Kawara’s will to document. In ink on silkscreen, One Hundred Years Calendar 23,928 Days (1998) is a grid of months and numbers. Yellow lines are carefully delineated and separated from black dots, as though made by an anonymous automaton rather than an individual artist. The piece has the feel of a technocratic document from the early days of HAL and IBM in the 1960s.

Located under the barrel vault and in the quadrant galleries and concourse, the exhibition, curated by Charles Wylie, is stark and contemplative—superbly befitting of Kawara’s smart quiet Conceptualism.

Charissa N. Terranova is Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, Director of Centraltrak: The UT Dallas Artists Residency and a freelance critic. Her writing appears regularly in the Dallas Morning News, Art Lies, Art Papers, Sculpture Magazine and Art News.