I GOT UP

Artist: On Kawara (Japanese, 1933–2014)

Date: 1970

Medium: Photomechanical print

Dimensions: 8.3 x 14.0 cm (3 1/4 x 5 1/2 in. ) each

Classification: Prints

Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2001

Accession Number: 2001.228a–uu

Description

I Got Up . . . is part of a continuous piece produced by On Kawara between 1968 and 1979 in which every day the artist sent two different friends or colleagues a picture postcard stamped with the exact time he arose that day and the addresses of both sender and recipient. The length of each correspondence ranged from a single card to hundreds sent consecutively over a period of months. The gesture's repetitive nature is counterbalanced by the artist's peripatetic global wanderings and exceedingly irregular hours (in 1973 alone he sent postcards from twenty-eight cities). Moreover, Kawara's postcards do not record his waking up but his "getting up," with its ambiguous conflation of carnal and existential (as opposed to not getting up) implications. This group of postcards was sent to the artist and writer Richard Kostelanetz. When looked at in order, the images comprise a little aerial tour of sights around their shared city.

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