**this blogpost is a brief extension of the telegrams I mention in the proposal supporting the overall concept, (didn't get a chance to include some that heavily influenced are the artists mentioned in Sarah's psychogeography/derive workshop - as well as the ideas she was talking about.. 'mapping' etc.)
I was reading further about On Kawara's I AM STILL ALIVE telegrams (for some reason I didn't find a lot of information/context behind them the first time before I put them in as major inspiration in the concept of my visual proposal), but I found this audio on the Guggenheim website titled 'On Kawara: I Am Still Alive Suicide Telegrams' and the word 'suicide' was quite confrontational in this context. there was a transcript for the audio:
https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/on-kawara-i-am-still-alive-suicide-telegrams#:~:text=Anne%20Wheeler%3A%20Kawara%20inaugurated%20the,to%20an%20exhibition%20in%20Paris.&text=Narrator%3A%20The%20series%20is%20unique,control%20of%20its%20visual%20appearance.
The series is unique in Kawara’s work in that it required him to relinquish control of its visual appearance. It is the only kind of work he produced that is untouched by the artist’s hand.
Transcript
Anne Wheeler: Kawara inaugurated the I Am Still Alive telegram series in December of 1969 with three telegrams sent to curator Michel Claura as his contribution to an exhibition in Paris.
Narrator: Assistant curator Anne Wheeler:
Anne Wheeler: The telegrams read: I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE DON’T WORRY, I AM NOT GOING TO COMMIT SUICIDE WORRY, and I AM GOING TO SLEEP FORGET IT. He sent the first I Am Still Alive telegram about one month later to collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel.
Narrator: Over the next three decades, as part of I Am Still Alive, Kawara sent nearly 900 telegrams to dozens of recipients, much the way he sent postcards of the I Got Up series. In the case of the telegrams, the statement is almost comically terse, given that its content could not be of greater importance to the sender.
Anne Wheeler: When curators or collectors wished to show or acquire his work, instead of responding to their questions, he would simply respond, with a telegram, I AM STILL ALIVE. At other times, he sent these telegrams unprompted to friends, other colleagues, family throughout the world.
Narrator: The series is unique in Kawara’s work in that it required him to relinquish control of its visual appearance. It is the only kind of work he produced that is untouched by the artist’s hand.
Anne Wheeler: Each telegraph office has its own regional system with which the telegram is prepared: the type of paper that it’s printed on, whether it’s horizontal or vertical. So Kawara was sending one thing, and the person was receiving something else.
Narrator: As time went on and the telegram became obsolete, it became extremely difficult to find a telegraph office. The artist’s friend, curator and former director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Kasper König:
Kasper König: What is interesting, when he sent the telegrams, you couldn’t even go anymore to Western Union. You had to make an e-mail to make it into a telegram, which isn’t that kind of direct medium.
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It was good to find out how this series started - and how he decided to continue sending these, whether prompted or not... I also realised that Kawara is an artist who is pretty quiet about exposing his intentions or concepts behind his work (the show at the Guggenheim, On Kawara: Silence), as evidenced in this other audio I found..
Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to On Kawara—Silence at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This exhibition is the first extensive survey of the artistic practice On Kawara initiated in the mid-1960s after he left his native Japan. Kawara had at a young age achieved acclaim for figurative painting in a surrealistic style but moved on to working in a very different vein, one we associate in part with Conceptual art.
After a period of travel, Kawara settled in New York, where he began producing a body of work that marked the bare fact of his existence by dating, mapping, and listing his daily activities and encounters through a variety of means. Each category of Kawara’s production was shaped by self-imposed rules and strict repetition, most famously in his Today series, paintings that feature the dates of their creation inscribed across monochromatic canvases. Kawara made such works for 48 years before his death last summer.
While revealing the coordinates and activities of his life, Kawara’s work is schematic in form and content, conveying little about his thoughts and emotions. In fact, the artist maintained a near-total silence on the intentions behind his art. Jeffrey Weiss, Guggenheim senior curator and organizer of the exhibition:
Jeffrey Weiss: He believed his work should be experienced through direct encounter and be unmediated by interpretation, including his own. There’s something deliberately ordinary and transparent about the nature of the work. It means to be, in a way, as accessible as possible, because the everyday is something that we all live, of course.
Narrator: This guide features commentary by Jeffrey Weiss, senior curator at the Guggenheim; Anne Wheeler, assistant curator at the Guggenheim; Kasper König, a German curator and former museum director who was a longtime friend of the artist; and Jonathan Watkins, a British curator and author who worked closely with Kawara on several exhibition and book projects.
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I was afraid that I 'read' his telegrams wrong - but I felt better reading the above transcript - how he conveys little about his intentions behind his art/thoughts and emotions, which was the impression I got and was saying kind of near the end of my proposal (how the short statement does not reveal much about himself at that time to do with his travels) and I just really like that kind of 'silence', how the same phrase, repeated in such different forms over time can create meaning in itself.... (also interesting how he never knows what it would look like on the other end) the way he did his 'date' paintings, the consistency, the mundane marking of everyday life, the concept, as mentioned above, is so accessible, 'as accessible as possible' is something that is really inspiring to me. I definitely am interested in this type of conceptual art... and I think the whole concept of documentation and the use of text, either handwritten or typed, has potential to have meaning develop compoundly overtime. definitely something I want to explore further...
I was afraid that I 'read' his telegrams wrong - but I felt better reading the above transcript - how he conveys little about his intentions behind his art/thoughts and emotions, which was the impression I got and was saying kind of near the end of my proposal (how the short statement does not reveal much about himself at that time to do with his travels) and I just really like that kind of 'silence', how the same phrase, repeated in such different forms over time can create meaning in itself.... (also interesting how he never knows what it would look like on the other end) the way he did his 'date' paintings, the consistency, the mundane marking of everyday life, the concept, as mentioned above, is so accessible, 'as accessible as possible' is something that is really inspiring to me. I definitely am interested in this type of conceptual art... and I think the whole concept of documentation and the use of text, either handwritten or typed, has potential to have meaning develop compoundly overtime. definitely something I want to explore further...