BREAKING ON
outro
subject to revision
These essays can give a false impression of what On Kawara was achieving via his Codes. That's because I've gone about solving them and writing them up in order of difficulty. Easiest first, of course. However, what counts from a biographical perspective - and in thinking about On Kawara's work as a whole - is the order in which On produced them. And I think here I'm talking about the first six Codes mentioned in the opening essay in this section. Codes seven to nine are of less consequence. Or so it seems to me.
So the first three Codes, Code, Love Letters and Traveler's Song, all very difficult to solve, were produced in 1965. That was the year before On began his Date Paintings. The year in which he slept during the day and played chess at night. With such a life-style, setting aside a few days or nights to come up with complicated codes may not have been an issue, not for such a clever guy as On Kawara. I'll say more about these three codes once the remaining one is cracked. I do not want to jump the gun! Having said that, we may never crack that first code as I suspect a knowledge of Japanese would be necessary. In which case I'll have to jump the gun regardless.
For me an even more vital code is Eight quintillion, partly because it was made in 1969 when On was so involved with many other brilliant ideas. But he did have the cancer scare prior to the Apollo mission in July, and it may have been while in hospital or otherwise 'resting' that he took the double-page from the Mad Magazine and turned it into a cypher, just for something to do. Just as an aesthetic joke. But if that is to be seen as an important work, it's mostly because the same MAD-based code was used in conjunction with the Moon Landing transcript to come up with the sixteen pages of written out numbers that On produced in 1995 for the book On Kawara: Whole and Parts.
The final Code to be produced was Voice From Moon. Another way of putting over the Moon transcript. I suppose that's underlining how important Apollo 11 was - and remained - in On Kawara's mind. Mankind beginning to explore the rest of the universe. But he didn't necessarily want the rest of the world to know this 'secret' perspective. So, after the first pure blast of enthusiasm, he kept putting it out in coded form thereafter.
To summarise this Moon passion:
1969: Three massive paintings of the date: JULY 16, 1969; JULY 20, 1969: JULY 21, 1969. (And the MAD magazine code for tuning letters into numbers.)
1995: The moon transcript from 1969 coded (using the MAD cypher from 1969) into a series of enormous and tiny numbers and placed - utterly deadpan - at the front and back of On Kawara: Whole and Parts.
2011: The moon transcript from 1969 coded using the coloured lines cypher that he'd developed in 1965, and placed - not quite so deadpan given the title - in the middle of On Kawara: Date Painting in New York and 136 Other Cities.
