(Via Em.)
From Wikipedia:
On Kawara (born December 24, 1932) is a Japanese conceptual artist living in New York City since 1965. He has shown in many solo and group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1976.
Since 1966 he has made a long series of “date paintings” (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in simple white lettering set against a solid background. Other series of works include the I Went and I Met series of postcards sent to his friends detailing aspects of his life, another series of postcards, I Got Up At, rubber-stamped with the time he got up that morning, and a series of telegrams sent to various people bearing the message “I AM STILL ALIVE”.
Much like the Today series, Kawara uses a number of days followed by date the work was executed as his life-dates. So the piece entitled Title at the National Gallery of Art has Kawara’s life-dates as 26,697 (January 27, 2006) which, when calculated, place Kawara’s birthdate at December 24, 1932.
Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.
Other, related works in his oeuvre confirm the existentialism at the heart of his metaphysics. For example, in 1970 he began intermittently to send telegrams to friends and professional colleagues that always contain the same message: I am still alive. Once a medium of urgent news, the telegram has become almost obsolete as a means of communication. Normally it announces timely or memorable events, such as unexpected deaths, but Kawara’s messages invert these customary practices: given that everyone is assumed to be alive until the contrary is announced, Kawara’s reassurance that he is still living seems gratuitous—absurd. Moreover, even though it was true at the moment it was sent, it may not be so by the time it is received.
Imbued in equal measure with humor and pathos, these terse missives nonetheless offer testimony to a fundamental state: consciousness, a precondition to all other forms of being. Although destined initially for the attention of a single recipient, they were immediately understood to be a form of conceptual art and hence soon exhibited or published in catalogues and monographs on the artist.
Kawara does not give interviews nor comments about his work.
No.
Yes.
(Update 20/10/07: I’d never heard of On Kawara when I posted this. Not consciously, anyway.)