I am Still Alive

Two exquisitely ephemeral works by On Kawara encapsulate the artist’s meditative approach to notions of time, space, and consciousness. I am Still Alive, 1973 is a single telegram which Kawara sent to Bjorn Springfeldt, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm during 1973. The second telegram, I am Still Alive, 1988, addressed to fellow artist Philipe Andre Rihoux in Brussels is an example of Kawara’s later telegrams, incorporating both the telegram slip and the envelope it was sent in. These two delicate pieces of communication both contain the electronically typed message ‘I am still alive, On Kawara’. The artist sent nearly nine hundred telegrams of this kind to many friends and acquaintances for more than three decades. Like his celebrated Date Paintings, which document the ineffable passage of time with ritualistic precision, the telegrams record the very fact the artist’s own existence with almost deadpan solemnity.