Stamping Time

This is a page from a copy of Philip Gaskell’s John Baskerville: A Bibliography (Cambridge University Press, 1959). When I recently took the book out of the library it was silently scanned, with no mark made on the book; but the older date-return sheet was still there. A previous borrower, unnamed, 27 years ago, had to bring back the book by 27 April 1995. The large red ‘CANCELLED’ presumably refers to the cancellation of this system of date stamping.

One response to this single date – one day in the past, stamped in ink – is the urge to find out what else happened on this day: to fill out a date that at first looks just like any other – to characterise it. The number one single in the UK was Take That’s ‘Back for Good.’ The Dutch writer Willem Frederik Hermans, author of the novel Beyond Sleep (1966), died aged 73. (You can see the BBC Nine O’Clock news for 27 April 1995 here.)

This is a train ticket for a single journey from Huddersfield to Honley, a village in West Yorkshire, a journey of about 9 minutes, dated 25 January 2007. A ticket stamped with a now past date is both a scrap of paper not worth keeping, and also an accidental metaphysical straining: the ticket is an attempt to grasp time, to stall its progression just for a moment.

For almost 50 years, from 4 January 1966 until 2013, the year before his death, the Japanese artist On Kawara worked on his Date Paintings (also known as his ‘Today’ series): each had an acrylic single colour background with the date of the painting’s composition in Helvetica letters and digits. If he hadn’t finished the painting by midnight of its date, On Kawara destroyed it. He didn’t make a painting every day, but he did produce nearly 3,000 over 5 decades. Here is one below.

Photo from Guggenheim, New York

And here is On Kawara’s 13th Street Studio, in New York, in 1966, the year he began the series, with several just-made paintings.

Photo via frieze.com

The date is the subject of the painting but also a document of its moment of making: in this sense, the paintings are accounts of themselves. The paintings are individual units, each one a day, separated in time; the tombstone-like quality has the effect of marking a day that has gone, and gone forever. But the uniformity of the paintings means they want to gather as a series, a progress through time, and suggest time less as staccato lost moments, but rather a snaking forward across the days and years.

Photo from Guggenheim, New York