On Kawara: Horizontality/Verticality

" Horizontality and Perpendicularity" documents the various places visited by Japanese artist On Kawara through his projects "I GOT UP" and "I WENT ", ongoing projects begun in 1968. "I GOT UP" consists of stamped postcards--stating time, venue, sender, and addressee--sent twice a day by Kawara from cities all over the world to friends and acquaintances. "I WENT" documents the distances covered daily by the artist, marked in photocopies of city maps. "Horizontality and Perpendicularity" covers both process-projects, combining a postcard and a city map for each day. French novelist and theorist Michel Butor contributes with an essay on Kawara's extremely systematic art--which recalls, in its way, Butor's experiments with the "nouveau roman" (or new novel) in the 1950s and 1960s. Beautiful and necessary, "Horizontality and Perpendicularity" is an impressive testament to Kawara's dismantling of the boundaries between art and life.