The 1961 Jasper Johns work 0 Through 9, which depicts the numerical figures stacked one on top of the other and scaled to fill the whole canvas, is art’s early acknowledgment of the important role that numbers play in our lives. Five years later, On Kawara began a series of small canvases, each painted with nothing more than the date—in simple white letters and digits—of its creation. His “Today” series, which now numbers more than 3,000 canvases, relies on the same indicators of numerical value as those found on Johns’s painting. Yet when Johns showed all numeric digits at the same time, he rendered them devoid of empirical information. Kawara’s numbers, by contrast, refer to a distinct, observable reality—specific days on the calendar—and therefore describe a quantifiable, chronological journey through the days of the artist’s life. 

While Johns’s numbers owe much to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Kawara’s pictures are forerunners of an art movement that is only now coming of age. I will call this new movement Dataism. 

Για περισσότερα δες εδώ.