In the I Went series (1968–79), Kawara traced his movements over the course of a day in red ballpoint pen on a photocopy of a local map that he stamped with the date. He eventually preserved the maps in plastic sleeves and assembled them in three-ring binders. Kawara created at least one map per day for the length of the series. If he left the area represented by the map, he used arrows and notes to describe where he had gone and his return route. Kawara marked the location where he began the day with a red dot. On days when he didn’t leave the house, the map solely bears that mark. If the artist was out after midnight, then the next day’s map begins at that location. Kawara achieved a consistency in size and appearance in this series by cropping and altering the maps through photocopying.

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Transcript:

Narrator: Kawara began I Went in Mexico City shortly after he launched the I Met and I Got Up series. Each day he charted his movements on photocopied maps, enlarging or reducing them to consistent sizes and cropping them to areas that included his residences and favorite haunts. They were eventually slipped into individual plastic sleeves and collected in three-ring binders, filling two binders each year.

Jeffrey Weiss: What we’ll see, beginning in the mid-’60s, is a focus on the idea of travel as a form of self-imposed itinerancy. This introduces the idea of a studio that is no one place, but that takes the form of any room an artist happens to be in.

Anne Wheeler: On the maps, Kawara traces his path with a red ballpoint pen regardless of the type of travel that he’s making: whether he’s in a car, or walking, or on the subway. One can see that a red dot signifies the place where he woke up that day, which is also the same place that he addressed the I Got Up postcard from.

If Kawara was out at midnight, he made careful notation of the spot that he was so that he could switch onto the map for the following day.

Narrator: The maps, like the lists of I Met, are diaristic. Yet they are also neutral records of information. Curator Jeffrey Weiss:

Jeffrey Weiss: There is something very personal and subjective, you might say, about the nature of Kawara’s work. At the same time, he tells us very little about what he felt, or about what he said and what he saw when he went from one place to another. The work is bereft of the content—the details that we associate with our experience of the everyday.

Narrator: Kawara eventually tired of revealing aspects of his personal life in the three series on view here as Self-Observation.

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Information obtained from the Guggenheim website.