I Got Up...
On Kawara
Japanese, 1933–2014
1970
A small stamped-ink statement on a found postcard—On Kawara’s conceptual act of recording the simple fact of having woken up by stamping the words “I GOT UP” onto an everyday photographic view.
What first grabs you is the ordinary, sunlit city snapshot—a red monorail arcing over multilane highways and a Ricoh billboard—against which the blunt, bureaucratic stamp reads like a sudden, intimate proof of presence.
Part of Kawara’s serial practice that treated temporal facts as art, this work helped shift attention from images to actions and time, turning daily rituals and documentary traces into the material of conceptual art.
Medium
Stamped ink on postcard
Dimensions
4 x 5 3/4" (10.2 x 14.6 cm)
Classification
Department
Credit
The Seth Siegelaub Collection. Gift of Richard S. Zeisler (by exchange)
Accession
324.2010.12
Palette
Art Terms
Exhibitions
