Context – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 is the second in a series where I develop on one of On Kawara’s earliest surviving conceptual works, Title (1965), which decisively marked his entrance to conceptual art, leaving his figurative period behind. Kawara’s earlier works depict gory scenes profoundly affected by the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like Kawara, I am deeply – although distantly – affected by US violence. Contrary to the sudden impactful bombings in Kawara’s case, the violence I experienced was slow, far-reaching, and long-lasting, crossing generations since 1965. This is why my first experience of Title (On Kawara, 1965) was so unsettling: Kawara must have known, I thought, that 1965 was not “ONE THING” (Wulia 2019, p.10).
In Subtext – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 (2019), the first work of this series, I exploded the three canvases of Title into 65 canvases of various sizes through rigorous research into the techniques and material that Kawara applied into this work as part of the BAIK ART Residency at Davidson College and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington DC. I also investigated the subdued themes in Kawara’s Title, including a text he arguably self-censored, “RED CHINA” (Woo, 2010). Context results from a further investigation in my Swedish Research Council-funded research project, Protocols of Killings: 1965, distance, and the ethics of future warfare (2021-23), bringing in the context of the 30,000-page declassified archives of Jakarta US Embassy, 1964-68, surrounding the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66.
In Context – after Kawara’s Title, 1965, I expand on my recent findings, namely the pattern of Withdrawal Notices I found across these 30,000-page archives. My analysis on the withdrawal of these 798 documents from the declassified archives shows the highest density around 1 October 1965, the date of the first killings that became the trigger event. This suggests that these withdrawn documents are the crème-de-la-crème of US’s secrets surrounding the Indonesian 1965-66 mass killings.
Context – after Kawara’s Title, 1965 is an installation of 65 paintings of dates picked by diverse individuals, chosen from a list of dates corresponding to the withdrawn documents, hence linking two events: a personal memory, and a reality withheld for the sake of state-sanctioned history.