People in glass boxes

The project will be staged later this month in Trafalgar Square

11 April 2012

The morning after the clocks go back, at 8am on Monday 29 March, an extraordinary art event begins in Trafalgar Square - and I'm not talking about the Fourth Plinth.

From a glass box, 16ft by 9ft by 8ft, installed at the foot of Nelson's Column, a team of 12 live-art performers, two at a time, seated at a desk inside the box, will read, continuously, 24 hours a day for a week, from conceptual artist On Kawara's One Million Years.

The artwork - which exists as a list of years printed numerically in bound volumes - is not exactly bedtime reading. Its performance will highlight other qualities: continuity, predictability, restraint and resolution.

One Million Years, first created in 1969 and most recently performed in Germany, in 2002, is about time and place, survival and memory.

The Trafalgar Square installation - conceived by South London Gallery as an off-site project while it awaits its summer reopening after an eightmonth refurbishment programme - may plant an idea in your mind of where David Blaine filched his halfbaked stakeout suspended over the Thames last year.

But going hungry does not make for profundity: Kawara's readers will be allowed food and water. During four-hour stints, into microphones for all to hear, they will read from Past, Kawara's volumes that list every year from 998031BC to AD1969, and on the next from Future (AD1980-AD1001980).

They will enunciate each year, slowly, carefully, as if to each other - almost in the tone of a restrained conversation - "Seven hundred and sixty-three thousand, two hundred and forty-one," says one. "Seven hundred and sixty-three thousand, two hundred and forty- two," responds the other.

Kawara's work seems to exemplify everything we think we know about conceptual art. It is based on ideas; it is, on the surface, all words and rules, texts and numbers. His approved biography cites his age in days rather than years (26,008 days old today, by my reckoning - you do the maths).

But this is more than tinkering with arithmetic; Kawara's work is about the day-by-day repetitions that can either render life banal and meaningless, or lend it a profundity and scale that we rarely contemplate. The readers may count continuously for one week, but the evocation of a million years is imponderable.

I first came across the Japaneseborn artist when I was an anxious teenager and read about the telegrams he sent to his friends on a daily basis. "I am still alive," each would read.

Not knowing my conceptual from my confessional, I read it personally, as a Beckettian stab at existence in the face of life's complexity. I later learned that such forms were known in the trade to have "conceptual rigour", but it remains for me a poetic act as much as an idea.

Kawara's oeuvre is extensive, but absolutely consistent. Since the mid-Sixties, he has been producing his Today series of "date paintings", in which the "subject" of each canvas is the very date it is painted.

The convention of spelling out the date is adopted from the country in which the work was made, and each painting has to be completed by midnight or it is destroyed.

In this way, the piece does not describe the day on which it was painted, nor the distinct features of the landscape on that day - such as Monet's repeated attempts at those haystacks. Instead it bears witness to the moment of making.

Kawara marks the passage of time, and so confirms his presence in the world. It is very simple, apparently clinical, but, despite the conceptual overtones, the project contains a spiritual dimension, resembling the daily ritual of prayer or meditation.

Once his projects settle into an established pattern, they just are, and continue to be. Meaning comes from the consistency.

Kawara, and contemporaries such as Roman Opalka (who has been counting on to canvas since the mid-Sixties), provide models for younger artists who have found systems to generate new work that lasts beyond the life of anyone who might witness it.

Many contemporary artists work with computers to provide infinite reworkings of a simple idea. Former Pogues banjo-player Jem Finer set up a sound work in 2000 with Artangel that is due for completion on the last day of 2999.

A computer programme ensures that there will be no repetition until then of the ever-reconfiguring ambient music that fills the location. Brian Eno has gone a notch further, with his recent January 07003, developing a compositional algorithm to accompany the Long Now Foundation's proposed 10,000 Year Clock.

Charles Sandison's recent exhibition at the Lisson Gallery in north London was an exercise in programming computers to produce infinite variations, using words as a visual palette to battle out ideas projected on to the wall.

Stan Douglas's Win, Place or Show is a six-minute double-screen video that reconfigures the same scene in combinations drawn from 12 points of view. What the viewer sees is never the same version twice, as a computer recombines the sequences and perspectives.

Douglas Gordon's bestknown work is 24-Hour Psycho - Hitchcock's movie slowed to a glacial pace. A day is but a blink in the eye compared with his snail's-pace version of the classic John Wayne movie The Searchers, called Five-Year Drive-By, slowed down to echo the film's narrative of a five-year quest.

Kawara's One Million Years also marks the passage of history - and a projected future - and might be seen as a memorial to humanity in both directions.

It cannot be incidental that the work was conceived in 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War and the Moon landing: the year when humanity marked itself at its weakest and also its most noble. Reproducing the project in the centre of London's monuments to forgotten heroes is inspired.

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