“I Am Still Alive”—A Tautology of Transmission
On Kawara, I Am Still Alive. Telegram sent to German curator Dr. Zdenek Felix in 1972. Shown at 125 Maiden Lane. Photo: Significant Images
“I am still alive.” The phrase is both redundant and necessary, a tautology radicalized by medium. Between 1969 and 1979, On Kawara sent more than nine hundred telegrams bearing these four words to artists, curators, and acquaintances. In a medium built for urgency—death notices, declarations of war, arrivals and departures—Kawara’s message stages the banal fact of existence as a formal event. Each telegram embodies its own ontology: declared in real time through a system of transmission: not reflection, not news, but duration.
Kawara’s telegrams literalize the problem of form that modernism has evacuated. They articulate the persistence of the subject not as psychological interiority but as an infrastructural inscription: life as a pulse through cables, switches, and bureaucratic routes. Kawara’s proclamation is printed with carbon-ribbon print in a monotype font on a single, lightweight sheet of telegram paper; I Am Still Alive is fully embedded within the scaffolds of routing numbers, transmission codes, addresses, and time stamps. The medium, decidedly impermanent, insists that persistence necessitates taking form, even when it is inexorably mediated by transmission infrastructure.
In the 125 Maiden Lane exhibition, these telegrams are shown in a stoic room: grey carpets, acoustic drop ceiling tiles, and fluorescent lights. The work lands in a space that is the quintessential American office, a spatial typology that evokes corporate efficiency yet has engulfed more hours of American life than any other space. In such a context, “I am still alive” reads as a cry of endurance. A civic text, addressed to the public, testing whether our city can still embody enough compassion to register the signal. To remain alive today is to resist and navigate networks of exhaustion: economic, informational, and ecological. Kawara’s work proclaims that survival must have a form, that persistence is not passive continuity but deliberate enunciation.
On Kawara, I Am Still Alive. Installation shots at 125 Maiden Lane. Photo: Significant Images
Concurrently at Dia Beacon, less than 70 miles from Manhattan, Tehching Hsieh’s exhibition also stages the endurance of being. In his one-year performances, Hsieh clocks in hourly, lives outdoors, and abstains from art, from speech, from shelter. While both artists ponder on the question of being, Kawara tests it through transmissions, while Hsieh explores it through endurance. Both artists enact time not metaphorically but materially. Their difference reveals a dialectic: Hsieh suffers time to prove that he exists within it, while Kawara formats time to prove that existence can transcend through transmission. Hsieh’s ascetic works embody survival through extremity; Kawara’s telegrams demonstrate that mere continuance, through circulation, is radical enough.
Their simultaneous presence in New York, decades after the telegrams ceased and after the year of performance had expired, marks a moment when the work’s minimal gestures ring the loudest. In an era of synthetic proclamations, the act of simply declaring life, without proof or spectacle, recovers a dignity of resisting indolence. The telegram, like a court order of the most bureaucratic variety, is a document whose force lies in its procedure. Kawara’s proclamation resists dramatization. It is not about why he is alive or for how much longer. The thin slips of telegrams instead project an optimism of medium, a belief that form can still hold being, that mediation can shelter life from decay.
On Kawara, I Am Still Alive. Installation shots at Turquoise Gallery. Photo: Significant Images
To read Kawara’s telegram is to glimpse a civic minimalism, an ethic of persistence. His telegrams are both relics and anticipations, rehearsing the politics of presence without spectacle. “I am still alive” becomes both declaration and demand: a hope that someone is still listening. Kawara’s work thus asks us to imagine survival as a communicative condition: something constructed, maintained, and transmitted. In that sense, it is not only about life, but also about the medium that lets life be known. To stay alive, then, is to keep sending.
On Kawara: I Am Still Alive is open through November 9th at Turquoise Gallery and 125 Maiden Lane. The exhibition is organized by Cooper Campbell and Yoshi Hill.
