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Roman Opalka
SLOWLY, though his heart was pounding like a runner’s, Roman Opalka approached the canvas. He had painted it completely black. The date, though he set no store by dates, was 1965. Clenched in his left hand was a pot of white acrylic paint; held tightly in his right was a No. 0 brush, the smallest standard size. He dipped the fine tip into the paint and then, very gently, as if in slow motion, raised his arm. His hand was trembling. Carefully he painted the figure 1 at the top left-hand corner of the canvas. At the same time he whispered, in his native Polish, jeden, one. The moment was so charged with emotion that he thought he might collapse. Instead, he had begun.
盡管心跳已如奔跑的人一樣快，羅曼·歐帕爾卡還是慢慢地走到畫布前。畫布已經被他全部涂上了純黑色。這一天，盡管他沒有記錄日期，是在1965年。他左手端著一碟白色丙烯酸顏料，右手握住0號筆刷（標準號碼里面最小的筆刷），然后筆尖蘸上顏料，輕柔地，慢慢地，抬起手臂。手在輕輕顫抖，他小心地在畫布左上角寫上“1”，用波蘭話輕輕說道，jeden，一。這一刻，充滿無限的感情，他感到自己要塌下了，只是，事實上，這正是他的起點。
He had thought about this for years, wondering how he might visualise time. He did not mean the time of clocks or calendars or hour-glasses; those were merely instruments of convenience for fixing points at which to have coffee, or feed the cat. That was time you could even reverse, by winding back the clock or tipping the hourglass over. He meant the irreversible continuum of time that flowed through him, the pulse of his life approaching his death within the vastness of infinity. For some years early in the 1960s he had played around with dabs and zigzags of monochrome paint on canvases which he called “Chronomes”, but he concluded that time was more orderly than that. By painting numbers in careful succession from one to infinity, or as near to it as he was destined to get, he would make a work of art that tracked as well as anything the movement of time in a life, and life in time.
關于怎樣才能表達出時間的印象，他已經深思熟很多年。他想要的表達，不是時鐘、日歷、時漏這些儀器，這些儀器的用處是提醒人們什么時候去喝咖啡，什么時間去喂小貓咪，這樣子的時間甚至都可以往回撥，鐘表的指針可以回調，時漏可以顛倒。他想要表達出來的，是穿過他自己的時間，那是不可逆轉的連續的時間，是在無限的廣漠之中他生命的脈搏走向了死亡。在二十世紀六十年代早期幾年里，他曾試著在用一種顏色在畫布上點點，或是畫之字，這種畫他稱之為“染色體”，但是最后他得出了這樣的結論，即時間比它們都有序。所以他才想到用這樣的方法來畫畫，在畫布上寫下數字，從一到無限，至少，到他有生之年能夠到達的那個數字，這樣，他能創作出的藝術品，才是對時間在生命之中的運動，或對生命在時間中的運動所做的紀錄。
The idea came easily enough, while he was waiting one winter day in a cold café in Warsaw for his wife and his friends to come, glancing impatiently at clock and watch, drumming the moments away on the table. But it demanded nothing less than the sacrifice of his life. From the moment of painting the figure 1 until the day he died, when he had reached well past 5500000 (no commas marred his work), his daily task was painting numbers and whispering their names, eventually into a tape recorder. Hence his extreme emotion when he began: his own “big bang”, signalling his own creation of space-time.
他是在寒冬的一天在華沙一家咖啡廳里等他老婆和朋友的時候萌生了這樣的想法，當時他不耐煩地看著鐘表，一下下敲著桌子要把時間敲走?？墒峭瓿蛇@樣的想法也要他奉獻一生的時間，從他寫下1開始，直到他逝世的那天，他已經寫到5500000了，他的作品沒有一個分隔的逗號，他每天的任務就是寫下數字，說那個數字，記錄在錄音帶里。因此，開始的那一刻，他強烈的情緒，正是他的“宇宙大爆炸”，是他自己的創世紀。
Each canvas was called a “detail”, and all had the same title, “Opalka 1965/ 1-∞”. Typically he would paint around 400 figures a day, standing almost motionless at the easel. He tried not to travel much, did not take holidays, and if the journey was unavoidable made what he called cartes de voyage, continuing his numbers in black ink on ordinary white paper. The work became so absorbing, so meditative, that he would try to paint at the deepest hours of night, when only the bark of a dog or distant cock-crow would disturb the southern French hillside where he lived.
每一張畫布都是一個“細節”，都有一樣的標題“歐帕爾卡 1965/1-∞”。通常，他一天寫大約400個數字，一動不動地站在畫架前。他盡量少去旅行，也沒有節假日，如果不得不出門旅行，他就寫下“旅行卡片”，在普通的白紙上用黑墨水寫下數字。他完全地沉浸在這份工作中，有時在深夜繪畫，在他所住的位于法國南部的山邊，只有能聽到遠處傳來的狗叫或雞鳴，
Heart trouble bothered him, and he once found the little paint-pot almost too heavy to lift, but he never considered stopping. The number 7777777 floated in his mind as a sort of completion of his “programme”; but in fact the completion would be his death, as he often said. Some critics saw his project as a sort of suicide, and he did not altogether dispute that. No sort of afterlife tempted him, he had no belief in one; but he very much liked a story by Marguerite Yourcenar in which a man built a boat and set out into infinity.
后來心臟有些問題讓他有點吃力，有一陣感到那個小顏料碟都太重了拿不動，但是他還是不放棄。曾經他也想過7777777這個數字就是這項任務的終點了，但是他也經常說過，事實上終點只能是到他死的時候。有些評論家認為他這個任務就等于是自殺，他沒有辯駁。他也沒有想過身后名聲之類的，也不相信誰。不過，他倒是很喜歡瑪格麗特·尤瑟納爾講的一個故事，講有一個男人，造了一艘船，就這樣開到無邊無際的地方去了。
Over the 46 years of his enterprise, his technique and materials barely changed. His canvases, 233 in all, were always 196 x 135cm, a good size to work at standing and to carry in outstretched arms. Brush and paint never varied. His figures were roughly a centimetre tall,
在他這項為期46年的事業里，他使用的材料，繪畫的技巧一點都沒變?？偣?33幅畫布，都是196 x 135cm，大小剛好適合站著畫，而且雙手展開拿著看也合適。繪畫的刷子和顏料還和最初用的一樣，數字大約一厘米高，其筆法大多數都是筆刷小心地刷過兩遍，再輕輕地淡出，像彗星的尾巴。他常說自己的畫法，就像出去散步的人，除非遇到嗑嗑絆絆，否則沒有意識到自己的腳步。也許他也遇到過嗑絆，但是他不曾回頭。
His biggest innovation was to change the background colour. In 1968 he made it grey; in 1972—when, barely able to breathe, he passed 1000000—he decided to add 1% more white to that grey every year. By 2008 the white of ground and figures was virtually the same, except that he thought of the ground as “well-earned white”, arduously brought out of the original black, and except that the newly painted figures would shine out against it until they dried. He approached this invisibility with a sort of exaltation.
他最大的創新在于更改畫布的背景顏色。1968年開始使用灰色的背景，1972年他的身體已經非常虛弱，他已經寫下了1000000，決定每過一年，就在那種灰色顏料里加1%的白色顏料。到2008年，背景色就是白色的，和寫數字的顏料幾乎無差，他認為，背景的白色是時光沉淀下來的白，是從最初的黑色當中一點點綻放出來的白色，與最初的白色不一樣。新畫上去的數字，顏料在顏料干了之后可以看出來。他認為就是這點難以發現的特點讓他感到欣喜?！?/p>
Self-portrait with numbers
From 1968, at the end of every working day, he took a black-and-white photograph of his impassive face against the canvas. This too was part of the project. It was not egoism or narcissism, he insisted. After all, his art told people nothing about his quotidian life. None of it—the birth in France, the childhood in Poland interrupted by war, the art studies in Warsaw, the year in Berlin—seemed important beside the immensity of the self-imposed task. He spoke about that, when asked, rather diffidently, softly rubbing the rims of his glasses in one hand, talking of Heidegger and Pascal and the notions of number held by the ancient Greeks, smiling often with what seemed to be repressed joy. And why not? Though people saw him as a prisoner, he felt more liberated with every stroke of the brush. Each of his self-portraits, with steadily silvering hair and whitening skin, showed him progressing as inevitably as his numbers into the infinity he longed for.
從1968年起，每天工作結束，他都站在畫布前照一張黑白照，都是些像寸照一樣的照片，照他沒有表情的臉。這也是這個項目的一部分。他說，這不是自我中心，更不是自戀。畢竟，他的作品里沒有傳達任何關于他平日生活的事情，一點都沒有，沒有關于他在法國出生的事情，沒有他在波蘭經歷戰爭的童年生活，沒有他在華沙學習藝術的事情，沒在柏林那一年的事情，這些，與他自愿接受的這項巨大任務相對都不重要。人們問到他的作品時，他有點羞怯，輕輕扶了下眼鏡框，談起海格德爾，帕斯卡，談成古代希臘人賦予數字的意義，他笑起來，帶著點壓抑的歡樂。怎能不歡樂？人們看他像住在監獄里，可是每刷動一次筆刷，他都感覺到更加自由。他每一幅自拍照片，銀色的頭發，白的膚色，展示著他的生命就像他所渴望的無窮的數字一樣不可逆轉地延續著。
