Dear Friends of VISA,
Time (or lack thereof) is a constant theme in conversations. Everybody wants more of it. Everybody wants more time to do what they love and less time spent on what they don't like. Everybody is busy and nobody has any time. In my practice as an artist, I tend to gravitate towards time intensive intricate details. I want the evidence of the hand in my work. Common phrases when people see my work: 'how long did it take you?'; 'how do you have the time to do this work and run an art school?;' or my personal favourite: 'you must have a lot of time on your hands to make work like this'. I never know how to respond to these comments. I know there are alot of assumptions made about time and labour; when people witness 'visible labour', such as in my painted and/or cut shapes, they are startled, as if it is something entirely out of their grasp or understanding. Paradoxically work such as photography or video might take the same time or longer to produce than my obviously labour intensive work; but because we can't see the obvious mark of the hand in photo or video, we don't see
time in it, so we are not enamoured in the same way about the process and production involved. Its a rare day someone looks at a photograph and says 'I wonder how long it took to do this?' We assume that it was done the split second of a pressed button even though the photographer might have waited for hours to get the right light and right conditions and then might have spent hours in the lab or computer processing the image. The same thing when we experience a two-hour film. We rarely think of the time that goes into making a movie. We see it as we experience it: two hours in real time.
Christian Marclay is an artist who took on the subject of time with full force in his work
The Clock which is currently on display at the National Gallery in Ottawa*.
The Clock is a 24 hour film montage that depicts all the minutes in a a 24 hour day. Yes, ALL the minutes is a 24 hour day. The New Yorker has a very long article about
making of The Clock. Don't be intimidated by the length of this reading: it is a really riveting read. In fact, it is the best writing on an artist I have read all year or maybe ever. Perhaps before reading about
The Clock you should check out a short clip of it on
YouTube. Here is a news story about
The Clock where you get to see the
installation and audience which helps contextualize the work a little more. When I saw the work, I hadn't yet read much about it beforehand (John Luna had sent me the New Yorker article but I hadn't got around to reading it at that point). After I took my seat in one of the cozy couches (seating specified by the artist), it took me a few minutes to realize it was in REAL time. So if you enter the exhibition at 3:05pm, that is the time it is in
The Clock. This gives the audience the uncanny feeling that they are 'in' the film. Sometimes you forget and check your time piece, only to realize (once again) it is the same time as in the film. The other fascinating aspect of
The Clock is that while it is made of literally thousands of film clips, as you sit down and watch it, your brain, with its understanding of the conventions of film, makes some strange kind of sense of these random images. The mind begins to construct a plot of sorts from these very diverse images. To get a sense of this experience check out
Telephones, an earlier work by Marclay.
Sometimes video art gets dismissed as a lesser art among more traditional art people. When students are signing up for courses, they balk when I suggest they take video art. They want to draw and paint. The genres of drawing and painting in some circles still have the romantic notion of being more authentic because you can see the mark of the hand, the labour.
The Clock is situated in an interesting place so that even the most jaded video art dismissers will become engaged. The hand is both evident (in the thousands of disparate images) and invisible because of the seemingly seamless continuity between images. If any of you are skeptical about the possibilities of 'video art' as an exciting and compelling means of expression, I hope you get to see
The Clock in a gallery space one day. (If any of you are in Toronto in September-November check it out at the
Power Plant). In the meantime, perhaps one of these days you might be tempted to try out this Video Art thing yourself one day.
*the fact that the last three newsletters contain commentary about work at the National Gallery in Ottawa has not been deliberate; however, it does attest to the high quality of curatorial decisions that get made there.
Digital Printing?