Making Time: Laura Richard

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Laura Richard, graduate student in History of Art at UC Berkeley.

As a description, “time-based art” has always struck me as a bit off. But not so much because its baggy scope enables a sometimes arbitrary and lazy lacing together of dizzyingly disparate works across media. In fact, this ruled but unruly interdisciplinarity seems mostly a virtue, the whole point: to think through dance, film, visual art, music, theater and performance adjacently and synchronically. To consider works primarily in relation to a shared structuring element of time, rather than diachronically according to a specific material-driven conception sprung from traditional genealogies and histories. Of course, this possibility pivots on whether we consider time to be a principle or a medium, an issue to which the hyphenation “time-based” offers little traction.

But if the term is silently indifferent to the way it might structure discourse in the humanities, it does call out a use-value in another, perhaps less welcome or intentional discipline: Business. Time, after all, is money, and indeed, in the marketplace “time-based” is the lingua franca of global information economy expounded and expanded in the pages of the Harvard Business Review and elsewhere. “Time-based strategies” focus on the reduction of time required to accomplish tasks: “time-based competition” seeks to compress the time required to propose, develop, manufacture, market and deliver products, and “time-based pricing” depends on the length of time it takes to provide a commodity or service. False-cognates between the languages of capital and culture seem no longer possible. And a loaded loanword like “time-based” functions not just as a portmanteau on which to hang a multitude of artistic practices, but implicitly smuggles in the mantle of the market. As a result, rather than enriching, “time-based” risks diluting and packaging complexity and difference across practices into a single fungible, brand-ready category born from—or based on—a lowest common denominator. The need for more precise and subtle subheaders for, distinctions within, and theorizations of “time-based art” is driven then as much by the value of acknowledging the particular ways in which duration and individual works shape each other, as it is necessary to resist cooption by the culture/entertainment industry and the flattening, time-indifferent logic of capital.

MAKING TIME: Liz Kotz

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Liz Kotz, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at UC Riverside.

I’m not sure how useful the concept of “time-based art” is. It lumps together things that have nothing in common, and artificially separates things that do.

For me, one of the places where this kind of practice emerged is the series of concerts that La Monte Young organized at Yoko Ono’s loft in 1960-1961. It included work by composers and musicians (Henry Flynt, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Richard Maxfield and others), with experimental dance (Simone Forti), poetry and theater (Jackson MacLow), and a sculptural installation (Robert Morris). The space was not a gallery and not a theater. Many of these “time-based” projects were indeterminate in nature and refuse to create a set sequence or control the way the audience encounters the work. The notion of “interdisciplinarity” at play was more about working in spaces between and beyond disciplines than an additive or mixed-media structure. Much of the work came out of an expanded sense of music that occurred in proximity to the visual arts.

Forti’s “Dance Constructions” were placed throughout the space, allowing audience members to walk around and among them. In “Huddle” – “a dance that’s in a way a sculpture” -- a basic structure sets the piece in motion, but the specific movements and duration are generated by those doing the piece. Young’s realization of his “Compositions 1961 #1-29” entailed carefully drawing a line across the space 29 times, a process that took a several hours. Morris’s “Passageway” was a room-sized environment, a gradually narrowing spiral passageway, open five nights in a row from 9pm-midnight. These works all occur over time in a relatedly unstructured way. They allow (or even force) viewers or listeners to create their own relation to them. You focus on this, or that. You pay attention, or you get tired. You walk around, or sit still.

This proto-minimal moment of 50+ years ago still seems very relevant. I was talking with a painter friend about a work we had just seen, “Passage,” a collaboration between the filmmaker Madison Brookshire and the composer Tashi Wada, “an installation in color and sound for two 16mm projectors.” Produced by two looped 16mm films projected onto a single field, the event went on for over five hours. You could sit still and watch or walk around the space, experiencing how the mix of the two sound and light sources shifted and created different effects. The abstract field of the film created a kind of immersive, bodily experience. “It's up front, you can't really go there, but you naturally go into it—just like painting.”

MAKING TIME: Malik Gaines

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Malik Gaines, Assistant Professor of Art at Hunter College, New York. 

Visual art and performance are in a classic bad relationship.  Art stays for the sex, the good times, the feeling of being alive.  But art will belittle performance in public, will call it late at night but won’t let it stay over, doesn’t really believe what performance does is valuable.  Art’s esteemed family only barely tolerates the relationship.  Performance stays with its more powerful partner for the money, for the stature, the trips to Europe, for feeling like it belongs to something, for fear of having to go back to that old senile boyfriend, the Theater.  How else can it support itself?  But performance never feels like it really belongs in art’s world.  It’s always using the wrong fork at dinner.  Performance is always acting out, marginalizing itself, relishing the freedom of that marginal position, then wondering why it can’t get any respect in art’s world.  These dynamics can be traced back to each partner’s childhood.

Art was born among aristocrats, but went to school with merchants who made it big.  They value value.  Their wealth is derived from a displacement of value onto objects. These objects are sometimes useful, like tools, machines, and slaves; but those are meant to be handled by the servants.  Art’s family is hierarchical, those on the top surround themselves with beauty.  Beauty is not material, like so many tools, but ideal.  One may not touch an ideal.  As this family grew increasingly rational and scientific, an empirical interest in observation met an emphasis on visuality to bolster art’s importance.  Art has always been very good-looking, and has long served as a site of contemplation for its many admirers.  As such, folks tend to project what they want onto it.

Performance is older than it looks, much older than the infantilized position imagined by art.  It grew up in a religious milieu, but eventually found its secular purposes.  In either context, it was always trying to do something, make something happen.  In an increasingly alienated and imagistic world, performance found that it could foreground its own body as the instrument of ideal relations, a material iteration of ideological constraints.  This act is ambivalent: it can mystify or deconstruct; it can promote heroism or criticality.  The body and its cultural trappings are so thoroughly marked, so easily recognized, that performance can sometimes feel over-determined to those who encounter it.

During a political rough patch, both were radicalized.  Art started dating outside its class.  Performance dared to leave home.  They met in an avant-garde café.  The rest is history: or Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present …

 

MAKING TIME: Mark Franko

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Mark Franko, Professor of Dance and Performance Studies at UC Santa Cruz. 

The debate over Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” some time ago raised an awareness that sculpture could be a time-based art, and that the time of art belonged principally to the beholder in a situation of viewing that Fried characterized negatively as “theatrical” but that was also reclaimed positively by others. Since then I think the term “theatricality” has given way to the term interdisciplinarity.
 
I have thought about these issues in the context of the Center for Visual and Performance Studies at UCSC where we have staged seminars and conferences on related to the interdisciplinary methodologies and of the visual and performative. In an article I co-authored with Catherine Soussloff, “Visual and Performance Studies. New History of Interdisciplinarity” [in Social Text 73, 20/4 (Winter 2002): 29-46] we examined the epistemologies of interdisciplinary art practices both historically and institutionally. One other pertinent publication that emerged from our conferences is the collective volume I edited Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Routledge, 2007).
 
With respect to dance, I have long felt time operates as the “space” for reflection. In particular the slowing down of dance, which I have long practiced in with my own choreography, brings the sensation of time in viewing and interpretation to the fore. This was particularly true for me in my collaboration with photographer Ernestine Rubin, Le Marbre Tremble (Toulon Art Museum). Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has spoken of the museum theatre and of the “slow object” and “performing museology”.

Arts Research Center Welcomes Sabine Breitwieser to Berkeley

 

The Arts Research Center is pleased to welcome Sabine Breitwieser, Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art, for a week-long residency at UC Berkeley as a 2012 Regents Lecturer.  Her visit kicked off on Sunday, April 15 in the galleries at the Berkeley Art Museum, where she and curator Constance Lewallen discussed the current exhibit "State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970." Their conversation about the "de-materialization" and "re-materialization" of conceptual art was enlivened by cameo appearances by two of the artists represented in the show--both Lynn Hershman and Chip Lord (of Ant Farm) were on hand to discuss their own work.  Lewallen's deep immersion in the history of California artists and art movements was neatly complemented by Breitwieser's European perspective. She reminded the audience that many of the American artists in "State of Mind" were influenced by European artists and art movements, and that many of them were exhibited extensively in Europe while their work was being virtually ignored in the United States. Both curators discussed the ways in which "post-studio" art practices challenge traditions of collection and exhibition--and pointed out the role that gender sometimes played in determining whether work was carefully archived or not.

Breitwieser will speak next at the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium on Monday, April 16 at 7:30pm.  Her lecture on "Media Bichos and Other Interdisciplinary Displays at the Art Museum" is free and open to the public.

On Thursday, April 19 at 5pm at the Berkeley Art Museum, Breitwieser will give her Regents Lecture on "Performance With Curators: Art and the Public Sphere" to kick off the Arts Research Center's Making Time symposium, a three-day exploration of issues related to time-based art. This event is also free and open to the public.

MAKING TIME: Sabine Breitwieser

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Sabine Breitwieser, Curator of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art.

Time based art is when the artist has the control of a certain choreography of a sequence of images and/or live events and determines how the audience is encountering it. It usually also involves a number of media and is rather organized cross-media or inter-media.

While in traditional exhibitions of static objects the choreography how art objects are displayed is usually decided by a curator.  This is not the case when it comes to artworks that are about choreography, such as film, video or performance related art works. We could argue that through time based work the artist is re-gaining the leadership and the decision of how the audience is confronted with the artwork.

This can also have the effect that the audience feels that the artwork is dominating too much. Like when confronted with long videos in museums it requires much time that I might not have planned before. Or when a performance is presented I just cannot watch a few minutes, go somewhere else and come back. I might not understand the work because I’ve missed the sequence of the individual acts.

MAKING TIME: Rebecca Schneider

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Rebecca Schneider, Associate Professor of Theatre, Speech, and Dance at Brown University.

For me, it’s hard to imagine a work that does not include time as material. Perhaps timeless masterworks once existed? Of course, to say that they used to exist would imply that they existed, once, in time. It was the claim of “ruin value” that a work would endure to such an extent that it could be, or at least seem, timeless. But this claim is clearly, itself, time-based. For me (a performance studies scholar – so everything I say here is completely predictable) time is included in the instant or the hour or the year or the life in which I encounter an artwork, an art event, an art life.  But time is also there in the work I may have missed – that time I didn’t make it to the theatre for instance, or to the gallery, or to the studio, or to the 18th-century. To miss something, to not encounter it, is as much a matter of time as of space. So the question perhaps is a matter of performative inflection:  what does it mean to be time-based? Does overtly placing the emphasis on “based” alter the question? How might a work based on time, or based in time – work whose primary material, whose explicit material support, is time itself – be different from a work that may be encountered or missed in time, but is not explicitly based in time, or does not give time to be its primary material support?   Work based in time might indicate work that takes some mode of marking time literally, like Tehching Hsieh’s time clock piece. It might indicate durational work that overtly expands or compresses the normative or habitual experience of time so that a participant spectator cannot miss the ingredient he or she might otherwise take for granted. It might be work that is purposefully anachronistic (though we could argue that all work is anachronistic), that is, work that clearly places one time in another time, such as Allison Smith’s Muster, or any production of a play or any citational piece or re-do. To think of time as material and to render that material palpable is a fecund project, for it undoes, almost immediately, the tendency toward thinking of time as a line -- linear – unidirectional – vanishing – gone the moment you acknowledge it as “now.” Time-based work is work that gets our hands or eyes or ears dirty with repetition, with event, dirty with theatricality, dirty with anything that falls outside ideality – dirty, that is, with mimesis, the basic building block of the social.  But time-based artwork is also any work, the minute we decide to access an experience of that work as primarily temporal. So, another question becomes, what is time-based encounter, viewing, experience, participation, or consumption of art – and what is not? There’s also the question of why now? Why now (again) the privileging or undoing, the stretching or condensing, of “now” as a mode of making and a mode of access to art?

MAKING TIME: Jonah Bokaer

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Jonah Bokaer, Choreographer and Media Artist. 

Photo Credit: Steve Benisty

The Greek language refers to choreography as "dance writing" from the words χορεία (circular dance) and γραφή (writing). I have come to understand that choreographers practice the art of designing movements, in some specified form, through time. 

Many choreographers supply the observation that “time-based art” is a redundant heading, when applied to their work. Not only is choreography time-based, but is is a continuum, advanced by many participants, over time. Choreographers participate in this continuum, by moving the artform forward - and in a variety of different aesthetic directions.

My goal is to develop four proposals on the time-based continuum of choreography: 

1. To inhibit the act of vanishing in choreography. To capture choreography, and interrupt its disappearance.
2. To intensify the relationship between choreography, visual art, and time-based media.
3. To utilize new forms of reproduction, animation, and digital applications, in order to show choreography in real time, after it has been performed.
4. To reconfigure the use of time, by situating choreography in new relationships to durational performance.

MAKING TIME: Jens Hoffmann

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Jens Hoffmann, Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.

Photo Credit: Bob Adler

 I would like to offer another mode of thinking about performance and the exhibition that is less involved with the various structures of the art world and more in consideration of the experience of the exhibition and the artwork itself. This is to say my thinking around the subject of the conference is informed by a set of parameters located quite specifically within the exhibition itself and my practice has very much developed in consideration of what kind of experiences can be made possible within that space. I would like to introduce Brecht's idea of the Dramatic Construction to the practice of exhibition making and to this discussion to see in how far we can talk about the visit of an exhibition as a performative experience.

MAKING TIME: Nora Alter

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Nora Alter, Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University.

Don Delillo’s 2010 novel Point Omega opens and closes with a lengthy meditation by a nameless character on Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, 1993. The first section plunges the reader into a detailed observation of Gordon’s video-sculpture as it was installed on the sixth floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in September 2006. An anonymous man (who turns out to be the narrator) describes the darkened, seatless setting in which he encounters the work, the impassive guards, the bewildered tourists, and the effect of watching Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 suspense film re-projected as a twenty-four-hour-long art work. In particular, DeLillo’s narrator ponders the effects of slowness, the changes in perception brought about by the manipulation of the speed of projection. He contrasts the conventional understanding of Hitchcock’s classic to the meanings produced by Gordon’s version in which every movement is amplified and each detail made more apparent. This is at the core of what separates art and entertainment, muses Delillo’s protagonist. The difference between an art installation and a Hollywood movie has largely to do with the speed of perception. Art deliberately slows down and complicates viewing in order to challenge the spectator to rethink and re-feel form and experience. Entertainment does the opposite--accelerating and simplifying viewing so that the observer before the spectacle does not have to think about or feel very much of anything at all.

From the point of view of the protagonist in Point Omega, 24-Hour Psycho underscores the concept of time in the cinematic. However, one integral component of the time-based medium of film is left out of this equation: sound. The latter is an element that, since 1927 at least, has been mobilized to measure, regulate, order, suture, and structure movement. But sound, unlike images, is much more difficult to slow down, to speed up, or to still, without a significant loss of coherency and a fundamental alteration of meaning. This, presumably, is why Gordon felt the need to project 24-Hour Psycho silently. Sound is unforgiving. It is the time-based sense, reliant on movement for its existence. As the narrator reflects in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1991 Allemagne 90 neuf zero (Germany Year 90 Nine Zero):

Peut–on raconteur le temps, le temps en-lui meme? Non, en verite ce serait une folle enterprise. Ce serait a peu pres comme si l’on voulait tenir pendant une heure une seule et meme note ou un accord, et comme si on voulait faire passer cela pour de la musique. [Can one recount time: time as such, in and of itself? No, in truth it would be an insane undertaking. A bit like holding one single note or chord for an hour, and trying to pass it off as music.]

The question I want to pose at this conference is: What is lost (or gained as the case may be) when the ephemeral, movement- and time-based phenomenon that is sound is framed, channeled, and put on display in an art context?

MAKING TIME: Darsie Alexander

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Darsie Alexander, Chief Curator of Walker Art Center. 

The phrase “time-based art” suggests a bygone era when ephemerality, duration, and process were the attributes of a radical new art that found its outlet through performance and its documentation through the camera. "Time-based" conjures the live experience attempting to find a permanent form in something tangible (and also, preferably, "time-based") like a photograph or raw video footage. These two things -- the live performance and the documentation it engenders -- have inherently different relationships to time, of course.  A performance (dance, spoken word, improvisational jazz, etc.) can expand or accelerate time, occurring in relationship to the human clock ticking off the minutes in states of rapture, boredom, or distraction. The camera deployed to document these events parses time in increments, measuring time or "freezing" time for posterity (i.e. another time). Many sixties event-based artists hated having their work calcified by the camera, arguing that "there is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image" (Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” first published in Art in America in 1978). Live or "time-based art" was designed to be experiential and resistant to commodification, and therefore the marketplace.  Time was not something that could be bought and sold, only inadequately "captured."

The struggle over how to navigate documentation (physically? philosophically?) seems to have subsided today, however, as our relationship to recording time has become so much more casual and fluid. Instantaneous streaming, blogging, Twitter feeds, etc. allow live events to be experienced as they occur through an array of simultaneous platforms activated by media-savvy participants/observers. Has the availability and ease of live image-capture disturbed the “allure” of firsthand experience?  Certainly there’s not the pressure to witness “time-based” events in person as there once was in a pre-digital era. At the same time, it could be argued that sharing an experience – be it in the theater, gallery environment, or alternative site -- has taken on even greater meaning in this climate of enhanced mediation. Maybe the best way to understand “time-based art” today is to imagine the state of being together in time (and space) rather than a particular genre that now feels decidedly historical. 

MAKING TIME: Ferran Barenblit

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Ferran Barenblit, Director of the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid.

I have been using the concept expanded event for some years as a way to refer to time-based art. With this concept I have referred to those works, mostly shown in exhibitions, which experiment with some kind of change during the time they stay on view to the public.
 
For the last two centuries the main form of relationship between art and public has been the exhibition: the setting out of works of art in a public space—the museum or gallery—to which visitors are allowed access. For decades that model has been undergoing reformulation thanks to the questioning of the social roles of art, the role of the art institutions and their position in relation to the market. Since the 1960s, these ideas have taken shape in works that in many cases are impossible to present in an exhibition space, such as Land Art, Actionism or certain conceptual practices. In due course museology itself would adapt to these challenges, designing mechanisms with which to incorporate these works into their collections.
 
Forty years on, this type of practice has evolved in the context of a society that is increasingly linked to the communications media and entertainment. The expanded event is the intuitive response: exhibitions in which the visitor’s experience is still paramount, and which apply the new logics of leisure culture and the event.
 
As a sample of what an expanded event is, I will mention a project I did in 2005 with Barcelona-based artist Martí Anson. The project was entitled Fitzcarraldo, 55 days working on the construction of a Stella 34 yacht in the CASM. What the visitor encountered was exactly that: the artist himself working alone in the construction of a 33-foot sailing yacht. The choice of a ship was all but naïve: it was the bigger object that could make sense to take as a valued art object after the exhibition. He did very well (he is a good craftsman) and almost finished the ship in the 55 working days that the show lasted. He worked 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, while the museum had different opening times. However, as planned, the yacht never left the museum: it was 3 inches wider than the venue’s biggest access. Thus, it was quickly destroyed the day after the show was finished.
 
The expanded event is configured as a way of developing these ideas by generating multiple readings, some of which enter into contradiction with one another. It takes a critical approach to many of the practices that are put forward as established norms in contemporary art. It obliges the ‘art institution’ to develop new ways of accommodating these proposals and in so doing brings about various changes. The most important of these is that in order to host such projects the centre has to look for new tools with which to produce and render accessible a work that is in process. These changes, in turn, also pose challenges to the other agents involved in this art institution, including critics, the academy and the market. All of this is done by creating a new pattern of work which paradoxically shares in many of the practices already accepted by a society ever more closely linked to the spectacle.

MAKING TIME: Shannon Jackson

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Shannon Jackson, ARC Director.

I come to the questions of Making Time from the field of performance--and before that, the field of theatre.  This is to say that, for a long time, the term "time-based art" did not mean that much to me.  It sounded confusing, or maybe even redundant. What art form does not involve time?  Indeed, it was not until I began working with experimental visual artists and critics of expanded visual art that I began to learn that I came from a time-based form.  "Oh," they would say, "you're interested in duration."  "Indeed," I would say back, channeling my field's constant conversations about time, tense, and narrative.  But I still wondered if their referent for duration was the same as mine.  Is the Time in "time-based art" the same for us all?

Obviously, ARC is hosting Making Time because we happen to think that choreographers, public artists, performing artists, visual artists, theatre-makers, video-makers, musicians, photographers, and more have different conceptions of what time-based art is.  And we also happen to think that we can learn from each other by bringing perspectives and processes from these different fields into the same space.  Such a gathering can involve moments of disorientation, confusion, or impatience.  But our hunch is that disorientation can become a productive kind of de-familiarization, a moment when we look anew at practices and principles that we take for granted in our own art fields.  

In the worlds I myself inhabit right now, there is a fairly urgent debate upon the relation between so-called "visual art performance" forms and those forms of performance that descend from theatre and dance.  Artists, critics, and curators are in tangles right now, trying to clarify how such cross-disciplinary experimentation should be understood.  Many also find themselves asserting new principles for deciding what is artistically rigorous and what is simply "entertainment," what is abstract and what is referential, what is innovation and what is a reinvented wheel.  Meanwhile, these interesting puzzles affect the kind of education we try to provide--what is skilled and what is unskilled in these difference kinds of performance?  What is amateur and what is "a Conceptual deployment of amateurism?"  When some artists "turn to time," they could accused of looking "too theatrical" by some and of producing "bad acting" to others.  Meanwhile, some dance installations in museum galleries feel overly literal or spectacular to some, while others feel that choreographers are allowing themselves to be de-skilled by an artworld's fascination with them.  

Similar moments of possibility and moments of mis-recognition shadow so much cross-displinary art.  In some socially-engaged art, the decision to make a work of long duration is often linked to its political content.  Meanwhile, in socially-engaged performance, critical consciousness is often said to occur when time is stopped, i.e. when conventional narratives are interrupted or stalled. Some experimental video is made to presented in the cinema, with audience members sitting in rows.  Other experimental video is made to be installed in the gallery, with audience members circling it as kind of sculpture.  The list of experiments continues--and will continue throughout our discussions in Making Time. I look forward to learning more about how everyone has turned moments of defamiliarization into new artistic possibilities--as we advance ARC's efforts to provide a think-tank for reflection across art forms.

MAKING TIME: Joe Goode

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Joe Goode, Professor of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Dance has been traditionally perceived as a time based form. The conventional wisdom is that a dance should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Merce Cunningham disrupted this to some great degree by corrupting the linearity of sequence in his dances. Chance processes allowed shards of the dance to appear and disappear at different times. He also went a great distance to getting dance out of the proscenium box and into spaces that were more level with the viewer (museums, warehouses, studios). I think there is another generation of dancemakers on the scene now who are taking dance into a more site specific realm where the viewer can be volitional and move as he or she chooses through the space in search of a very individual perspective on the dance. In this type of work there can be a sense of discovery and participation which I find truly exciting. 

My own attraction to site work stems from my desire to offer small narrative fragments, snapshots if you will, that suggest a larger context, but never spell it out. Depending on the order in which these “close-ups” are viewed, the viewer may construct many different narratives. Again, this relinquishes a kind of control of authorship that I like. It demands that the viewer bring his/her own intuitive power into play. The story is not the important thing, the individual perception of the story is what matters. 

For example: In 2009, I did an installation at the Old Mint in San Francisco (Traveling Light).  The viewer roamed through vaults and chambers of the building discovering little narrative threads that were somehow related to the site. Some of the text was inspired by Edna Ferber’s wonderful book, So Big, about the sea change in America in the early twentieth century, where we went from an agrarian culture to an industrialized one. Many of the sites within the building were inhabited with snapshots of a newly minted capitalist mentality as it was just beginning to burgeon and spread. Because the building offered so many different types of spaces, from elegant balconied reception halls to dark steel clad vaults, there were many textures to draw from. It was a delicious smorgasborg for an artist looking to offer a fractured narrative. As it was the peak of the financial melt down in the US, I felt I had hit the jackpot when I procured this site. 

Two days before the opening of Traveling Light, Merce died. I was being interviewed about the show by a local television station and I had a sudden realization- what I was making, even with all its narrative trappings, was a salute to Merce, the great pioneer. Without his courageous disregard for the conventions of time and how dance “ought” to be viewed, I would never have arrived at this place. 

I am eager to see where dance making can go in the next few years. None of the cutting edge choreographers that I know are very much interested in making work for the stage. And everyone seems to be looking for that key to a more engaged participation of the viewer. Certainly, we will all be following in Merce’s footsteps to some degree- looking at “time” and what it means and how it can be reconfigured.

MAKING TIME: Lawrence Rinder

The Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley is sponsoring the symposium MAKING TIME: Art Across Gallery, Screen, and Stage taking place from April 19-21, 2012. Participants have been invited to respond to the prompt “what does the phrase 'time-based art' mean to you?” in advance of the event. This posting is by Lawrence Rinder, Director of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

Photo by Ben Blackwell

 

To me, time-based art could be anything that is art and takes time. Time-based art could include video, film, performance, net art, etc. These are a diverse array of practices and I'm not sure that they have anything particularly meaningful in common. Time itself is not a clear differentiator since even static works take time to view. So time as part of any art experience is inescapable. Works that require specific amounts of time may create logistical issues for presenters and sometimes for audiences, especially those not accustomed to incorporating specific duration in their viewing experience. However, I'm not sure that the fact that a work requires a specific amount of time to view necessarily differentiates it aesthetically from one that does not, though in some cases (i.e. John Cage's 4'33") specific duration is the very point of the work and, arguably, contributes importantly to the aesthetic experience.