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?
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