Spiraling Time: Leandro Katz

On March 15 and 16, 2013, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley will present Spiraling Time: Intermedial Conversations in Latin American Arts, part of its yearlong Time Zones series examining time-based arts in an international context. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, symposium participants have been invited to share here some brief reflections on what interests them about time and temporality. This posting is by the Argentine artist Leandro Katz.

A Sequence of Photographs

A work consisting of photograph taken through an analytical process that concentrates on the same sight, recording the passing of natural events in their relation to historical ones.    

 The work is thought as

1) Nature as an analogue of history and against the classical idea of nature as renewal, but of dominated nature: nature as ruins.

2) Photography equated to the hunting of images, and, in this case, the growing and cultivation of images. Superimposing as the storing of major and minor events in synthetic modes (freezing).

3) Memory as propensity, inclination or habit of the mind in relation to the current of events which appear and disappear in a series of separate but constant moments in perpetual state of change.

4) Images seen as images of the past: the idea that a picture of the world which we behold represents the condition of things happening at the moment when it appears to us, is here held as doubtful. 
     

5) From the perspective of art in which –appropriated from the objectivity of technological standards– each photograph is subjected to optical and chemical treatments outside manufacturer’s recommendations.

6) Living as waiting.

Leandro Katz. Notes for 12 Moons and 365 Sunsets (1976-77)

Suggested reading: Thesis on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin