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?