Beyond its philosophical connotation, time can be an element to question the limits: of the institution, of perception, of the spectator, of the work, of the artist…
The shot in which Carey Mulligan performs the song “New York, New York” is eternal in Steve McQueen’s film “Shame.” And we are not in a museum. “Shame” is in the circuits of commercial cinema. Alexandr Sokurov’s cinema expands the notion of time so much that it challenges the conventions of its exhibition. In “Sleeping,” Andy Warhol filmed an eight-hour night of sleep by the poet John Giorno. Real time and cinematic time overlap. Martí Anson makes a pseudo-road-movie “Walt & Travis” that shows the moments in which nothing relevant happens.
Time can also expand in such a way that we are not able to encompass all the work. In “24 Hours Psycho”, Douglas Gordon slows down Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Psycho” so that its duration coincides with the 24 hours in which the film’s plot unfolds. Christian Marclay builds an installation from the editing of film scenes in which clocks appear, talk about time or actions linked to it are carried out, synchronized with the moment in which they are projected.
Dora García’s proposal at the 2011 Venice Biennale was equally unfathomable. “Lo recomendado” consisted of a series of performances that were carried out throughout the months that the Biennale lasted, so that hardly any spectator was able to follow the project in person in its entirety, except for the artist herself.
In other cases, perception changes because it focuses on the experience of reality. The time spent visiting the exhibition is transformed into a time of experience or conversation, as occurs with the “constructed situations” by Tino Sehgal. Or a time of surprise, as in Martin Creed’s “Work No. 850” which consisted of a sprinter running the 86 metres of the neoclassical corridor of the Tate Britain at full speed every 30 seconds.
Modifying temporal codes has to do with experience and, whether through expansion, freezing, slowing down or compression, it is related to exploring the limits of the institution and the very definition of the artistic fact: what is the work? How should it be presented? How should it be perceived? What is the role of the artist? What is the role of the spectator?
[Article published in Bonart, 2012]
