TIME
Los Angeles, 2019
On the roof of the Lloyd building, Roy Batty, the leader of the group of rebel replicants who have returned to Earth to learn the meaning of their existence, is about to accept his end: “I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. I have seen ships attacking on fire off the edge of Orion. I have seen C-beams shining in the darkness near the Tanhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. It’s time to die.”
Police officer Rick Deckard becomes a witness and ally, even though his initial mission was quite different: “I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those moments he loved life more than he had ever loved it. Not just his own life, but everyone’s. My life. All he wanted were the same answers we all seek. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How much time do I have left?”
Time. The notion of time leads us to a great philosophical question. The certainty of its finitude leads to an existential question. Memento Mori. Do not forget that your time is not eternal and will end one day.
And of course, art can become a manifestation of ideas, “a Trojan horse,” as the artist Ceal Floyer once defined it.
Tere Recarens prepared two large containers, the contents of which can only be revealed on March 19, 2014.
Kris Martin made an edition of ten golden spheres whose interior houses an explosive device that will be activated in a hundred years, in the year 2104.
James Lee Byars collected “perfect spheres,” “perfect moments,” “perfect phrases,” everything that deserves to endure and that synthesizes the essence of things, of existence.
The paintings and videos by Muntean and Rosenblum show the nostalgia of an Arcadia that also reminds us of the ephemeral nature of life.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres lets the pile of sweets equivalent to the weight of his sick lover gradually diminish as visitors to the exhibition take them away. Mountains of sweets or piles of posters disappear, dispersing, like life.
With songs shared by everyone, sung a cappella, Susan Philipsz transforms a common space into a space that we can suddenly make our own, that we see in a different way, because the songs she sings with her fragile and naked voice are part of our own biography.
On Kawara constantly reminds us that he is still alive.
Kris Martin invites us to look into a mirror in which, as if it were the end of a film, the words “The End” are written.
Suspended Time
Suspending time. Expanding it. To eternalize it, but also to reveal its mechanisms. To reveal its meaninglessness.
In Sleeping, Andy Warhol films an eight-hour night of sleep by the poet John Giorno. The last image of the film is a frozen shot. He also records the Empire State Building for eight hours. Real time and cinematic time overlap.
Martí Anson makes a road movie that shows everything that a road movie would never show, that is, the moments in which nothing relevant happens, the dead times.
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 develops. Not only does he emphasize the denial of the narrative, but he turns the suspense of the intrigue into a suspended narrative.
Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and other artists who work with “staged photographs” stop the action, but to make it last and so that the ordinariness of the chosen moment makes us aware of certain disturbing elements. In short, to make us suspicious of what we see.
Alicia Framis also stops time, or rather, the people who are part of various companies and institutions remain completely still for a few minutes. Her gesture has consequences but above all it serves to remind us that any individual action can have an extraordinary impact.
Economies of time
Time is money. The efficient use of work responds to a mental and economic system in which time equals money. Our daily life is completely programmed. There is no room for the unexpected or for the chance encounter. Baudelaire’s flâneur, the dandies’ walks accompanied by turtles to mark a slow rhythm; Breton’s Parisian wandering in search of Nadja and also poetry; the drifting journeys of the situationists… are no longer possible or have become acts of resistance or desocialization, attempts to reclaim our time. There are many ways of using time and also of losing it. The answer to effectiveness is a commitment to individuality and a position against standardization. It is the search for results different from those expected.
Art can create these frameworks of thought. It allows us to approach things in a different way. It allows us to approach reality from new perspectives, from the absurd, from the questioning of predetermined values, from doubt.
Francis Alÿs proposes travelling from Tijuana to San Diego, but not along the road that crosses the Mexican-American border, but by following another route, via Panama, Santiago, Sydney, Singapore and Bangkok, which will take thirty-five days to complete. He also observes some “paradoxes of praxis”. Sometimes making something leads to nothing. The artist drags a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts, leaving only a wet trail. There is no doubt that this is an absolutely subjective estimate of the economy of time.
Claude Closky revels in unproductive efforts, in futile knowledge. He makes inventories: the first thousand numbers in alphabetical order. He collects set phrases, ordering them from longest to shortest. He numbers the squares on a squared pad or makes a list from the Dôle telephone directory of 8,633 people there that he doesn’t know.
Ignasi Aballí also makes lists from newspapers: of people, artists, works, dead people… He wastes huge cans of paint. He builds useless walls or rectifies a black surface by covering it completely with tippex.
To put a bicycle wheel around a lamppost, Andreas Slominski has the lamppost raised, puts the wheel on the ground and then puts the lamppost back in place. To send a letter, he has a giraffe from the zoo lick the stamp.
David Hammons decided long ago. “The less I do, the more of an artist I am. Most of the time I spend on the street and walking.” In 1983, in Cooper Square in New York, David Hammons put snowballs on sale, arranged according to size on a coloured carpet.
We are left with the image of Hammons in a coat, hat and gloves, on a snowy street corner in front of fifty perfectly grouped snowballs, holding one in his hand and waiting. Looking to the side with an expression somewhere between taciturn, mocking and resigned. Selling snowballs and waiting. Waiting for a reaction, a response, a meaning. Simply waiting. Time.
Montse Badia
Spring 2008
(Pensa/Piensa/Think is an exhibition co-curated at the Santa Mònica Art Center in Barcelona, by Frederic Montornés, Jacob Fabricius, Ferran Barenblit and Montse Badia)
