Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2018
“This is an urgent message. Time is running out!” warned an automated voice on my phone one morning. I slammed the phone down assuming it was a sales pitch, but whatever the voice’s motive it wasn’t wrong. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the election of Donald Trump in 2016 inched the Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes 30 seconds to midnight, closer to the apocalypse than at any time since 1953, when America embraced the hydrogen bomb. God knows where it stands after the recent fusillade of incendiary tweets from the Potus with the shortest fuse in history; our best hope is that it’s quivering with indecision.
I don’t know how seriously we should take the BAS’s prophecy of doom, given that another contributory factor to its risk assessment was the danger posed to humanity by self-driving cars. But it does lend a sense of urgency to the question: is life too short for artists’ video?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the art form per se. In the 15 years since I first sounded off in this column on the subject of Tate Modern’s inaugural film and video exhibition, Time Zones, focused on artists who aimed “to mimic the passing of time”, so-called ‘moving image arts’ have moved on. Art schools may no longer teach painting and drawing but they do teach filmmaking, and some of their graduates have gone on to make successful features and (in the case of Steve McQueen, though not Sam Taylor-Johnson) win Oscars for them. As with any art form, there is good and bad. The problem is no longer quality, it’s quantity.
With a few exceptions, this year’s Liverpool Biennial is wall-to-wall film. In less than a week you haven’t a hope of seeing them all, let alone starting at the beginning and watching through to the end. In a day and a half I managed this feat with a few of the shorter ones, others I dipped in and out of before rushing onto the next thing. Living as we do under what French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has defined as a ‘dromocracy’ in which time = money and speed = power, ‘durational arts’ ought by rights to be regarded as a waste of time. Yet our art institutions are devoting more and more of this precious commodity to them. Why?
The easy answer is that moving images hold the attention in a way still images don’t. A recent study published in the American journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts found that people spend an average of 28 seconds in front of ‘important’ works of art (ie ones they need to tick off their bucket list). No change there – the figure has remained more or less constant for 15 years. The difference now is that most of those seconds are spent taking selfies, or what the authors of the study have dubbed ‘arties’.
Another advantage of video art, then, is that it’s screened in the dark. But apart from this, what’s in it for the artists? Most filmmakers, one imagines, structure their films in the expectation that audiences will watch them through from beginning to end. So it would be a courtesy to artists and audiences alike for organisers to provide some sort of timetable or app enabling footsore biennial trekkers to time their arrival at different venues to coincide with the start of the film they’re interested in seeing. But this seems to be beyond the capacity even of individual museum spaces. At Tate Modern’s Joan Jonas exhibition I totted up the running times of the dozen films on offer and the total came to four hours, two minutes and 30 seconds. (A little sad, I know, but I was bored.) That didn’t include the other half dozen films screened in The Tanks whose running times weren’t listed. There was no apparent attempt to stagger the screenings. Given that it took me nearly an hour to get around the show just reading the wall texts, it would have taken a devotee of Jonas – someone who had made a pilgrimage to the exhibition – the best part of a day, even if the films were programmed so that one finished as another started.
Jonas’s whimsical works were not meant to be seen like this. Many are records of performances now mostly of interest to aspiring performance artists or art historians, made over the course of a 50-year career with modest means for screening in makeshift venues, not for consuming in bulk in a Blavatnik Building gross-out. No surprise, then, that on a Sunday afternoon even the free section of the exhibition in The Tanks was deserted apart from a few people drifting aimlessly about. If the Psychology of Aesthetics boffins had come and timed the average attention span of this audience, I doubt it would have stretched the full 28 seconds.
In his review of last year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Jonathan Jones thanked god for video art. Yes, he actually pronounced those words. “In the shadows of an instant-culture age,” he went on, “perhaps only time-consuming video installation can make us lose track of the world and be truly absorbed in art… Good video art,” he concluded, “can set us free from time”. So can good feature films, and for longer periods. They do it by means of narrative, a device once despised by video artists but increasingly in evidence at the Liverpool Biennial in short films such as Mathias Poledna’s Indifference – a gripping piece of cinematography that is basically a mini-feature, just as Mohamed Bourouissa’s equally watchable Horse Day is a documentary by any other name.
Setting us free from time is not video art’s USP. Rather than freeing us from time, the best artists’ films and videos focus our attention on its passing by finding unusual ways of measuring it. In The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann pooh-poohed the idea of ‘telling time’ as narrative: “That would be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: ‘Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onwards and so forth – no one in his senses would consider that a narrative. It would be as though one held a single note for a whole hour and called it music.” He was obviously not familiar with durational art. With hindsight, though, I’m prepared to admit that Tate Modern’s Time Zones exhibition had a point: the obvious subject for time-based art is time. It’s the principal theme of the tragicomic video animations of David Theobald – measured out in winking kebab shop signs, crazy golf courses and naff rite-of-passage greetings cards – and of Mark Formanek’s Standard Time, a record of a 2009 performance outside Rotterdam Central Station in which a team of 36 workmen in hard hats equipped with ladders scrambled to keep a digital clock constructed from planks of wood ticking for 24 hours.
But the most successful exercise in ‘telling time’ is Christian Marclay’s The Clock, coming to Tate Modern in September. “It doesn’t just tell the time, it also tells us that we are going to die,” was how Charles Spencer sold this 24-hour durational marathon to modern art-averse readers of the Telegraph. Not only does Marclay turn clockwatching into an art, he entertains us while the seconds tick by to Doomsday.
Laura Gascoigne: Only A Matter of Time – September 2018
Laura Gascoigne
September/October 2018
“This is an urgent message. Time is running out!” warned an automated voice on my phone one morning. I slammed the phone down assuming it was a sales pitch, but whatever the voice’s motive it wasn’t wrong. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists the election of Donald Trump in 2016 inched the Doomsday Clock forward to two minutes 30 seconds to midnight, closer to the apocalypse than at any time since 1953, when America embraced the hydrogen bomb. God knows where it stands after the recent fusillade of incendiary tweets from the Potus with the shortest fuse in history; our best hope is that it’s quivering with indecision.
I don’t know how seriously we should take the BAS’s prophecy of doom, given that another contributory factor to its risk assessment was the danger posed to humanity by self-driving cars. But it does lend a sense of urgency to the question: is life too short for artists’ video?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the art form per se. In the 15 years since I first sounded off in this column on the subject of Tate Modern’s inaugural film and video exhibition, Time Zones, focused on artists who aimed “to mimic the passing of time”, so-called ‘moving image arts’ have moved on. Art schools may no longer teach painting and drawing but they do teach filmmaking, and some of their graduates have gone on to make successful features and (in the case of Steve McQueen, though not Sam Taylor-Johnson) win Oscars for them. As with any art form, there is good and bad. The problem is no longer quality, it’s quantity.
With a few exceptions, this year’s Liverpool Biennial is wall-to-wall film. In less than a week you haven’t a hope of seeing them all, let alone starting at the beginning and watching through to the end. In a day and a half I managed this feat with a few of the shorter ones, others I dipped in and out of before rushing onto the next thing. Living as we do under what French cultural theorist Paul Virilio has defined as a ‘dromocracy’ in which time = money and speed = power, ‘durational arts’ ought by rights to be regarded as a waste of time. Yet our art institutions are devoting more and more of this precious commodity to them. Why?
The easy answer is that moving images hold the attention in a way still images don’t. A recent study published in the American journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts found that people spend an average of 28 seconds in front of ‘important’ works of art (ie ones they need to tick off their bucket list). No change there – the figure has remained more or less constant for 15 years. The difference now is that most of those seconds are spent taking selfies, or what the authors of the study have dubbed ‘arties’.
Another advantage of video art, then, is that it’s screened in the dark. But apart from this, what’s in it for the artists? Most filmmakers, one imagines, structure their films in the expectation that audiences will watch them through from beginning to end. So it would be a courtesy to artists and audiences alike for organisers to provide some sort of timetable or app enabling footsore biennial trekkers to time their arrival at different venues to coincide with the start of the film they’re interested in seeing. But this seems to be beyond the capacity even of individual museum spaces. At Tate Modern’s Joan Jonas exhibition I totted up the running times of the dozen films on offer and the total came to four hours, two minutes and 30 seconds. (A little sad, I know, but I was bored.) That didn’t include the other half dozen films screened in The Tanks whose running times weren’t listed. There was no apparent attempt to stagger the screenings. Given that it took me nearly an hour to get around the show just reading the wall texts, it would have taken a devotee of Jonas – someone who had made a pilgrimage to the exhibition – the best part of a day, even if the films were programmed so that one finished as another started.
Jonas’s whimsical works were not meant to be seen like this. Many are records of performances now mostly of interest to aspiring performance artists or art historians, made over the course of a 50-year career with modest means for screening in makeshift venues, not for consuming in bulk in a Blavatnik Building gross-out. No surprise, then, that on a Sunday afternoon even the free section of the exhibition in The Tanks was deserted apart from a few people drifting aimlessly about. If the Psychology of Aesthetics boffins had come and timed the average attention span of this audience, I doubt it would have stretched the full 28 seconds.
In his review of last year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, Jonathan Jones thanked god for video art. Yes, he actually pronounced those words. “In the shadows of an instant-culture age,” he went on, “perhaps only time-consuming video installation can make us lose track of the world and be truly absorbed in art… Good video art,” he concluded, “can set us free from time”. So can good feature films, and for longer periods. They do it by means of narrative, a device once despised by video artists but increasingly in evidence at the Liverpool Biennial in short films such as Mathias Poledna’s Indifference – a gripping piece of cinematography that is basically a mini-feature, just as Mohamed Bourouissa’s equally watchable Horse Day is a documentary by any other name.
Setting us free from time is not video art’s USP. Rather than freeing us from time, the best artists’ films and videos focus our attention on its passing by finding unusual ways of measuring it. In The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann pooh-poohed the idea of ‘telling time’ as narrative: “That would be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: ‘Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onwards and so forth – no one in his senses would consider that a narrative. It would be as though one held a single note for a whole hour and called it music.” He was obviously not familiar with durational art. With hindsight, though, I’m prepared to admit that Tate Modern’s Time Zones exhibition had a point: the obvious subject for time-based art is time. It’s the principal theme of the tragicomic video animations of David Theobald – measured out in winking kebab shop signs, crazy golf courses and naff rite-of-passage greetings cards – and of Mark Formanek’s Standard Time, a record of a 2009 performance outside Rotterdam Central Station in which a team of 36 workmen in hard hats equipped with ladders scrambled to keep a digital clock constructed from planks of wood ticking for 24 hours.
But the most successful exercise in ‘telling time’ is Christian Marclay’s The Clock, coming to Tate Modern in September. “It doesn’t just tell the time, it also tells us that we are going to die,” was how Charles Spencer sold this 24-hour durational marathon to modern art-averse readers of the Telegraph. Not only does Marclay turn clockwatching into an art, he entertains us while the seconds tick by to Doomsday.
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