Time as Activity (*)
Time as Activity (*)
John Baldessari / Hans Bryssinck & Diederik Peeters / Etienne Chambaud / Rodney Graham / Nelson Henricks / David Lamelas / Chris Lloyd / Kelly Mark / Rober Racine / Claire Savoie / Bill Vazan / Ian Wallace
—(*) The title is borrowed from David Lamelas’ eponymous video series—
12.09.2009 → 07.11.2009
While nowadays, ‘documentation’ has widely been accepted and understood as one of the main paradigms of conceptual art, there has only been few attention for the ‘description’ – especially considering how intrinsic this activity was to the work of conceptual artists from the sixties and seventies. Even if the works of that period are often presented as the testimony of an action or an idea, this doesn’t exclude that they wouldn’t offer just as much a descriptive content of a particular sort: they denote the presence of “things-as-they-are”, in all their layers and details. Marie-Josée Jean, artistic director of the art center Vox in Montréal and curator of Time as Activity, concentrated on the continuity of these descriptions from the end of the sixties until
today.
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from David Lamelas’ eponymous video series which started in 1969, displaying three time sequences captured in Düsseldorf, in guise of a hyperrealistic rendition of day-to-day banality. Lamelas, in 2006: What happens on the screen has no aesthetic meaning whatsoever. The film only shows time in a city where the exhibition Prospect is taking place.Twelve minutes were chosen out of twenty-four hours of the city’s routine activity. Routine is made up from a series of actions that occur simultaneously, conditioned by the city’s boundaries. The artist attempts to capture a time without decision, a brief passage of time literally transformed into a subject of observation and reflection.
This way of observing reality is close to one of Georges Perec’s explorations. In October 1974, for three successive days, he sat in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris writing down anything he perceived. The result was a text published as Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (red.: ‘Attempt to exhaust a Parisian place’). By way of introduction, Perec wrote: My aim (…) was to describe (…) what one usually doesn’t write down, what one doesn’t perceive, what is without importance. The goal of these descriptions is not to testify about an external reality nor to show an accomplished world, but to participate in a creation, to invent the work – and the world – and therefore to learn to invent one own’s life (Georges Perec, 1975).
This approach enables to shed a new light on several conceptual practices – in particular those of David Lamelas, Bill Vazan, John Baldessari, Robert Racine, Ian Wallace or Rodney Graham – artists who share a similar descriptive attitude. These practices are gathered in the historical component of the exhibition, confronting the stakes lifted by the descriptive modalities of this generation with recent projects by contemporary artists, such as Hans Bryssinck and Diederik Peeters, Etienne Chambaud, Nelson Henricks, Chris Lloyd, Kelly Mark and Claire Savoie. Their temporality doesn’t imply a condensed or narrative time, but shows an expanse which is closely related to the linear progression of time, giving the impression that it is happening there, that it is about the present. Time as Activity regroups works which describe and make overt the time that goes by, the time that lasts, or, in Lamelas’ words, the time as activity.
John Baldessari ↓ Hans Bryssinck & Diederik Peeters ↓ Etienne Chambaud ↓ Rodney Graham ↓ Nelson Henricks ↓ David Lamelas ↓ Chris Lloyd ↓ Kelly Mark ↓ Rober Racine ↓ Claire Savoie ↓ Bill Vazan ↓ Ian Wallace ↓
John Baldessari Title
John Baldessari (°1931 U.S. National City) is famous for his appropriation of imagery and ideas from the world of publicity and popular cinema. His lapidary use of image and text play upon the blind spots of what is seen, as it offers new, associative structures that simultaneously refer to painting, art theory and media criticism. Title is among his most radical projects. This video work consists of a minimal sequence of images cut from a classic movie, according to rigid non-narrative categories. In the beginning it shows austere shots of objects, of characters, of landscapes, of frames associating two shapes, and then, finally, the beginning of an action or a dialogue. In Title Baldessari deconstructs the making and manipulation of meaning in cinema. The non-linear sequence of images seem to belong to an ever evolving film, in which the viewer creates his/her own structures, based on personal imagination and experience. I am somehow trying to jam the media world together with what we would call the ‘real world’, he recently stated during an interview, aphoristically resuming the continuity in his work.
Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix
Hans Bryssinck & Diederik Peeters Los Viernes, 2003, 10’
Hans Bryssinck (°1977 BE, Bonheiden) and Diederik Peeters (°1977 BE, Leuven) participated in the exhibition Storage & Display in Mexico City with Los Viernes (“The Fridays”) in the beginning of 2003. On two consecutive Fridays, they explored the metropolis by taking the same route, following the same day schedule, recording their actions from similar to completely identical camera angles. In the resulting video they juxtapose action and re-enactment, as in Francis Alys’ Re-enactment from 2000, which shows Alys being arrested for walking about in the same city with a loaded gun, together with the reconstruction of the same facts on the following day. But with Bryssinck & Peeters, the juxtaposition does not really focus on the ambiguous restaging of tension and intensity. They rather impersonate actors being guided through take one and take two of the shooting of a movie, caught up in the city’s chaos and impredictability. Dealing with the same protagonists all over again, one day in Mexico City results into an almost ceremonial recycling of previous experiences, in the middle of day-to-day variability.
Etienne Chambaud, L’Horloge, 2005 – 2008
Etienne Chambaud (°1980 FR, Mulhouse) is a French artist who is noted for his participation in the Biennale of Lyon in 2007 and several solo exhibitions in Paris. L’Horloge is a sequence of movie stills displaying clocks, each still being hold for one minute long. As they are ranked according to the minute on display, the installation functions as a watch, genuinely indicating the time in the exhibition space. Still, L’Horloge contains a lot of gaps, as many minutes are missing. Those gaps have been replaced by a dysfunctional blue screen, through which the stills appear and disappear, giving the viewer an impression of time fading in and out. Therefore, the work also seems to be a subcutaneous reminder of mortality, as it reduces ‘the animation of the past in an old motion picture (…) to a nature morte with a clock face.’
Collection Frac Ile-de-France, Paris
Etienne Chambaud, L'Horloge, various materials including a computer program and film stills, édition 1/5, 2005-2008. Collection Frac Ile-de-France, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lucile Corty, Paris.
Etienne Chambaud, L'Horloge, various materials including a computer program and film stills, édition 1/5, 2005-2008. Collection Frac Ile-de-France, Paris. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lucile Corty, Paris.
Rodney Graham Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong (1969), 2006, 9’20”
Since the late seventies Rodney Graham (°1949 CA, Matsqui) has developed a conceptual oeuvre in which he regularly calls upon elements from the world of music and cinema. Often he presents himself as a phlegmatic performer who, despite of what initially sounds as a promising action, becomes caught up in a loop of predictable, unspectacular events. Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong (1969) was inspired by a rock anecdote from the sixties, where the drummer of Pink Floyd, a victim of boredom during a never-ending jam session, began to throw potatoes in the direction of a gong. Dressed in boots, jeans and a lumberjack shirt, Graham re-enacts the events as a parody of a Fluxus Performance, acting like a New York artist from the same period. The public filmed during the session patiently watches the performance, frequently showing subdued signs of boredom. Now and then one of the thrown potatoes hits the gong, to be subsequently distilled into vodka. So the liquor in the bottle on display also documents the performance, and continues the parody with a hand designed label mocking the wide proliferation of concrete poetry by Fluxus.
Courtesy of the Hauser & Wirth, Zürich and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago
Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong (1969), 2006, Super 16mm b/w film loop, sound, 9:20 min.; Vodka bottle in vitrine. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Donald Young Gallery Chicago
Nelson Henricks Countdown 2007, 0’30”
The Canadian video artist Nelson Henricks (°1963 CA, Bow Island) denotes the fading of time from a sharp, contemporary angle. In Happy Hour, a video installation from 2002, an old alarm clock takes the lead: the artist makes a reconstruction of a picture showing the object as it was when he received it at Christmas as a twelve-year-old. The same clock indicates time during aperformance in which the emerging physical effects of excessive alcohol consumption serve as a metaphor for the passing of time, the loss of innocence and the inevitable reversal of work and pleasure. In Countdown the clock reappears as part of a rapid sequence of close-ups of numbers. The numbers move from 30 to 0, showing fleetingly recognizable details from everyday life and creating multiple associative effects. The shots scales, calculators, thermometers, telephones, computers and dice, indicating meters, minutes, hours, good luck, bad luck, happiness or misfortune. Each countdown ends with the real clock being lit for a moment, to readjust the loop to thirty seconds in real time.
Nelson Henricks, Countdown. 30 sec., in loop, 2007, Video projection, colour, silent. Courtesy of the artist.
David Lamelas Time as Activity (Warsaw), 2006, 13’
In the sixties and seventies David Lamelas (°1946 AG, Buenos Aires) commuted between his native Argentina and several cities in Europe. Lamelas’ oeuvre, with time, place and language as privileged subjects, is now seen as one of the pillars in the development of conceptual art, especially in retrospective terms. In Time as Activity, a video series that runs to this day, he shows time in a fragmented but uncondensed form, as a triple-linear sequence of mundane events that took place in Warsaw. The duration of the filmed excerpts corresponds exactly with real time. At first sight the viewer is left with a somewhat inadequate experience, because the events on the screen seem to have no particular significance. The artist is rather questioning the concept of time itself. According to Lamelas, not time, but location and place are the primary parameters in the forming of an experience, because, as he stated in 2004, space is a reality, it exists. Time on the contrary, he says, does not exist, our consciousness constructs time. Time is a fiction.
Courtesy of the Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw and Jan Mot, Brussels
David Lamelas, Time as Activity – Warsaw, 2006, (still), Courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels / Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw
Chris Lloyd Dear PM, 2001 – ongoing
Chris Lloyd (°1973 CA, Wolfville) is an artist, curator and artistic director of Third Space, one of Canada’s widespread artist-run spaces. Since 01.01.2001 he has written a daily letter to the Prime Minister of the country. Chris Lloyd: Because these letters are addressed to the actual and symbolic leader of the country, I constantly move between severity and deceit, work and leisure, arts and bureaucracy. I explore situations from daily life in order to bring the role of the artist in our society into question. With a tone that often remains deliberately casual, he denotes the particularities of every day life in relation to currents of power and economy: Is the personal really political? Are we drowning in a system of excessive consumption? Can art transcend monotony? None of the first ministers, who have come to power since 2001, have officially expressed an inkling of interest in the letters, but the project has spread throughout Internet blogs and via a succession of exhibitions in alternating art centres. In Netwerk Chris Lloyd shows a selection of the letters.
Chris Lloyd, Dear PM, 2001-, more than 1700 letters sent to the Prime Minister of Canada since 2001. Art Gallery of Calgary, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.
Kelly Mark In & Out, 1997 – ongoing until 2032
Kelly Mark (°1967 CA, Welland) belongs to the younger generation of conceptual artists. Primarily she approaches time not in a metaphysical, but rather in a materialistic way – as it is dictated by the particularities of the McJob economy. From 1997 on, Mark registers her artistic activities on timecards, a habit she will pursue until her 65th birthday. This installation, In & Out, was soon to be sold to a Canadian art collector, who pays the artist a monthly salary based on the amount of labour, as a regular employee. Mark plays with the absurdities of time registration, confronting art, life and labour with the utter basics of corporate governance. In another work, Minimum Wage, she allowed herself to be paid the official minimum wage of Canada for the duration of an exhibition, a transaction that ironically (or sadly) enough yielded more than the regular exhibition fee.
Kelly Mark, In & Out (1997/ongoing until 2032), Steel time card racks & punch cards. Courtesy of the artist.
Rober Racine Vexations 1978 14hrs08’ Salammbô 1980, 14hrs
(°1956 CA, Montréal) is also known in Belgium for his participation in Jan Hoet’s
Documenta in 1992. Being trained as a musician, in 1978, he played Vexations by Eric Satie, both the shortest and the longest composition of the composer’s repertoire. The melody takes less than a minute, but the score reads: to be played 840 times (…). This is a designation that Racine literally obeys, performing the melody for hours and hours. His artistic activities are often boundless, not to say stachanovistic. Racine hand-copied novels by Gustave Flaubert, as a tribute to the latter’s time consuming perfectionism. In 1980 Racine recited a full version of Salammbô on a staircase whose shape corresponds to the number of chapters of the book and whose width of each step with that of the number of words per chapter. The performance took fourteen hours. Racine, in 1993: L’artiste est là pour offrir des visions, transcender le réel, le montrer sous de nouveaux angles. Il ressemble à un pilote d’essai. Il repousse toujours plus loin les limites de l’exploration du monde et de l’infini.
Vexations: Performance at the Véhicule Art Gallery, Montréal, 04-05.11.1978
Salammbô: Performance done at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 09.08.1980
Rober Racine, Salammbô, 1980
Claire Savoie Aujourd’hui, dates-vidéos 2006 – ongoing, variable duration
Claire Savoie (°1957 CA, Richmond) often questions the ambiguities of language and sound, creating installations and video with a remarkable tactility. On 05.02.2006 the artist realised her first date-vidéo, as part of an obsessive-repetitive impulse to capture daily impressions, kept in the series under the title Aujourd’hui. Inspired by On Kawara’s Date Paintings – and his series I Got up at, I Went, I Am Alive, I Read, I Met… – Savoie takes what the current day has to offer. She selects and organizes events into short videos with text, audio and images appearing together. By allowing ideas to evolve in time she differs from the more detached practice of On Kawara – the experience of time regularly arises in shifts, bringing past and present into a circular motion with each other. Claire Savoie: The work in all its states and in all its phases, from its origin to its non-end, is accomplished through circularity and obsession. Her repetitions are not mechanical but subjective, because the work itself is fully embedded into the daily life of the artist.
Claire Savoie, Aujourd'hui (dates-vidéos), video installation, 2006/on going. Courtesy of the artist.
Claire Savoie, Aujourd'hui (dates-vidéos), video installation, 2006/on going. Courtesy of the artist.
Bill Vazan Yonge Street Walk, 1969 / 1972, Toronto
Bill Vazan (°1933 CA, Toronto) is nowadays often regarded as a Canadian representative of land art, but at the beginning of his career, during his treks through towns and nature, he developed a conceptual visual language that stood entirely on its own. The Yonge Street Walk is a photo series that is shown along with maps and notes Vazan collected during a trip through the eponymous street. Since 1969 Vazan he began to document his pathways following systematic processes. He decided for instance to make pictures at particular stops: at every street corner, at every bus stop, and so on – often in sets of more than a hundred images. The photographs present an unmediated view of the continued linearity of his trips, staking the passage of time by showing the physical distances he bridges.
Bill Vazan, Yonge Street Walk (detail), Toronto, 1969/1972, 163 colour slides. Courtesy of the artist
Bill Vazan, Yonge Street Walk (detail), Toronto, 1969/1972, 163 colour slides. Courtesy of the artist
Ian Wallace At Work
Ian Wallace (°1943 UK, Shoreham) played a central role in the emergence of Vancouver conceptualism. Both as an artist and a teacher he developed a strong individual position towards conceptual art, photography and art history, considering even the most abstract artistic gesture as full of narrative meaning. Among Wallace’s groundbreaking works was his performance At Work in the Or Gallery in 1983, where the artist is ostensibly devoted to the reading of a book in an exhibition space designed as a rudimentary office. His choice of literature, Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony, clearly emphasizes the irony of the situation – the artist becoming the object of observation, while reading, thinking and taking notes. Clearly, Kierkegaard is no coincidence, since his text contains a sharp response to Hegel’s criticism that the ironic attitude is often too distant, and prone to indecisiveness.
Courtesy of the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
Ian Wallace, At Work, 1983, black and white photograph, edition of 3, 41 1/2" × 60". Courtesy of the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
