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TIME |
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MONTSE BADIA
Los Angeles, 2019
On the roof of the Lloyd's building, Roy Batty, the leader of the group of rebel replicants that have returned to Earth to discover the meaning of their existence, is on the point of accepting his end: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe… Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.’
The ex-cop Rick Deckard becomes his witness and ally, for all that his mission was originally a very different one: ‘I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?’
Time. The notion of time leads us to a big philosophical question. The certainty of finitude gives rise to an existential doubt. Memento mori. Never forget that your time is not eternal and some day will end.
And, of course, art can be a manifestation of ideas, a Trojan horse, as the artist Ceal Floyer once defined it.
Tere Recarens prepared two large containers, whose contents are only to be revealed on the 19th of March of the year 2014.
Kris Martin made a set of ten gold spheres, inside of which are explosive devices that will be triggered in a hundred years, in 2104.
James Lee Byars collected ‘perfect spheres’, ‘perfect moments’, ‘perfect phrases’, all the things that deserve to endure, and are a synthesis of the essence of things, of existence.
The paintings and videos of Muntean and Rosenblum embody a nostalgia for an Arcadia that also reminds us how ephemeral life is.
Felix González-Torres allowed the pile of sweets whose weight was the same as that of his sick lover slowly to diminish as the visitors to the exhibition took them away. Mounds of sweets or stacks of posters, gradually disappearing, dispersing, like life.
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Kris Martin. The End, 2006 |
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With songs we all know, sung a capella, Susan Philipsz transforms an ordinary space into a space that we can suddenly make our own, a space we see in a different way, because the songs she sings in her fragile, naked voice are part of our own life-stories.
On Kawara constantly reminds us that he is still alive.
Kris Martin invites us to look at ourselves in a mirror on which we see, as if it were the final image of a movie, the words ‘The End’.
Time suspended
To suspend time. To expand it. So as to eternize it, but also to bring to light its mechanisms. To expose its meaninglessness.
In Sleeping, Andy Warhol filmed an eight hours of the poet John Giorno’s night’s sleep. The film’s final image is a freeze frame. He also made an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building. Real time and cinematic time are superposed.
Martí Anson has made a ‘road movie’ that shows all the things an actual Road Movie would never show: namely, the moments when nothing of interest is happening, the dead times.
In 24 Hour Psycho, Douglas Gordon slowed down Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to make its running time coincide with the 24 hours in which the action of the film takes place. Not only does he emphasize the negation of the narrative, he also converts the suspense of the plot into a suspended narrative.
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Gustavo Artigas. Vive la resistance!, 2004 |
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Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson and other artists that work with ‘staged photographs’ stop the action, but in order to make it last and so that the ordinariness of the chosen moment makes us conscious of certain disturbing elements; in fact, to make us suspicious of what we see.
Alicia Framis also stops time, or better said, the people that form work in various companies and institutions are asked to stay perfectly still for a few minutes. Her gesture has certain 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 is the product of an economic and mental system in which time is equivalent to money. Our daily routine is entirely programmed. There are not spaces for the contingency neither for the fortuitous encounter. The Baudelairean flâneur, the dandy who takes a tortoise for a stroll to set a slow pace, Breton’s prowl through Paris in search of Nadja, and also of poetry, and the routes traced by the Situationists in their dérives … these are no longer possible, or they have become acts of resistance or a-socialization, attempts of regain control of our time. There are many ways of using time, and also of losing it. The response to efficiency is a commitment to individuality and a stand against standardization. It is a search for results that are other than the expected ones.
Art can create these frameworks for thought. It lets us posit things in a different way. It lets us approach reality from unfamiliar perspectives, from the absurd, from the questioning of predetermined values, from doubt.
Francis Alÿs set out to travel from Tijuana to San Diego, not by the road that crosses the Mexican-US border, but following a different route, by way of Panama, Santiago, Sydney, Singapore and Bangkok, a journey that was to take him thirty-five days. As he has also observed in one of his ‘Paradoxes of Praxis’: ‘sometimes making something leads to nothing.’ The artist dragged a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melted, leaving nothing but a trail of damp. There can be no doubt that this is an absolutely subjective estimation of the economy of time.
Claude Closky takes pleasure in non-productive efforts, in useless knowledge. He makes inventories: the first thousand numbers in alphabetical order. He collects stock phrases and ranks them from the longest to the shortest. He numbers all the squares in a pad of squared paper or compiles a list from the Dôle telephone directory of 8,633 people there that he does not know.
Ignasi Aballí, too, makes lists from the newspapers: of individuals, of artists, of works, of dead people… He squanders huge drums of paint. He builds walls that have no use or corrects a black surface by totally covering it with Tippex.
In order to put a bicycle wheel round a streetlamp, Andreas Slominski had the streetlamp lifted up, positioned the wheel on the ground and then replaced the streetlamp. To send a letter, he had a giraffe at the zoo lick the stamp.
David Hammons reached the decision some time ago. ‘The less I do, the more of an artist I am. Most of the time, I hang out on the street. I walk.’ In 1983, in Cooper Square in New York, David Hammons sold snowballs, set out according to size on a coloured carpet.
We are left with the image of Hammons in coat, hat and gloves, standing on a snowy street-corner next to fifty perfectly arranged snowballs, holding one in his hand and waiting. Looking to one side with an expression somewhere between taciturn, mocking and resigned. Selling snowballs and waiting. Waiting for a reaction, a response, a meaning. Just waiting. Time.
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