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Fetishism of Divided Time KARIYA Yosuke Translation: Alfred BIRNBAUM “THE SECOND / Time Based Art from the Netherlands” November 13－December 27, 1998 ICC Gallery A, D InterCommunication No.28 Spring 1999 ICC Review Documenta
X, held in 1997, evidenced a growing
tendency toward electronic imagemaking in
contemporary art. Within this trend, how are we
to regard the element of "time"? Though
hardly a large-scale exhibition, ICC's THE SECOND was remarkable for the sensitive
vision of the participating artists. Planned by
Montevideo/Time Based Arts = Dutch
Media Art Institute, the exhibition has traveled
from Amsterdam to Mexico City, Taipei,
and now Tokyo's ICC. Montevideo/Time
Based Arts = Dutch Media Art
Institute was founded in 1978 by the exhibition's
guest curator René COELHO as an
organization dedicated to fostering local
Dutch media artists as well as showing, selling
and archiving their works. As the name
states so emblematically, TBA's take on media
art focuses on associations with time. In
many ways, the present exhibition is a sequel
to IMAGO, fin de siècle in Dutch Contemporary
Art, also curated by COELHO in
1989 and subsequently toured to eight
countries. Media art,
which implements sound, film and video
mediums, is essentially predicated upon time.
Just how media art reflects on time is of
particular interest to this writer. For needless
to say, running video images alone does
signify not any real grasp on time. Even so, rather
than even "time-based," more apt keywords
for the overall exhibition might well have been
"detail and whole" or "aspect and recomposition."
Almost every work played upon by
such expectations by displaying subdivided
and fragmented data to viewers via video
monitors and computers, then leaving
the viewers to recompose for themselves;
the result of such minutely segmented
and parsed time frames being that the
very organic flow of time and continuity
of duration no longer registered (at least not
to me). Take
for instance PETER BOGERS's «Heaven»
(1995), the "central installation" of the exhibition: 17 small video monitors
are placed in a white room, some hanging
on the wall, some suspended in space,
some sitting on the floor. Each displays
part of an object (a clock, a sleeping cat,
a person) one might find in an actual room,
sound and image all repeating with exacting
regularity in one-second cycles. Upon
entering this curious space, we are forced
to take in as many of these instantaneous
image fragments as possible and
assemble them into some kind of whole (if
only to dispel the unsettling atmosphere of the
room). What emerges is a kind of early cubist
time-space, where viewers must subjectively
analyze and synthesize from their
perceptions of the monitors. The
exhibition also includes two other works by
BOGERS, both highly acclaimed in Holland.
In one of these, «Retorica» (1992), two
TV monitors show a father and child trying
to communicate. Such a scheme of two
TV's conversing was previously seen in Bruce
NAUMAN's «Clown Torture» (1987), but
whereas NAUMAN's two clowns repeating
their tales ad nauseum presented a nightmarish
tableau of closed communication,
BOGERS's soundtrack of a child's
baby talk and the father's responses paint
a far happier smile. Yet as only the eyes
and mouths are shown, even this communication
begins to taken on a deviously
serpentine aspect. Another
BOGERS's work, «Sacrifice» (1994) situated
strategically at the entrance to the exhibition
space, peers into the open mouth of
the artist himself drowning (dissolving?) in a
bathtub. Displayed alongside is a large photograph
of the production studio showing the
outlandishly huge device the artist used to
shoot the scene, the sheer mechanical complexity
of zooming in on himself reduced to
a mouth, juxtaposed with the sacrificial title putting
a somehow sinister slant on the image.
It turns the commonplace TV into a fetishistic
implement forcing us to examine the
human form piece by piece. A similar tendency
towards fetishism is also seen in A.P.
KOMEN's «Face Shopping» (1994), in which
women's faces are projected close-up onto a row
of four screens, the artist persistently
following their inadvertent eyelid twitches
and facial ticks, causing an uneasiness
in the viewer who is made to focus in
on these women's more "indiscreet" moments. Different
approaches to the theme of subdivided
time apart from the fetishistic gaze are
presented by Bea DE VISSER and Boris
GERRETS. In DE VISSER's «The Skipping
Mind / A Film about Forgetting» (1994),
the artist builds an utterly lifelike moving
"mosaic" of women's portraits culled from old
books. In GERRETS's «Time/Piece» (1994),
the artist rotates a still video image to create a
moving panorama by stroboscopic effect.
Both works are displayed so as to openly
illuminate their workings. GERRETS's work is
set up on a bronze pedestal reminiscent
of an astrolabe, inscribed with a quote from
St. Augustine: "Time is the mobile image of
immobile eternity."—words that might
epitomize both works. Indeed, both DE VISSER and
GERRETS have produced "reborn"
or "reincarnate" readings of the wellknown principle
behind film and animation, whereby a
succession of slightly shifting still appears to
produce motion, breathing new life into
fragmented time. In the
exhibition catalog, Rudi FUCHS points out that
"the patient will" of traditional Dutch painting
is still alive in the production of contemporary
Dutch artists. To be sure, the various
participating artists of THE SECOND cast an
exceedingly patient and finely tuned gaze upon
their subjects, such even the most familiar
of relate are dissected down to mere fragments.
Some artists like DE VISSER and GERRETS
patch these fragments back together
in Frankenstein fashion as if to reassemble
an organic continuum of time reborn. But most
clearly what these works bear witness to
is the time awareness of this media age.
For is not the world we face an intellectual
construct of fragmentary data, in which we
must process fragments of time and
information via rational means alone? Has not
our gaze microscope down to details?
While I find this image of time somewhat
distorted and disquieting, in Jaap DE JONGE's
«O.T.S.» (1995), an antique octagonal
display case for a collection of fragmentary
videoworks situated near the entrance
next to BOGERS's piece saved the day for me
by the artist's precious loving stance
toward media art. KARIYA
Yosuke Born 1970
in Yokohama. After working at the Watari Museum, he
proceeded to postgraduate studies in Aesthetics
and Art History at Keio University Graduate School. He
currently researches on Josef BEUYS and 20th
century German art. |
