Out-of-Sync: The Paradoxes of Time

Just read about this exhibition in Luxembourg from an email I received from E-Flux. Sounds pretty cool! There's a pretty good list of artists to research if you're looking for inspiration.


Artists
Manon de Boer, David Claerbout,
Tony Conrad, Valie Export,
Dan Graham, David Lamelas,
Marco Godinho, Laurent Montaron,
Bruce Nauman, Anri Sala, Hiroshi Sugimoto

Show description:
The Out-of-Sync exhibition broaches the sweeping issue of the place taken up by the dimension of time in the visual arts from a specific angle: it is concerned with works in which several temporalities coexist, overlap, contradict one another, thus developing a paradoxical relationship to time. Through this interest in what the philosopher Elie During, in his recent book Faux Raccords, calls "times out-of-tune" ["les temps désaccordés"], the works brought together in the show are not meant to illustrate or define the notion of time. On the contrary, they offer us an experience of its elusive nature.

The time-related figures of non-synchrony, disjunction and delay play a significant part in works produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their development went hand-in-hand with the rise of the moving image in the visual arts, marked by the emergence of video and the growing use of film by artists, together with the busy dialogue struck up between the various art disciplines, focusing in particular on questions of time and process. The Out-of-Sync exhibition brings together a series of key works from that period, linked, dialogue-like, with more recent works illustrating the topicality of this question in contemporary artistic practices.

The matter of recording is central to the show. By way of straightforward techniques, the works on view in Out-of-Sync highlight the way the recording of time and its recreation may give rise to unconventional temporal forms. The installation Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) by Dan Graham is emblematic of this approach: using a video system which retransmits a picture of the exhibition area with a lapse of a few seconds, it offers us a perception of an "extended present time". A similar time-frame is conjured up by Laurent Montaron's Melancholia (2005): taking the form of a Space-Echo a musical analogue device designed to produce echo and reverberation effects displayed like a bas-relief in a pierced niche at the base of a wall, the work presents our eye with the ever-changing loops produced by its magnetic tape.

Another important aspect of the exhibition, underscored by the title Out-of-Sync indicating a discrepancy or lapse between sound and image is the place taken up in it by the sonic and musical fields. Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham have regularly compared the dimension of time in their early works with the musical output of composers like Steve Reich, whose "phasing" technique, based on the superposition of several identical lines of sound played at slightly differing speeds, foreshadows the use of a time delay in pieces like Bruce Nauman's Lip Sync (1969). This interest in complex forms of time possibly suggested by the musical fields occurs, in particular, in the activities of Manon de Boer, several of whose films take as their point of departure musical works such as John Cage's 4'33" and Béla Bartók's Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117, as well as in works by Anri Sala, whose video diptych After Three Minutes (2007) plays with the clash between the beat of a cymbal lit by a stroboscopic light and the frequencies peculiar to video recording.

Houses on houses

Heather - this made me think about your final project idea.



Here's a link to the article. They have a link to more of the artist's work.

Lydia Benglis - Now (1973)

Follow link to be taken to Video Data Bank's page on Now.

Joan Jonas - Vertical Roll (1972)

Richard Serra - Boomerang (1974)

As described in Krauss's Aesthetics of Narcissism.

Jonathan Horowitz

Maxell (1990)


Read about the piece here on Rhizome.org.

Guitar Drag (2000)

Is this music? Or noise?

Nicola Costantino

Nicola Costantino, "Soccer Ball,"1999.
Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zürich.
Photo by Peter Schälchli, Zürich.

Artist Nicola Costantino has a solo exhibition on display in collaboration with Daros Latinamerica as guest of Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition features sculptural objects, installations, and photographs by the artist from the 1990s to present day.

Here's a link to the E-flux write about the show!

Mundane Ethnobotany

Jef Geys, "Hartrick Avenue / Euphorbia maculata," (detail) 2010.

New exhibition by artist Jef Geys entitled Woodward Avenue now on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

From the exhibition article:

Operating across conventional boundaries that often limit discourse within the social, the political, and the aesthetic, Jef Geys' Woodward Avenue is guided by an intellectual curiosity that incorporates collaboration and community, with a distinct conceptual method grounded by the unambiguous reality of plant life. Linking two seemingly different places in Bolivia and Detroit, the films included in the exhibition were made by Vandebroek during her workshops and edited with detached precision by Geys. Revealing sensitivity to the utility of indigenous plants among traditional healers, which occasionally contrasts with the biomedical healthcare providers conventional practice, the films broaden the scope of the exhibition geographically, while underlining the persistent gaps in the promise of modernity routinely filled by the perennial resourcefulness of those on its margins.

Water Walk - John Cage

There's No Sound In My Head - Mark Applebaum

Is noise music? Can notation that does not follow convention be considered a score?

There's No Sound In My Head from lateral on Vimeo.

Sleep Works

I found some artwork that related to dreams and sleep - check it out Kaley!

Rodney Graham's Halcion Sleep (1994)


Here's a link to an article about his filmic works.

Also Sophie Calle has done a bunch of work about sleeping and dreams. Here's an image of Sleepers (1979)

In Sleepers Calle asked people to sleep in her bed and then describe the experience to her. She documented them through their testimonials and, as you can see here, their photos in her bed.

Here's Room With A View (2003)


Here's a link to some writing about her work.

David Claerbout on E-flux

Hey guys check it out!

David Claerbout on E-flux
Read the short article they have posted on his first major exhibition being held in Berlin. It's very well written and easy to understand.

The Dot and Line

Christian Marclay's "The Clock"

A friend of mine posted this article on Facebook today. Makes me wish I could go to NY in conjunction with my Chicago trip. I think the discussion of time as a protagonist and the interplay between real time and video time relates, in many ways, to the discussion we were having about David Claerbout's work.




Also, randomly, a faculty member sent out an email about Marclay, letting us know that his piece was installed at the Harn. He provided some links and, boom, there was an article about the artist putting together his newest piece (The Clock). Both are good short and interesting to read.

A short documentary about Marclay (there's a bit about Telephones in there as well):


This confirms for me even more that we need to go to the Harn and see his piece "Telephones." Let's see if we can squeeze it into the schedule before the exhibition is over.


Telephones 1995

In case you're interested here are some other images of his works:


Virtuoso 2000

Interesting Lecture

Hey guys,

Interesting lecture that's going to be held on campus on Friday at 4pm. Check it out! Here's a link to the lecture poster: Japan's Erotique Grotesque

Here's a link to the CLAS Event website where you can find where the lecture is being held.

Inspiration from crit

Laslo Moholy Nagy's view of the ground from atop the Berlin Tower. Do you see how the ground and the structure itself begin to flip between foreground and background in the image?


A closer view.


Here is an image of the Eiffel Tower Nagy took. See how the lattice work and sky behind it begin to shift to the same picture plane as well?

I also remember mentioning Stan Brakhage in regards to Solina's piece. I wanted to originally show you guys a film entitled The Riddle of Lumen but it has since been taken off the internet. You can read about it and see some film stills here. (Also on that page are film stills and descriptions from his other work)

An awesome piece by Dan Graham - "Body Press"







Also, I found a textual recording of all the letters narrated in Sans Soleil. If you're interested you can read them here. The dvd of the film is available to check out from library west.

That's all I can remember for now. I'll post more as I remember.