Dear List
The discussion has been extremely interesting in relation to the
question of time-based art, but appears to have lost a little steam. As
we approach the Liverpool conference I thought I might try to stoke up
the boilers a bit by posting some more thoughts.
One of the difficulties that has emerged is that of defining 'time-based
art'. In a sense almost all art is time-based one way or another, not
least because art is always experienced in time, so the question soon
gets mired in increasingly desperate definitions and demarcations.
Getting away from the phenomenology of the art experience to the
ontology of the art object, I am interested in the disconnect between
the ephemerality of much contemporary art and the continued mania for
preservation that lies at the heart of the museological project and
indeed in other parts of our culture.
I think this is interesting in relation to the increasingly unmanageable
amounts of stuff we are confronted with, and the surely futile efforts
to find ways of preserving it. It is interesting to go to conferences
where digital conservation/preservation are earnestly debated without
any discussion about whether it is either possible or even desirable to
preserve even a tiny percentage of the flood of digital material now
being produced
I would like to think of time-based art as referring to works that
acknowledge finitude, entropy etc...
A lovely example would be David Antin's Skypoems, temporary poems
written using skywriting planes. Interestingly Antin was highly critical
of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, in particular Serra's suggestion that the
attempt to dismantle it was an attack on his right to free speech. Antin
suggested that Serra had a right to free speech but not to be listened
to forever (thanks, Jeremy)
Obviously we can try to collect records of work such as that of Antin,
but that is different to collecting objects. Perhaps we should stop
thinking about collecting objects and think about collecting the record
of action and practice and art galleries should become more like
anthropological museums, dedicated to the display of objects that evoke,
metonymically and inadequately, a whole culture and a whole world
Every object in such a museum is clearly 'time-based' in that it is now
out of the time of its usefulness
Charlie Gere
Head of Department
Institute for Cultural Research
Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 594446
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php
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