Hi CRUMBers,
Thanks to Charlie Gere et. al for starting this discussion and to Curt
Cloninger for reminding us that an archive, like any form of memory,
doesn't really safeguard artifacts from the effects of time, but
imposes its own changes instead. Some archives, like The Black
Factory, are conscious of this inevitable transformation; in an
upcoming book on new media and social memory, Rick Rinehart and I call
these guerilla warriors of cultural preservation "the Unreliable
Archivists." But most institutions are oblivious to the changes their
curatorial policies wreak on a creative work.
Like others on this list, I think the term "time-based art" is dumb,
but less because all art involves time than because time is a less
relevant parameter than control. The paradigmatic case of "time-
based" media art seems to be single-channel video. Yet how a viewer
experiences time in video changes drastically depending on the amount
of control exerted by the curator. A theater curator determines when
viewers start and finish watching the movie, whereas a gallery curator
has little control over when viewers enter or leave the viewing space.
Performance, another archetype of time-based art, offers more
opportunities to exert or relinquish control. Wielding the script as
an authoritative gospel, the Samuel Beckett Estate polices how plays
like Waiting for Godot can be re-staged, whereas John Cage famously
handed over control of when to begin and end notes to the performers
in indeterminate works such as his numbered pieces.
Networks are notoriously difficult to control. Letting a work of net
art loose in the wild means you can't tell whether your viewer will
see it in Snow Leopard on an 23-inch Cinema Display at Apple
headquarters or in Windows 98 on a 15-inch screen at the Wasilla
Public Library. Of course, this doesn't stop institutions from trying
to control network-based pieces, which is why artists from Auriea
Harvey to jodi have refused invitations to high-profile exhibitions
because the museum wanted to project a Web site, cache it locally, or
run it in kiosk mode so visitors couldn't check their email in the
gallery. To call Entropy8.com or jodi.org "time-based" works may help
registrars pigeonhole them in badly structured collection databases or
curators justify consigning them to black-box "media galleries," but
the label has little or no relevance to the critical issues
surrounding their exhibition.
Recognizing the importance of control to institutions like galleries
and museums, many artists have tried to subvert the expectations that
attend particular devices, contexts, or genres. Some of the most
important new media artworks wrest control from a manufacturer or
curator to a viewer or participant. Nam June Paik hoisted a magnet
onto a TV set, so that the timing of "station breaks" could be
determined not by soap opera schedules but by gallerygoers shifting
the magnet's position. His extraordinary installation Random Access,
meanwhile, puts the timing of audio tracks literally in the palm of
the gallerygoer, who can trace a playback head wired to a handheld
wand back-and-forth at whatever speed across magnetic audiotape tacked
to the wall. (A Wiimote forty years before its time.) The fact that
these works involve time is less relevant than that they allow the
viewer to control it.
Others subvert by taking away control where it is most expected. Cory
Arcangel famously hacked Super Mario Bros. to remove all elements of
gameplay except the clouds drifting by, turning an interactive game
into a single-channel video (albeit a low-resolution one). But what
sense does it make to label Super Mario Clouds a time-based work?
Classifying it as a video subtracts everything interesting about it
(ironic cultural misappropriation via hardware hack) and adds a
presumption that it is somehow "durational," despite the fact that it
takes five seconds to "get" Super Mario Clouds and hours (or volumes,
judging from the number of dissertations on the subject) to decipher
Velazquez's painting Las Meninas.
In the age of asynchronous media and remote presence, even live
performances can strain the boundaries of a "time-based" designator.
Perhaps in response to suffering through one too many performances
where viewers couldn't get up and leave, MTAA posted online their One-
Year Performance Video--a re-enactment of performance artist Sam
Hsieh's year of isolation in a small room, but with a difference. 1YPV
enables viewers to time-shift their experience of the year-long
project, tracking the amount of time they watch M.River brush his
teeth or T.Whid stare at the wall but allowing them to pause and
return to the performance at their leisure.
From a curatorial perspective, I think it's less important how long
the thing lasts than whether you give people access to the pause and
fast-forward buttons.
Cheers,
jon
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