Lists, Lists and More Lists

Hi again from UNM... Below is our class response to the original Walker list provocation. The last is our edited and discussed final list.

Walker:
Hybridity
Appropriation
Performance
Space
Time

Felicie:
Respect
Dissolution
Inclusion
Engagement

Jennifer:
Succession
Exploration
Displace
Sensitivity
Process

Gene:
Structure
Function
Process
Driving force
Sustainability

David:
Pasear (walk)
Estampa (to make a mark)
Colonizacion
Poner la bandera (plant flag)
Enmarcar (Frame the landscape)
Recordacion (Memory)

Final List:
Dissolve
Enmarcar (Frame)
Engage
Relolectar (Recollect)
Witness

Week 3 Provocation on Time: A Gesture of Time from Karen

On my fortieth birthday, I gathered my sketches, paintings, hair trimmings, and other gestures from the year and sewed them in layers with bulges, hidden parts, and revealing cut-aways. The process is visible, while the specifics are not, in my political self-representation of the connecting lines of my art, life, and body. In the end, the watercolor could not be protected with a glass frame, and thus I began a series of watercolors throughout my next decade that could not be confined in a traditional framing process. Instead the shape (in)formed the meaning. I mounted the multi-edged watercolors on wooden embroidery hoops. These supports represented and hid the hiddenstream art history of my grandmother, her sister, mother, and prior generations of mothers.

Light Moving in Time

dried zinnia

The film historian William Wees entitled one of his books Light Moving in Time. I always think that his is as good a description of film as any. In film making, light and time (and space) are our basic elements. Time is always manipulated in film making. I can use camera technology to show you a flower blooming in a minute of screen time--something that would take hours or days of "real" time. I can tell some one's life story in an hour of screen time. I can challenge your patience with a film that asks you to spend a lot of time watching as I perform some banal task in real time (eat, sleep, clean the house). Right now, I am filming my backyard garden as it bursts into spring, taking two seconds a day for many days, so that the entire burst will unfold in three minutes of screen time.

a fresh zinnia, from "Flora and Fauna"

In the films I make with plants, I am always aware of layers of time. Not only am I trying to figure out how long I want to see each handmade frame on the screen, but I'm also trying to work with or against the gradual decay process the plants undergo in the frame over time. In "Flora and Fauna," which combines handmade frames with live action footage, I raced (time, again) to create and rephotograph the handmade frames while the flowers, herbs, and vegetables I was using were still fresh. I ended up not using a lot of handmade frames that I thought were too dried out. Those "old" frames will become part of a different work, in which the decaying process itself is the subject. Regardless, time is always central to my work. Like the play of scale (or space, really), which I wrote about in an earlier post, the play of time calls attention to the materials and the experience, presenting what I hope is a compelling way to look at something from the botanical world that we might otherwise not see, or take for granted.

rendering geologic time sensible

passing through the Cambrian Manhattan Formation (central park), 2009

Hi Colin,

I'd like to offer a couple of ideas and a project I am working on in response to your provocation.

I just finished a book by Elizabeth Grosz called chaos, territory, art: deleuze and the framing of the earth. In the book she uses the following quote from Deleuze which seems relevant to your provocation:

"To render Time sensible is itself the task common to the painter, the musician, and sometimes the writer. It is a task beyond all measure or cadence"
- Deleuze, Francis Bacon, the Logic of Sensation

Geologic time is a topic that looms large in my imagination right now. Despite an immense gap existing between a human time scale and a geologic time scale, I'm hoping to find ways to make geologic time sensible and relate-able through my work. I think artists such as those you posted in your provocation offer powerful contexts for experiencing sensations of time and change that are graspable by humans (a day at the Lightning Field or time in a river over the course of season). I think this kind of work helps humans re-connect their sense of time with a larger rhythm of the planet. It can be a humbling experience.

I am finding it very difficult to take on something as enormous as "deep time", also known as "vast time" or "infinite time", depending on the source. This is a concept of time that strikes me as out-of-sync with the human, it greatly exceeds us even though we are "of it". Perhaps as much asynchronous as diachronic. I'm drawn to this concept of vast time because I feel that contemporary humans could greatly benefit from having a deeper relationship and awareness of our "passing" through the time that makes the earth --- something incredibly brief and momentary within this immensely larger scale. It truly is a miracle that we even get to exist at all! Perhaps in turn, such sensations might not only create a context for considering the immense impact that our contemporary selves continuously have on the earth (and the time span that this impact will last) but also restore some basic, but powerful sensations such as wonder and awe in response to our very existence (within this incredibly long time scale). At least, this is the effect geologic time is having on me as I learn more...

I've started a series of images that are called "humans passing through the geologic". They are about specific places and moments in time, but also about the immense spans of time that have lead up to and will exist after the moment and place as "documented". I'd love to have some feedback on them. The link to the gallery and descriptive text for the project can be found here.

March 19-26, 2009

We’ve been spending time considering the implications of appropriation and hybridity in the field of art + environment in the first two weeks of this conversation. I’d like to shift gears to raise a question about time as a concept in this discussion.

First disclaimer: I’m no linguist. Second disclaimer: I know just enough about linguistics to be dangerous. Now that I have my disclaimers out of the way, what I recall from my very introductory undergraduate training in linguistics was the impact of lectures Ferdinand de Saussure presented between 1906-1911. The resulting compilation of the lectures, Course in General Linguistics, more or less shaped the field of historical linguistics throughout the twentieth century. To deeply simplify and summarize one component of his proposed/theorized methodologies: linguistic analysis is conditioned by the relationship of linguistic study to time. The primary methodological concern in early-twentieth-century historical linguistics had to do with a debate over analysis: synchronic analysis (for example, the examination of a language at a single moment in time or in the language’s history, specifically limiting study of the language’s development over time) as compared to diachronic analysis (for example, the examination of a word’s development over time, and its relationship to other language changes in that same period of time). So what does any of it have to do with art?

I would argue that a good deal of what might be considered “traditional” landscape art would appear to be synchronically oriented. That is, paintings or photographs depicting landscape depict, generally, a moment in time. Even the language we use to describe more traditional landscape art has to do with “capturing the moment.”

In comparison, many contemporary artists—especially, perhaps, those artists working at the intersection of art + environment—create work that is about the experience and perception of time in relation to the work’s space | place | context. By way of a very famous example, Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) was created with very specific expectations of visitors’ experience over time—hours and even days (Figure 1).

Fig. 1 Walter de Maria, The Lightning Field (1977)

Similarly, the artist Mario Reis’s “watercolors” (Figure 2) are also very much about time—but perhaps on a hydrological or geological scale. Leaving a canvas in a specific creek, stream, or river, Reis captures the sediments and silts of a particular place, both reflecting and creating a sense of time and place in his creative practice. His work physically embodies the places from which they are literally made, but they also reveal the effects of time—the rivers’ currents, changes in weather patterns, and so on (Figure 3).Fig. 2 Mario Reis, Nature Watercolors Fig. 3 Mario Reis, Nature Watercolor in Process

So my question for this group of provocateurs is what do you think time has to do with any of this? How does time play into your work or creative process? What are the promises and pitfalls of thinking about time conceptually, particularly in relation to work located somewhere near the intersection of art + environment?

Live Blogging from the New Museum

Experimental Geography Panel Discussion: An Aesthetic Investigation of Space


As part of Generative Conversations, smudge studio will be live-blogging from the New Museum on Saturday, March 21st at 3 p.m. We welcome you to join us!

"Creative Time curator Nato Thompson will lead a discussion on Experimental Geography with Lize Mogel and Damon Rich, two artists who participated in his exhibition (for Independent Curators International) and book (Melville House) of the same name. The discussion will focus on the creative use of landscape hacking, cartography, locative media, and radical urbanism as a means of engaging with the politics of contested spaces. In presenting work from the show and book, the panelists will explore the distinctions between geographical study and artistic experience of the earth, and the juncture where the two realms collide."

Learn more about the panelists:
Nato Thompson
Liza Mogel
Damon Rich