Time as Medium Five Artists' Video Installations

Barbara London

HAVE EXPLOITED TIME AS A OVER THE LAST 30 YEARS ARTISTS unique effect of video. Dissociated into segments and reconstituted in diverse ways, video time is an expressive element in Although not motivated by the installations of Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Bill Viola, and Gary Hill. scientific paradigms, video-makers' work often bears on the evolving concept of time in twentieth century science.

of abso- the mid-196os, when the introduction of the At the beginning of this century, Newton's notion Portavak video camera to the consumer market lute time (a reference frame for all temporal measurements) was meaningful only `1 1 initiated video as an art form, the ideas of critic superseded when Einstein declared that time is infinity of times, Clement Greenberg were well known within the artistic com- in association with space. He introduced an of spaces. In quantum munity [1]. His analysis of Modernism stipulated that each dis- each linked to one of an infinity time to energy cipline must search for and determine what is unique and mechanics the concept is equally odd, linking then abandoning what lit- irreducible to that art. Many of the artists who tried their hand through' the uncertainty principle and constructs in the abyss of comple- at video were modernist in the Greenbergian sense. They tle remains of these mental apprehension [z]. focused on the effects peculiar and exclusive to video. mentarity, a theory that defies rational explicating the large In their experimentations with the medium, video-makers Video-makers are not concerned with of time, pointed their cameras at the live picture on the monitor and questions that preoccupy scientists. In their handling as often as they discovered the recursion phenomenon popularly known as artists rework commonly held notions at least Rarely do these domains feedback. They colorized black-and-white sequences and rear- incorporate scientists' radical ideas. technology. ranged the digital image on the screen by modulating the video intersect as effectively as in the art initiated by video signal. In addition, various forms of interactivity, such as using a magnet to warp a television image, added a new dimension of Shock of the Present (1970), lined up six "nowness" to the exploratory works of these artists. In Corridor Installation Bruce Nauman a choice of realms to A fuller study of time resulted from the interplay between long corridors, as if offering a traveler enough to peer the viewer, the live camera, and prerecorded video material. explore. Three of the corridors are only wide they are barely passable. Time was speeded up, slowed down, frozen, and otherwise into, and the others so narrow that monitors at the far mangled within a context that allowed viewer participation . The One of these corridors has two identical each screen is an ability to split time into segments and reconstitute them within end, stacked one on top of the other. On the arrange- the actual flow of the present moment is unique to video. image of that empty corridor. The simplicity of confining space forces The course of real time-the order of events and their dura- ment is curious, enticing. Entering the pressed tight against the don-is identical to that of video time. Anyone with a portable one to proceed in small steps, elbows behind, appears on television at a football game would confirm that the action on body. Suddenly one's picture, shot from live, in the present. the set temporally matches the play on the field. The corre- one of the two monitors. This monitor is is positioned spondence leads viewers to perceive any modification to the When turning about to find the camera, which the monitor; but normal flow of video events as a tampering with real time. above the entrance, one's face appears on Thus artists discovered in vdeo time a medium with expressive qualities. In transfiguring the ribbon of time that is video, artists Modern Art, worked directly with an elusive idea that has engaged philoso- Barbara London, Museum of York, NY iootg, U.S .A. phers for millennia. The resulting art, like the ideas put forth by 11 W. 53rd St., New Received May i, science, underscored the complex character of time. y9SI

LEONARDO, Vol.ig, No. 5, PP. 423-426. 1995 42 3 0 1995 ISAST also sug- Video Koan balanced and contemplative but because one is looking backwards at the A June Paik's installation N gests conflict. After all, Zen koans do camera, the image on the monitor is not In Nam Fig. 1), a video camera have answers, often dispensed by a trav- accessible. Spinning between camera and Buddha (1974; the sculpture of the Buddha and eling monk who wishes to supplant monitor, the visitor cannot capture the captures a image to a monitor. reigning master of the monastery. To when his or her visage is on the transmits the live instant knowingly at his Paik's koan, the sojourner might respond two events-a viewer The Buddha, gazing monitor. These an obvious by leaping into action and placing a hand monitor, and the shot of image on the screen, evokes looking at the the dif- over the camera lens. This gesture accen- monitor-cannot question, a video koan: What is his or her face on the a tuates the difference between a live con- ference between the Buddha staring at V occur simultaneously in the present. prerecorded (present time) image of himself and nection to a camera and a The other monitor, not connected to live rejoin- confronted with a replay of tape, but as with many koans, the a camera, shows a tape of the empty the Buddha (past time) representation? der only launches other mind twisters. corridor. The unchanging picture on this a videotaped studying the Buddha on the monitor mocks the efforts of the viewer For a viewer monitor, clearly there is no difference. Reflections in Space to alter the order of events on the live An image on television does not carry a and Time monitor. Installation art often completely famous paintings of water time signature. As Eastern philosophy Monet's surrounds the viewer. For someone in the same place. teaches, "Time is an illusion"; among lilies put multiple spaces immersed in such an installation, the spaces can be dis- Western philosophers, "Time is a human At least three distinct word "participant" portrays the relation- water on which construct" expresses a similar conviction. cemed: the surface of the ship to the work more accurately-or shallow space below The monitor, housed in an ovoid the lily pads float, the perhaps "victim" is more appropriate in where the stems plastic enclosure, is attractive, and the the surface of the water the case of Corridor Installation. The expe- visible, and the sky sculpture of the Buddha is particularly of the water lilies are rience is somatic. The spectator's body pond's sur- beautiful. Asia, in its timeless wisdom, of clouds reflected from the feels trapped, hemmed in by walls as the three milieus appears adequate to the challenge of face. Monet intends that well as by the inflexible nature of the this spatial modern technology. The confrontation is be seen concurrently. Though present moment.

with closed-circuit video camera, monitor, and sculpture. Fig.1 . Nam June Paik, IV Buddba (1974). Installation .) (Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

424 Barbara London, Time as Medium

illusionism is not uncommon in Western painting, the notion of many spaces within the same space clashes with normal expe- riences of space. Einstein's recognition of multiple spaces is also enigmatic . He asks us to imagine a small box s situated, relatively at rest, inside the hollow space of a large box S Then the hollow space s is part of the hollow space of S, and the same small space that contains both of them belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S It then becomes necessary its particular room, to apportion to each box Fig. z. Dan Graham, Parent Continuous Past(s) (1974) . Diagram of installation with mirrored and space, not thought of as bounded, video monitor, and hidden camera. (Figure courtesy of the artist.) to assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other. space- The Specious Present Einstein elaborated this notion in his time encompasses an infinity of Time, as a phenomenon of human theory of special relativity, which pro- times in relative motion. These ideas are are experience, is universally recognized. But poses that at every place, there are an difficult to fathom. Perhaps they the origin and properties of a sense of time infinite number of spaces, each in beyond comprehension, but Graham's unite remain themes of philosophical disputa- motion with respect to one another [3]. Present Continuous Parts) is able to . The Phenomenology of Internal Time The multiplicity of spaces understood space and time by introducing a time tion Consciousness, Edmund Husserl's philo- in Einstein's conception and perceived in delay of several seconds between the tome published in 19o9-the Monet's painting can be experienced in camera and the monitor. Each of the sophical same year Einstein proclaimed the theory Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past(s) myriad reflections encompasses two enclosure, of special relativity-proposes that time ; Fig. 2). The installation consists of space-times-the present of the (1974 not is not divisible . In his analysis, he allows a room with mirrored walls and a moni- and the past of the monitor. Though "starting points" because an awareness of tor inset into the middle of one wall. an exact analogue of special relativity, ideas events beginning (and ending) exists, but Reflections of everything within the the reflections challenge traditional insists that duration cannot be divided room stretch as if reaching toward a dis- about space and time. he in into the instants of its existence [4] . tant horizon. Usually people within a The images on the monitor inset The philosopher William James, writ- multi-mirrored enclosure, such as a hall the wall correspond to the experience of ing in the late nineteenth century, of mirrors in an amusement park, are a memory, which has two distinguishing memory expounds contradictory views. For seduced by the myriad reflections of qualities: the impressions of a James, time consciousness is stitched themselves. They notice only their own exist in the present, and they are remem- These together from pieces of time; long times solid body repeated many times, not the bered to have existed in the past. are conceived by combining shorter seg- space they inhabit. However, the effect elements are explicit in the German ments. He attributes the original intuition is different in Graham's environment expression for memory: ist geschehen, time to "a constantly conscious dura- because of the image on the monitor. which translates literally as "is hap- of tion," lasting from a few seconds to not Captured by a hidden camera, the mir- pened": a memory "is" in the present as past. more than a minute, which he terms rored space of the room is depicted on well as has "happened" in the "the specious present." the monitor and thus forms part of the Within Present Continuous Past(s), the will In Decay lime Bill Viola isolates endless reflections. Consequently, the krfowledge that the current moment (1974), time a unit of time, and impresses it on a view- room is the focus of attention. It appears appear as a memory after a short er's consciousness. The installation con- as an infinity of spaces that are reflections delay adds an element of consciousness their sists of a darkened room, intermittently of a single space-the mirrored chamber. of the present instant. Viewers flail illuminated by a strobe. Only for an In the theory of special relativity, the arms in order to distinguish clearly the instant does a camera aimed at a viewer conceptions of space and time are difference between the live image and have enough light to form a likeness, bound to one another: Time has mean- the delay. In the normal course of now which appears as a life-size projection on ing only in reference to an associated events, people are rarely aware that a wall. In Viola's words, "The image is space. Furthermore, each place in space- is the present instant.

Barbara London, Time as :Medium 4ZS References and Notes the viewer's eyes, second of video played at standard born, flashes before r. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical enduring only in speed matches the 30 frames in the I- then dies in blackness, Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). remembrance, William beam. In effect, duration has acquired memory" [S] . The 2. Robert Bruce Lindsay and Henry Margenau, the experience at spatial representation . James would claim, is Foundations of Physics (New York: Dover consciousness. Although Hill uses only recorded the foundation of time Publications, 1957). suitably images, the present is manifest through a The blinding flash of the strobe Is the Lord . . . " The individual video 3. Abraham Pais, `Subtle between past and system of "switching" York: represents the knife-edge Science and the Life ofAlbert Einstein (New instant, appearing frames. The computerized electronic future. The record of that Oxford University Press, 198x). in keeping "deranger" slices duration finely, concur- on a screen and slowly fading, is 4. Edmund Hussed, The Phenomenology of Internal characterization of the rently reconstituting the visual sequences with William James's Time Consciousness, translated by James S. he asks. in a elaborate manner. The orderly flow present: "Where is it, this presents' Churchill (Indiana University Press, 1964). ere we of time has been transformed into a "It has melted in our grasp, fled 5. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating instant of multidirectional torrent. could touch it, gone in the Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York : As the end of the millennium becoming" [6]. Aperture; Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990) p. 483. approaches, and with recent books pro- 6. William James, The Principles of Pschologp claiming the end of history and the end A Time-Space System : Encyclopedia Britannica, 1990) p. 398. treats time in the (Chicago Gary Hill's Suspension of Disbelief (for of art, an essay that 3o rasters twentieth century would be remiss if it Marinne) (1992) comprises Barbara London is video curator at the did not proclaim the end of time. Clearly (monitors stripped of their outer casings) Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she . the arrow of time is bent The assurance set horizontally side by side in an I-beam has organized exhibitions with international that time flows in an unending regular Images flash from one cluster of screens artists working with new technologies. Founder manner no longer applies. Time must to another, in shifting patterns reminis- of the Museum's Video Study Center, she has conform to a menu of future cent of a musical composition . Two now written extensively about art and technology. example, herald the young and slender nudes, a man and a events. Doctors, for some children woman, stretch across several monitors, advent of immortality : century will not die fitting within the narrow frame. They are born in the coming inflation may make their in repose, yet their images are propelled (although time bounded). The final rapidly across the screens, at times slowly endless life seem relegating time to the and sometimes wildly as in a flamenco coup de grace, history, will occur dance. In an unusual effect, a figure, overflowing dustbin of theory of relativity restricted to only two screens, appears to when Einstein's an astronaut returns fold back onto itself, hovering in place comes to life and voyage to discover that his like a hummingbird. Or briskly shuttling, from a space older in appearance as the personage may suddenly stop, sus- or her child is what should it be called, pended in a nervous stasis . For a well as in . . . course appointments moment the body becomes statuesque, as Einstein time? Of at a certain hour, and if carved in marble and laid to rest atop a will still be made coffee breaks, but medieval tomb. there will be time for will exist that we The full figure displayed across several a widespread awareness what tim~is. screens in Suspension of Disbelief is an don't really know illusion. The original footage was a pan shot of the person. If the clip were played back normally on a video deck, only a segment of the body would appear on a monitor at any instant. The phantasm is generated by time shifting discrete frames-consecutive frames are lined up and then played at the same time so as to portray a complete entity. Suspension of Disbelief implements a dif- ferent sort of shift to engender motion. A computer-controlled device hurtles images across the rasters by directing one frame of video to a monitor and steering subsequent frames of the series to adjacent screens. The 30 frames in t

42 6 Barbara London, Time as Medium