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| Red Boat, White Paint, Still Travelling, 2010 |
Going through my drafts archives, I found this unposted image of a Lowell Boyer’s painting. More of the artist’s mixed media works on paper and canvas can be found on his website, all a bit phantasmagorical, beautiful layered, even decorative like a China pattern gone wrong. I believe I saw this at the Von Lintel Gallery’s booth at an art fair last year…but much like the figures in these works, the memory is unclear.
I stood in line the next to last day that Christian Marclay’s The Clock was screening at Lincoln Center, and I really lucked out. The line was only 2 and half hours. My friend from Georgia was suitably impressed by the lengths New Yorkers will go to for an experiential art film.
The film consists of thousands of spliced clips from cinema, put together so that each minute is filled with references to that minute, with clocks and watches, which is then played on that minute of the day, in a 24-hour cycle. The clips were largely English and French films, old black and white, last year’s blockbusters, and some b-cinema with a few Asian or Swedish film clips thrown in.
Remarkably, what ought to have been a disjointed, jarring experience by the very nature of it proceeded with some degree of flow and linearity, largely owing to the great sounds transitions, which were carefully managed. This makes sense; the person ahead of me in line shared some of the artist’s early sound work in the 80s. He spliced mechanically rather than digitally then.
I saw 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm, always hyperaware of the time. The clips made me wonder “Is this what people do a 6:30? Miss trains? And do they eat soup at 8 o’clock? Is this life?” I enjoyed recognizing the clips. Immediately one knows so much even in never-before-seen clips–who the protagonist is, roughly when it was filmed, the mood of the piece. It’s remarkable and would create a magnifiscent time capsule for someone to discover in 1,000 years, so much of our common consciousness is bound up in it.
I enjoyed, or rather disenjoyed, the continual interruption of the narrative, which would begin to drag you in only to end. It harasses the viewer with his status as a viewer, never letting him forget what and where he is. Or, of course, when it is.
And naturally everything you can think to say about the nature or passage of time is relevant to this piece which makes you hyperaware of the passage of time as you live it.
Also, see twitter for a variety of bad or better puns and jokes on the meta-ness of having to wait for hours to see this film.
Johannes Girardoni’s pieces at Tomlinson Kong at Pulse struck me as being incredibly contemporary and well executed. I don’t even really go in for this sort of flat, Baldessari-like stuff.
Yet somehow I especially like this print in yellow.
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| Exposed Icon #4, 2011, c-print with commercial paint mounted on aluminum, 60 x 40″ |
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| Exposed Icon 50, Exposed Icon #42, Exposed Icon #42, 2011, c-prints with commercial paints mounted on aluminum |