Making Time: Darsie Alexander

The phrase “time-based art” suggests a bygone era when ephemerality, duration, and process were the attributes of a radical new art that found its outlet through performance and its documentation through the camera. “Time-based” conjures the live experience attempting to find a permanent form in something tangible (and also, preferably, “time-based”) like a photograph or raw video footage. These two things — the live performance and the documentation it engenders — have inherently different relationships to time, of course.  A performance (dance, spoken word, improvisational jazz, etc.) can expand or accelerate time, occurring in relationship to the human clock ticking off the minutes in states of rapture, boredom, or distraction. The camera deployed to document these events parses time in increments, measuring time or “freezing” time for posterity (i.e. another time). Many sixties event-based artists hated having their work calcified by the camera, arguing that “there is probably no defense against the malevolent powers of the photograph to convert every visible aspect of the world into a static, consumable image” (Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” first published in Art in America in 1978). Live or “time-based art” was designed to be experiential and resistant to commodification, and therefore the marketplace.  Time was not something that could be bought and sold, only inadequately “captured.”