Don Delillo’s 2010 novelPoint Omega opens and closes with a lengthy meditation by a nameless character on Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho, 1993. The first section plunges the reader into a detailed observation of Gordon’s video-sculpture as it was installed on the sixth floor of New York’s Museum of Modern Art in September 2006.
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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.
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I have been using the concept expanded event for some years as a way to refer to time-based art. With this concept I have referred to those works, mostly shown in exhibitions, which experiment with some kind of change during the time they stay on view to the public.
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I come to the questions of Making Time from the field of performance–and before that, the field of theatre. This is to say that, for a long time, the term “time-based art” did not mean that much to me. It sounded confusing, or maybe even redundant. What art form does not involve time? Indeed, it was not until I began working with experimental visual artists and critics of expanded visual art that I began to learn that I came from a time-based form. “Oh,” they would say, “you’re interested in duration.”
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Dance has been traditionally perceived as a time based form. The conventional wisdom is that a dance should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Merce Cunningham disrupted this to some great degree by corrupting the linearity of sequence in his dances. Chance processes allowed shards of the dance to appear and disappear at different times. He also went a great distance to getting dance out of the proscenium box and into spaces that were more level with the viewer (museums, warehouses, studios).
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To me, time-based art could be anything that is art and takes time. Time-based art could include video, film, performance, net art, etc. These are a diverse array of practices and I’m not sure that they have anything particularly meaningful in common.
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I’ve been thinking and teaching a lot lately on the question of what is critique.
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Since 2008 I have been working with a team of colleagues at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) to design and organize the museum’s performative/social practice program, Engagement Party.
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LACE has been a crucial participant in Los Angeles artistic production for over three decades. One can argue that LACE’s existence emerged directly from the creative intensity generated in Los Angeles in the 1970’s. More specifically, performance art was a driving force behind the emergence of Los Angeles’s alternative spaces, including LACE. At the same time, performance-based activities provided a central platform for three new forms of contemporary practice to emerge: performance art, video art and public practices.
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Central to the PoLAAT is a performance lab in which participants are trained in the tactics and techniques of the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater. Classes are comprised of exercises designed to educate the participants in the five principles: 1) Estrangement, 2) Indistinction, 3) Suspension of Beliefs, 4) Mandate to Participate and 5) Inspirational Critique. Songs based on these principles are taught to the group.
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