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Fabula Tempo Screening
The art works or documents of artworks assembled under the various themes are meant to provide a launching point for your engagement with artists and their works. The compilations are made, as much as possible, in a way to give you more direct access to time-based artworks. They are not videos about works with artists or historians interpreting the works, but artworks in and of themselves presented for your consideration.
It is important to consider time and place when you watch. Consider how the work might seem commonplace or dated, but that this might say something about the work’s influence. Consider what works, resonates, or inspires you, and how you may engage in the same conversation these artists may have begun. Consider what works might make you uncomfortable or even annoy you, and decide what you hope others might feel when they experience the work you will make.
Still Life
“The classical still life is updated in this exquisite, simple meditation on mortality and beauty. The addition of a supermarket peach and a Bic pen prompts questions about modern attempts at immortality.” Artist statement
Coincidence Engine One: Universal People’s Republic Time (Documentation)
“Coincidence Engines is a series of works conceived in homage to the Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes, a work by 20th-century Hungarian composer György Ligeti who used metronomes not simply to keep musical time, but as generators of sonic events. Extending and developing this approach, Coincidence Engines employs a multitude of dynamically modulated time-keeping devices to explore themes of regimentation, multiplicity, (im)perfection and entropy.” Artists’ statement
Birthday Suit with scars and defects (Excerpt)
“On the occasion of her 27th birthday, the artist made this work which chronicles her passage through time. In the tape, she undresses, then reveals, touches, counts, dates and recounts the story of every scar on her body.” Vtape
24 Hour Psycho (Excerpt)
“Realistically, no one can watch the whole of ‘24 Hour Psycho’, which consists of Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Psycho’ (1960) slowed down so that a single, continuous viewing lasts for twenty-four hours. While we can experience narrative elements in it (largely through familiarity with the original), the crushing slowness of their unfolding constantly undercuts our expectations, even as it ratchets up the idea of suspense to a level approaching absurdity.” Russell Ferguson, “Trust Me,” in Douglas Gordon, Cambridge/MA, 2001, p. 16
The Clock (Excerpt, Audience Documentation)
“Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2011 Venice Biennale, Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a cinematic tour de force that unfolds on the screen in real time through thousands of film excerpts that form a 24-hour montage. Appropriated from the last 100 years of cinema’s rich history, the film clips chronicle the hours and minutes of the 24-hour period, often by displaying a watch or clock. The Clock incorporates scenes of everything from car chases and board rooms to emergency wards, bank heists, trysts, and high-noon shootouts.” MoMA
Time Delay Room (Audience Documentation)
“On monitor 1 a spectator from audience A can see himself only after an 8 second delay. While he views audience B (in the other room) on monitor 2, this audience sees him live on the monitor whose image can also be seen by audience A. The same situation is true for audience B. A spectator may choose to pass from one room and audience to the other. To walk the passage-way takes about 8 seconds.” Artist statement
One Year Performance 1980–1981 (Time Clock Piece)
For one year, from 11 April 1980 to 11 April 1981, Hsieh punched a worker’s time clock in his New York studio every hour, on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. Each punch was recorded with a single frame of 16mm film, and the year of images compresses into a six-minute film. Hsieh shaved his head at the start, so his growing hair becomes a second, bodily register of the year passing. The piece binds the artist’s life to industrial clock time and asks what it means to be “doing time.”
Machine for Taking Time (Boul. St-Laurent) (Excerpt)
“‘Machine for Taking Time (Boul. Saint-Laurent)’ is a work commissioned by the Fondation Daniel Langlois in celebration of its 10th anniversary. Two hi definition cameras were mounted on pan-tilt mounts on the east and west sides of the Foundation building in Montréal. 1024 images per camera per day were recorded from precise points of view for a year from March 2006 to March 2007. The resulting database of about 750,000 images is explored by two computers, and they stitch together leisurely continuous pans through the city, staying true to the spatial trajectory but shifting unpredictably through time.” Artist statement
Modell 5 (Performance Documentation, Excerpt)
“From a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya to a frenzied exploration of the alter ego, any known context of meaning ends in the dissolved movements, is stalled in denaturalized redundancy, in machine pain. The semantic void is too loud to be amenable to meditative reception. The frontal images, the rhythmic structures generate contradictory emotions and great strain. Entertainment is offered and almost violently denied. At the highest level of energy, enjoyment reaches the limit.” Artists’ statement