‘thinking heads rather than talking heads’ (katherine waugh and fergus daly’s ‘the art of...

8/11/2019 Thinking Heads rather than Talking Heads (Katherine Waugh and Fergus Dalys The Art of Time) | UNBUILDING

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Mermaid Arts Centre, 21st Aug 17th Oct 2010

Thinking Heads rather than Talking Heads (Katherine

Waugh and Fergus Dalys The Art of Time)

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French Philosopher Sylvere Lotringer in Katherine Waugh and Fergus Dalys The Art of Time, (FilmStill), 2010; courtesy of Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.

When the philosopher announces a discourse on Time, we can expect the worst. [1]

Jean!Franois Lyotard

What is your intention? is an aggressive question, which usually dumbfounds the recipient? We allwant to answer with a short fluid quip, a delivery that shows that we are confident in our view of

ourselves and the exterior worlds view of us. Katherine Waughs introduction to the screening ofThe Art of Time at the Mermaid Arts Centre was revelatory in this respect. It revealed anintention to confront Time, that was grounded in philosophy, and which umbrellaedmultidisciplinary art practices in contemporary culture. To confront Time head-on, as Waugh and
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her collaborator, Fergus Daly have successfully done in this documentary-film, is an achievementthat cannot be measured, like the subject that they are chasing in the film. Waugh reflected on thischase when she spoke of jet-setting artists being hard to catch flying from LA New York Berlin. When caught, the artists self-reflect in their studios and living rooms about time, and theart-mode of slowing time in their practices. They seem to all at once encompass a contradiction ofimagining a world in slow motion, but living a life that compresses time and space geographicallyand experientially. These artist are urbanites who have either left their homeland for the artcentres of the world, or are in-between places and time in order to display their work in a spacethat Vito Acconci says in the film, has no windowsthe art gallery. Paul Virilio, with his usuallyricism, and a degree of panic added-on, gives us a First light view of this new world:

In the 18th century the by now rather shady population of Paris mushroomed and the capital became knowns the New Babylon. The brightness of its lighting signaled not just a desire for security, but also individualnd institutional economic prosperity, as well as the fact that brilliance is all the rage among the new elites

bankers, gentlemen farmers and the nouveaux riches of dubious origins and careers. Whence the taste forarish lights which no lampshade could soften. On the contrary, they were amplified by the play of mirrorsultiplying them to infinity. Mirrors turned into dazzling reflectors. A giorno lighting now spilled out of

the buildings where it once helped turn reality into illusion theatres, palaces, luxury hotels, princelyardens. Artificial light was in itself a spectacle soon to be made available to all, and street lighting, the

democratisation of lighting, is designed to trick everyones eyes. There is everything from old-fashionedreworks to the light shows of the engineer Philippe Lebon, the inventor of the gaslight who, in the middle ofsocial revolution, opened the Seignelay Hotel to the public so they might appreciate the value of his

discovery. The streets were packed at night with people gazing upon the works of lighting engineers andpyrotechnists known collectively as impressionists.[2]

Virilio goes on to brutally tear a hole is his description of time-past by concluding: But thisconstant straining after more light was already leading to a sort of precocious disability, ablindness; the eye literally popped out of its socket.[3] Virilio, with intentional sloth, leads us withmeandering prose to abruptly wrench it away with force and speed. The slow sojourn through18th Century Paris hits a Stop sign! In the past we had time to ruminate, while today a sentence,a text, a word, is a stealthy substitute for the Epic.


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The Brothers Quay, in Katherine Waugh and Fergus Dalys The Art of Time, (Film Still), 2010; courtesyof Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.

The Art of Time is primarily situated in the city, except in the opening passages where Venice ispresented as a geographic and temporal counterpoint a nostalgic turn of the hypermodernicpage, a time when the passage was not so fast.[4] The films subjects are Time and Space, and howboth are being lost, imagined, spread, leveled, or reimagined by the multidisciplinary arts. I saymultidisciplinary with some trepidation, as the term temporality, which is the lynchpin ofphilosophical discourse and contemporary art and cinema, is primarily being dealt with by themoving image rather than the traditional art objectper se.The Art of Time, inadvertently asksquestions about the cause and effect, or lack thereof, of contemporary art on history and time, andthe philosophical discourse that continues to have a growing influence on arts formal exercises inspace and time, and vice versa. If we take Martin Heideggers view that Whenever [great] arthappensthat is, when there is a beginninga push enters history, and history either starts up orstarts again; from this ontological perspective, history and time are grounded and generatedby art and philosophy.[5] Todays perception of time and space is managed by technology. Thefilms pessimistic note is that technological innovation is disseminating time, space and

information with ever-increasing speed. Philosopher Sylvere Lotringers most enduring commentin the film is There is no space for Time. The philosopher makes a convincing figure in the film,presumedly sitting in the Ivy League College where he teaches, while Waugh and Daly juxtaposehis confident reasoning against the back drop of a dizzying film montage of Time Square, NewYork. Speed and technology is Virilios thesis and his theories are becoming more salient year byyear. However, half a century earlier Heidegger was posing a few questions himself on technologyand time:

We ask the question concerning technology when we ask what it is. Everyone knows the two statements

that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says: Technology is auman activity. The two definitions of technology belong together. For to posit ends and procure and utilizethe means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilisation of equipment, tools, and machines,
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the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to whattechnology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivanceinLatin, aninstrumentum.[6]

Heidiggers text, The Question Concerning Technology, is fitting in the context of The Art ofTime. The german philosophers use of the idiom, A means to an end, is pivotal to ourrelationship with technology. A means to and end proposes that the process of technology isneither enjoyed nor experienced, but denied as A means, in order to have what Heidigger calls a

causal effect, which is not known or understood yet in the present. In The Art of Time, art,theatre, cinema, animation, act as moderators of speed, or more appropriately, fabricators of atechnological deceleration. Heidigger goes on to write:

Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means. We will, as we say,get technology spiritually in hand. We will master it. The will to mastery becomes all the more urgentthe more technology threatens to slip from human control.[7]

Stan Douglas, Overture 1986, David Zwirner Gallery, New York, Imagehere

Throughout the duration of the film there is a move by the philosophers and artists to try andplace a tentative finger on the pulse of time through language and moving image. Thephilosophers John Rajchman and especially Sylvere Lotringer, come out on top in this sense, asclear and concise articulators of the cause and effect of technology on time. I canunderstand Waughs description of them as pet-philosophers in her introduction to thescreening. As I am not a philosopher, but an artist, I will first look at some of the artists thatWaugh and Daly have chosen to represent temporality in contemporary culture.

Stan Douglass dialogue in The Art of Time is more modernist than postmodernist, reiteratingstructuralist notions of the Real that are more in keeping with Jacques Lacan than Gilles Deleuze.

In saying that, Douglas represents the artist caught in time, reflecting back on past events inorder to escape the loop through re-representation in the present, a technique that Douglas hasused since the 1980s. Speaking on his work Overture, Douglas explains:
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Overture was dealing with this conflict of mechanical time, which is all about repetition. Machines areeant to do the same thing over and over again by spacialising a temporal process. As opposed to the more

organic time of the subject, which is the person who comes into the gallery space, uses the images they seeor a certain amount of time, and walks away when they are done with it.[8]

This is a common theme in the film, artists using methods, such as looping and repetition, tosecure time in some way or another. As the artist David Claerbout discloses, he wants to occupythe time of his audience as little as possible. This is especially ironic considering the durational

aspect to his works, but can also be seen as a testament to the artists effort to show that there isnot enough time. This is where art fails and succeeds all at once. Alone, art is a signifier of somekind of absence experienced by the individual making itan obsessive exercise in method ratherthan functional production, the Brothers Quay are an example of this symptom in the film.Coupled with the viewer, art, especially the moving image, which is the preoccupation of The Artof Time, presents a series of events that are continually fighting against what is outside in thereal world. Virilio writes and the artist Laurie Anderson (who was asked to be part of The Art ofTime but fell-through), comments on this phenomenon:

Thanks to work like that of W. R. Russell and Nathan (1946), scientists have become aware of therelationship of post-perceptual visual processes to time. The storage of mental images is never instantaneous;it has to do with the processing of perception. Yet it is precisely this storage process that is rejected today.The young American film-maker Laurie Anderson, among others, is able to declare herself a mere voyeurinterested only in details; as for the rest, she says, They use computers that are tragically unable to forget,ike endless rubbish dumps.[9]

Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, Einstein on the beach 1976.

In the film, Robert Wilson represents another aspect of arts slowing down of time, that is literal tothe extreme. But it is a mistake to see art as a de-literalisation of the world. In fact, it is easier torecognise art as a super-literalisation of the object and the subject in the real world. Wilsons

collaboration with the minimalist composer, Philip Glass, produced an opera titled Einstein onthe Beach, 1976. Snippets from the 1976 original is shown at sporadic moments in the film. Forme, this is the winner of the race to capture time as a tautological production, that had nonarrative only an Icon and a Place. It is chance that Einstein, and not Hitler or Charlie Chaplin
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took the role as the Icon in the title. The beach in the title acts like a adjunct to a non-existingnarrative, a deliberate absurdity. Anti-narrativity is presented in The Art of Time as anotherstrategy that destabelises linear time. In a way, it would be better if the viewer was ignorant of allthese modus operandi,by revealing them, the audience realises the simplicity of arts operations intime and space. What the artist really wants is a viewer that is linear, in order to manipulate andconfuse, momentarily bullying them in and out of time and space.

Chantal Akerman, The Art of Time, (Film Still), 2010; courtesy Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.

Chantal Akerman is the Ethical chapter of The Art of Time. As a Jewish artist and a secondgeneration survivor of the Holocaust, she exhibits an openness that is part biographypart art.She in a way separates herself from philosophical discourse, but in another sense is connectedwith 20th century philosophy on a humanistic level; a relationship that is experienced rather thanread. Lotringer at one point of the film questions if we are human enough to be humanistic, Ihave to say, Akerman presents a positive case that we are. Her film From the East perpetuates acyclic fiction of an event that could be in real time and space. People are lined up at a Moscowtrain station, dressed in clothes that could be from 1950s Germany, or 1991 (when the Wall hadrecently fallen but the displacement was still happening from west to east). Akermans subtitle forthe work shows her intention to illustrate an unsure presentation of history in all its factual and

fictional slippages: Bordering on Fiction; (Dest: Au bord de la fiction). Virilio describes thisdisplacement in Time and space as delocalisation:


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With confusion setting in between the real space of action and the virtual space of retroaction, allpositioning is, in fact, beginning to find itself in an impasse, causing a crisis in all position forecasting. Thisdelocalisation also leads to uncertainty about the place of effective action, so that pre- positioning becomesimpossible, which then undermines the whole principle of forecasting. When WHERE loses its priority toWHEN and HOW, a doubt remainsnot about the effective plausibility of virtual reality so much as aboutthe nature of its location and thereby about the very possibility of controlling the virtual environment.[10]

Chantal Akerman, From the East, 1995, Film Still from The Art of Time; courtesy Katherine Waugh andFergus Daly

Without a comment to give at the end of the screening of Waugh and Dalys The Art of Time, Iam left with one word beauty. Serious Contemporary Art doesnt like this word, I amsuspicious of it myself, its like the word sublimeits commercial, sincere and nostalgic. This iswhat is called Art with a capital A; the exterior force that keeps art in its place and doesnt let itveer into the very arena that it reveals in bit-parts to the viewer, the fast-track capitalist world. Artis FRAGILE, a word that Vito Acconci uses in his disavowal of art in the film. I see Acconcisview of art in The Art of Time as comedic rather than damaging. In the film, he is the art jester to

Lotringers sage. It is especially revealing when Acconci discloses his attitude to his own enduringmark on art, which was the part-authorship of the repositioning of the viewer and the art object inthe gallery, events that had a pivotal role in the development of conceptualism and contemporaryperformance, but which he is cynical of now. Back to this word beauty, it can also mean a rulingof the heart over the head. With such philosophical intensity, which the film offered, maybe themind shuts down for the heart to take over? A humanistic ideal, where feeling conquersintellectualism, where art is unspeakable, where life is not concerned with meaningjust being.

As I write in the first person, which seems appropriate after watching a film that was so generousin how it revealed art and philosophical perspectives on time from individual viewpoints,sometimes in the first person (the artists), and other times with objective distance (thephilosophers), Waugh and Dalys sensitive edit offered the audience a layering of perspectives anda desire to see more. These differing viewpoints shared insights that could not be revealed wading


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through a cryptic philosophical text. Just like Wilson and Glasss Einstein on the Beach, the operawould sound or appear self indulgent if one of them was missing in the work. It is with such polarviews, articulations and formal expressions that sets-up questions rather than a dialecticalconclusion; Waugh and Dalys intention from the beginning. I would like to conclude where thephilosopher John Rajchman (one of the interviewees in The Art of Time) begins in his articleThinking in Contemporary Art, who writes:

Id like to start from the principle that there is no art and in particular, no contemporary art without a

search for new ideas of art, of what it is and of its particular relations with thinking itself. For what is new isin fact not what is in fashion, but what we cant yet conceive, cant yet see, or have the sure means to judge.[11]

Vito Acconci, Film Still from The Art of Time; courtesy Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly.

Rajchmans simple premise for a meeting between thinking and art is succinct perfection. Hisuse of the word fashion in the context of art is usually voiced by the begrudger. Indeed, it couldbe added that fashionable trends in art could be the tell-tale sign that the art work is alreadystale, rather than fresh. Fashion could also be a signifier for money and capital, and theinvoluntary disappearance of the trend before it is consumed, the last hurrah. It is apt that TheArt of Time begins in Venice where you can imagine Virilios lanterns still lighting and Artbeing a very different thing than its contemporary equivalent. Maybe Acconcis position is correct,one that has evolved from being digested over and over in books and reappraisals. As he saidhimself, people were doing what I was doing in the gallery ten years earlierin the streets. Maybearts continual distribution of the sensible, digestion and reworking through discourse is its ownundoing. Or, this is our intention, and art should be undid before it gets ahead of itself, and is leftto its own devices in the big bad capitalist world, its chief and consort.

In The Art of Time, Waugh and Daly have directed and produced a film that questions thelynchpin that holds the fabric of philosophy, art, music, the event, life and death together. ThisLynchpin is Time, and what an exhilaratingly elusive thing it is!


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ames Merrigan is an artist

Works cited

[1] Jean!Franois Lyotard, Emma, in Misre de la philosophie, Paris: Galile, 2000, 57!95, p. 68.

[2] Paul Virillo, The Vision Machine, Trans: Chris Turner, Verso books, New York, 2000, p. 9.

[3] Ibid., p. 10.[4] Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond (Published in associationwith Theory, Culture & Society), Sage Publications Ltd; 1 edition (November 13, 2000).

[5] Martin Heigegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter, trans. New York: Harper &Row, 1971.

[6] Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, Harper Perennial,1992.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Stan Douglas, from The Art of Time, film by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh, 2010.

[9] Paul Virillo, The Vision Machine, op.cit. p 11.

[10] Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp.133-156.

[11] John Rajchman, Thinking in Contemporary Art, For Art Journal, The Institute for research

within International Contemporary Art, Date ?Written by James Merrigan

October 14, 2010 at 5:32 pm

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