calendario eventi  :: 

X

28/11/2000

Art and time

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona CCCB, Barcelona

This coming 29 November, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona presents the exhibition "Art and time", an exhibition designed and produced by the Centre Georges Pompidou in collaboration with the IRCAM and the CCCB, which are responsible for the musical and cinematographic sections, respectively.

"Art and time" was the great exhibition organised to mark the reopening of the Centre Pompidou in January 2000. It then toured to the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, where it ran from 24 July to 23 October.

"Art and time" ("Le temps, vite" at the Centre Pompidou) is a pluridisciplinary exhibition which aims to recount the changes which have taken place in our perception and our conceptions of time.

The exhibition, which includes in the region of 300 works, accords particular importance to visual and sound art: many modern and contemporary works will be presented side by side with prominent pieces from the past. In this way, Pablo Picasso and Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim and Luciano Fabio, Richter and Stockhausen, dialogue with Egyptian water clocks and Mayan calendars. It also includes a series of works produced specially for the occasion, such as the exhibition soundtrack, composed by Heiner Goebbels.

The exhibition will centre around the time-honoured commonplaces of all reflection on time: the sky, life and awareness. Whereas the way we objectively conceive of time is based on the movements of the sky, it is life and the major rhythms marked out by our biology -birth, growth, death- that produce both our intimate awareness of time and its duration, and our social and collective constructions of temporality.

On the subject of the concept of "time", the CCCB is also organising a film season for the months of January and February 2001, directed by Ángela Martínez, with the collaboration of Carolina López and José Ángel Alcalde; the concert/action "Tempo", directed by Xavier Maristany, and a public competition for sound projects: Periodic. Finally, the Institut d'Humanitats de Barcelona is organising the course "Perceptions of time" directed by Jordi Balló.

THE SECTIONS OF THE EXHIBITION:

PROLOGUE
Luciano Fabro's Moon, set up in the Pati de les Dones, provides the doorway to the exhibition, which continues via a small entranceway where visitors are welcomed by an Egyptian water clock or clepsydra from the fifteenth century BC. It is a particularly significant technical artefact, being one of the oldest surviving timepieces, and the only one to be preserved intact. The clepsydra symbolises passage and flow, one of the most universal metaphors of time, the thread leading throughout the exhibition.

1. Time and the sky
Various images and astronomical instruments, ranging from prehistory to the Enlightenment (Neolithic man's carved bones, armillary spheres, De Dondi's Astrarium, Galileo's theses) will illustrate the importance of the heavenly bodies, and particularly of the moon, to our awareness of the course of time, to the echo of monitors showing Moon is the Oldest TV by Nam June Paik.

2. Time and i...
This section passes from the extreme objectivity of the great clock of the heavens to the interiority of time lived, or subjective time. This space will be presided by a bronze self-portrait by Alighiero e Boetti, showing the artist dousing his head, representing subjective time. This piece opens a series of contemporary self-portraits focusing on the passage of time: Boltanski, Guston, Warhol, Snow, Penone and Esther Ferrer, among others.

The second focus of the exhibition opens with a confrontation between One Hundred Live and Die by Bruce Nauman and a virtual presentation of The Ambassadors by Holbein. It gravitates around the theme of the limits on human life and the tradition of vanity. The section also includes works by Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrecht, a little-known seventeenth-century master, alongside artists as varied as Picasso, Robert Morris, Gerhard Richter and Cindy Sherman.

Finally, it looks at the time-emotion relationship (the time of love, of wrath, of desire) with an audiovisual montage which brings together dramatic climaxes from the history of the cinema, and works such as Ciel by Anne Jaffrennou and Untitled (Perfect-Lovers) by Félix González-Torres.

3. The time of languages
Our conceptions and perception of time pay their dues directly to linguistic structures. One language goes without the future, another without the past tense, a third is unaware of actions which are taking place. A Babel-like section is devoted to these essential differences, permanently immersed in the musical murmuring of the word 'time' translated into as many languages as possible.

4. Calendars, festivals and rituals
This section presents the way time is organised, with examples from ancient cultures and different geographical and cultural areas: Greek and Roman, Mayan and Islamic calendars, etc.

A short film, Rituals, presents sequences from documentary films (by Murnau, Flaherty, Rossellini and José Luis Guerin) showing the various rituals which succeed each other in the course of a year.

5. Measuring time
This section proposes to stage Alexandre Koyré's famous thesis on the change from a world of approximation to a universe of precision, a basic requisite for the organisation of the West's social and economic life since the dawn of modern times.

A series of historical objects will illustrate the main stages in this evolution, ranging from the water and sun clocks of antiquity, the first clocks for personal use in the fifteenth century, the complex, beautiful Italian sundials of the sixteenth century and the conquest of clockwork precision in the Enlightenment, to the first quartz watches, caesium clocks and the global positioning system (GPS), a system of geographical localisation based on extreme chronometric precision.

The circuit will be marked out by contemporary works of art and music, including a piece by Dennis Oppenheim, a pendulum by Rebecca Horn and a series of works by Claude Closky, Alvin Lucier, Stockhausen, etc.

6. The time of work
This space deals with the time of manual and industrial work, the time which serves as a measure of the value of goods. By this token, the world of things is also a world of accumulated time, representing time which humankind is constantly interchanging. The photographs of Andreas Gursky bear witness to this fact, showing how the "straight-lined" construction of working space underlines a desire for the extreme rationalisation of time.

Thelonious Monk and Marcel Broodthaerts provide us with food for thought about the fragility of the artist's time and Johan van der Keuken presents a selection of the best clips from his films on the theme of anonymous work.

And just as there is a time of work, there is also the work of time itself, which is no less important. Part two of the section will evoke this kind of work, in the photographs of John Davies.

7. Free time
This section, given over to desire and pleasure, goes back to a time which is governed more by subjectivity than by measurement. Time at a standstill? Unfortunately, leisure time is only what is left over after working time; it is time that is subject to consumption and, as such, simply consumed...

This section offers footage of Jacques Tati films, Claude Closky's series of photographs Aoûtiens and the photographs of Massimo Vitali.

John Cage's silent score 4'33 closes the section.

8. Transport
The speed of displacement of objects, the speed of displacement of the human body… the mastery of escalating speeds modifies man's relationship with time: time becomes more complex as it is moulded by multiple breakdowns, of which time differences are just one example.

Here we see the photographs which Stephen Gill and Andreas Gursky dedicate to different aspects of airports, those contemporary "non-places", accompanied by the Toccata for Toy trains by Charles & Ray Eames.

9. Memories
From handwriting to the printing press, from painting to photography, not forgetting film and video, sound recording and digital techniques, technology is endlessly increasing the relation between the amount of information stored and the time needed to store it, even though we are now capable of recording almost in real time.

This leads to a fascinating (and perhaps disturbing) paradox: memory and stored time obtrude ever further, yet the nature of time does not change... What are we to do with all the time constantly being recorded all over the planet? Every form of recording is covered in this section.

10. Real time
The speed of information transmission forms the core of this section, which is given over to showing how the domination of what we call "real time" has an infinitely more profound effect on human temporality than the simple displacement of bodies does. Telephone, radio, television, computers and computerised networks are generating an increasingly complex time these days, at both individual and collective levels.

This section includes the installation Repons by Pierre Boulez and two films by Christian Marklay and Charles & Ray Eames. Here too, the IRCAM exemplifies its work on real time in music.

11. Irreversibility
This section, devoted to the major themes of irreversibility, in terms of physics (the second principle of thermodynamics, entropy, etc.), cosmology (the big bang and the hypothetical big crunch) and metaphysics (the arrow of time and human fate), gives us the opportunity to turn the spotlight back onto individual subjectivity.

Our visit to this section takes in a series of drawings by Gordon Matta-Clark, Arrows (evocations of the arrow of time), and pieces by Anselmo on the irreversible destruction of physical and biological objects; Ligeti's Poème symphonique pour 100 métronomes; a film montage about suspense based on Hitchcock's visual narrative (The Bomb) and, finally, the foreseeable end of our physical future, evoked in the form of photographs of exploding stars captured after a few years by the Hubble satellite.

12. The future of time
An open room in all senses of the word: open to the light of the daytime sky, but also to the big questions (not all of which are reassuring) about the future (on earth and in the universe) of the human species. This room purports to represent a page of luminous but opaque blankness, as it is a page yet to be written on, a kind of metaphysical filter before we leave the gallery and return to normal life, where our habitual perception of time will once again take hold of our lives: where we will go back to thinking more about the present and the immediate future than about what is to come.
PARALLEL ACTIVITIES: ARTS AND TIME

TEMPO: Concert/action
"Tempo" by Xavier Maristany, with the collaboration of La Porta and Propost.
Date: 3 February 2001
Time: 8.00 -10.00 p.m.
Place: foyer of the CCCB

Tempo is a concert/action which points up the mixture of the arts: literature, dance, music, performance, video. Arts in which, by definition, time is a substantial part. Tempo will constantly question their relationship with time, and point up and bring out their "temporal" qualities: repetition, lengthening and shortening of time, distance from the spectator, etc.

Tempo is an uninterrupted succession of one-minute "pieces", an easily digestible fraction of time for performer and audience alike. The fact that the length is, in each case, a minute gives the spectacle a constant cadence, advancing with exploratory time.

PERIODIC: Public competition for sound projects
To coincide with the exhibition "Art and Time", the CCCB is also organising a public competition for an experimental concert/action. The projects should be music-based, with the central theme of musical "tempo", with all that this involves (delays, repetitions, silences, etc.). The jury will particularly value the incorporation of elements extraneous or related to music (video, dance, performance, visual arts, literature, etc.). The last date for submission of projects is 11 December. The two winners of the competition will each present their concert/action on 17 and 20 January 2001, at 8.00 p.m., in the auditorium of the CCCB.

TIME IN THE CINEMA
The cycle "Time in the cinema", directed by Ángela Martínez with the collaboration of Carolina López and José Ángel Alcalde, will present films that deal with different ways of representing time in the cinema. Three sessions being together Michel Snow and Johan Van der Keuken and their ways of addressing the issue of time. Fictional and experimental cinema illustrate subjective time, repetition, inverted time and suspended time. And finally, a session of animation film looks at reconstructed time.

Curator Daniel Souttif
Designer Fernando Marzá
Organisation and production Centre Georges Pompidou, with the collaboration of the IRCAM and the CCCB
Exhibition space Hall 2 - CCCB

GENERAL INFORMATION
- Exhibition opening times:
· Tuesday, Thursday and Friday: 11 a.m. - 2 p.m. and 4 - 8 p.m.
· Wednesday and Saturday: 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
· Sunday and holidays: 11 a.m. - 7 p.m.
· Special opening times: 24, 26 and 31 December and 6 January, 11 a.m. - 3 p.m.
· Closed on Mondays except holidays 25 December and 1 January.


CCCB - Montalegre 5 - 08001 Barcelona - Tel: 933064100 - Fax: 933064101

stampa

permanent link