The opening thirty seconds of A Tight Thirteen Minutes made me laugh. It was two brushes with no ink or paint, brushing on a blank white piece of paper in a rhythmic pattern with a narrator describing what was happening. After I quickly pulled myself together I realized that the sixty second film was actually interesting. The narrator talked about how the rhythmic sound and the motion of the brushes produces a landscape that is visible to the eye, and I actually started to see an image appear on the paper. Just by hearing a repetitious sound and seeing a repetitious motion made an image appear in the brain. This was the perfect opening film because it raised my interest for the rest of A Tight Thirteen Minutes and A Commissioned Works.
All the artists’ of the short films tried to manipulate the representation of time in a different way in either a 60 second film or a four minute film. The film that most affected me in representing time in a different way is John Fernie’s four minute Old Fort Piece. The filming takes place inside a single room of an eighteenth century castle. The camera pans around the perimeter of the room and stops at every window, or opening, then zooms out the window to show the outside. The narrator of the film describes how the single room feels like a place of solitude, and while he is in the room time seems to slow down. It makes him feel completely relaxed and all his anxiety goes away. He expresses his experience of time by stating that someone could “marry a turtle” in a room like this. His experience of time inside the room is slower than outside. This is actually strange to me because when he zooms out the windows there are scenes of nature, which makes the walls of the room a barrier between him and the natural world. Usually time slows down for me when I am immersed in nature, not separate from it, but I guess he feels differently about nature.
The film that ended up being the most disappointing was William Wegman’s four minute Dog/Ball. This film featured a dog sitting in the same spot with a cup in front of it. The dog would catch a golf ball and then drop it. Every time the dog dropped the ball a man would move the cup to the spot where the ball hit. For almost the entire film the dog did not drop the ball in the same spot two times in a row. This shows that everything changes in time and that everything is random. I think Bergson would like this dog because it proved that nobody can really predict the future, no matter how hard they tried. Unfortunately, the dog ended up dropping the ball into the cup, showing that there is some chance to predict the future, even though everything is still random. This film actually engaged the audience the most. Whenever the dog dropped the ball near the cup the audience let out a disappointed moan and when the dog finally made it in the cup the audience cheered. The audience made the film feel like a live show and maybe that was the intention of the film, to show that past actions and time can be refreshed again and again. That the past can be experienced as the present.
Some of the other films in Commissioned Works showed different ways to measure time. In John Baldessari’s 4 Minutes of Trying to Tune Two Glasses a kitchen timer is used to represent the time passing. In Robert Watts Snowflakes, time is measured by the layers that thicken as snowflakes fall. In Eleanor Antin’s The Little Ballerina time is measured in the rotation of a wind up ballerina that revolves at a constant rate. In Siah Armajan’s Skylight at Monticello time is measured by the motion of a bar of light that rotates as it moves forward at a constant rate. I thought that using motion to represent time in films was interesting.
Johnny Mendoza
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The event commenced with a short video entitled “A tight thirty minutes,” which is a compellation of a few short clips. One of these clips talks about the need for a better public school system that stresses the artistic creativity of students as opposed to knowledge of scientific and systematic rules. I felt that this served as an appropriate introduction to the rest of the show because it points out the main theme in this presentation: the conflict between the scientific division/measurement of time and the qualitative “experience” of time. This video also included a clip of a person making lines out of cocaine, which gave the viewers an introduction to the rest of the shocking images to come.
After a quick speech, they played “Commissioned works.” It was a collection of four minute films made by Bay Area artists. Some of the films like “4 Minutes of Trying to Tune Two Glasses” and “Snowflakes” induce sleep amongst its viewers due to their repetitive and uneventful natures—which tend to make the four minutes seem long. Other clips like the “Dog/Ball” and “Heartland,” which stimulate the humorous and intellectual side of the viewers, make the films appear shorter. Unfortunately, I sat through shock films like “Apology” that depicted a guy with his cock between his legs dancing like a retard. I reject this piece as art, but it projected a strong point none the less. This point has to do with the rejection of scientific time because even though each piece was exactly four minutes long, they all felt like they were completely different and had completely different durations.
-Christopher Melgaard
Summaries of Commissioned Works and A Tight Thirteen Minutes have been provided by various classmates who attended this event. Therefore, instead of giving a recap to the two video clips, I will discuss the works that left an impression on me, and the comments I received from Jim Melchert, the curator of Commissioned Works, after the showing. I really enjoyed the opening of A Tight Thirteen, where the clip showed two paint brushes (without paint) brushing a blank piece of paper. This clip showed an interesting formation of terrain by the indentations made by the brushstrokes. I thought this was a particular powerful image, where the development of space progressed with time: a 3-D space formed from a 2-D plane through narration; the zooming in and out of the plane served the purpose to give the viewers a better view of this formation.
From Commissioned Works, two pieces that really resonated with me were the Spinning knives by Dennis Oppenheim, and Please Stand By by Hilla Futterman. Oppenheim presented different perspectives of a knife spinning on a plane, though it wasn’t clear whether the plane was spinning or it was his video cam that was doing all the work. Besides the knife spinning, he also showed different angles and reflection of light from the knife in a single image. Again, the temporality of space and time were presented here implicitly, which I thought was absolutely fascinating. During the four minutes of the clip’s showing, I was intrigued by how Oppenheim positioned his camera in order to obtain the different views of the knives. The repeated throwing of the knife did not seem like a laborious task in the least.
Please Stand By followed after an intense depiction of a naked guy dancing for four minutes. It was a long over due relief to see such assemblage of soothing pictures displayed with classical music for four minutes. The relief experienced by this clip made these four minutes seemed the shortest of all the fifteen clips. This also made me wonder whether the video clips were arranged in a specific order in mind, perhaps Please Stand By was strategically placed after Apology, where the effects of Futterman’s clip was accentuated by the nude man.
After the showing I had an opportunity to talk to Melchert regarding the arrangements of these video clips. I asked him whether he had a specific ordering in mind when he assembled the works together. He responded that he did arrange the works; however, he was primarily concerned with the ease of transition between clips, as people usually only watched a couple clips at once when Commission Works was first displayed. He mentioned that the circumstances of the presentation of the Works was very different back then: it wasn’t meant to be shown in a continuous sixty-minute time frame, but as pieces of clips where people were free to leave in the middle. This also made me wonder how the two different showings would alter the perception of time of the viewers.
Cathy Hwang
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