The screening included two separate compilations, A Tight Thirteen Minutes and Commissioned Works, 1976. The first part included 60-second films by various Bay Area artists that included scenes of paint brushes acting as a drums on paper and resonating a sound and ultimately building an image out of “nothing.” All the portions were very different and in each individual way questioned time and what could be done in a short amount of it. The next screening included 15 four minute visual art projects that were made again by Bay Area artists with an assignment of depicting ways time is measured. The intention of this assignment was to see what would happen when similar instructions are given to different artists but obtain different responses from each. What happened was a unique compilation of completely unique short films that at first glance might seem to have nothing to do with time, or how it is measured; however, they each show a different perspective on an eternal question of what signifies a moment in time.
One of the first films was Robert Watts’ Snowflakes which depicted time in layers with snowflakes falling down and layering on top of the camera screen until all we can see is a blurry white image. In his interpretation, time is a continuous process that begins with nothing, builds on top of itself, and ultimately ends in nothing—for us. From another perspective, the snowflakes keep falling and falling with no beginning and no end; however, if we are underneath the snowflakes we can only experience the moment from the time we open our eyes and until the snowflake layer blocks the view from our eyes. David Askevold’s An Excerpt from the Ambit, on the other hand, had no beginning nor end—signifying that time is immeasurable since we can never know when “the clock” started ticking and when it stopped.
Dennis Oppenheim depicted time as being in a circular motion in his short film called Spinning Knives. In his piece, a person is throwing knives at a spinning board and watching it “cut” up the board with its shadow. I believe this knife can represent clocks and how it cuts up time into “random” intervals established by someone outside of nature—just like “someone” is throwing the knife; it does not fly down by itself. Lastly, one more work by Les Levine, The Selling of a Video Artist, reminded me of Bergson’s argument that “time is invention” (115), because the commentator spoke about visual art as the only way of feeling absolute time, compared to TV programming which is just a way of making us buy things. If time is used properly, as these video artists are trying to do—creating something completely new, unique, and significant in their work, then this time is much more than just measured intervals, it is their creativity, and invention.
Alina Goldenberg
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A Tight Thirteen Minutes was a fitting preamble to Commissioned Works in that it put us in the mindset to watch a compilation of short films and that it somewhat prepared us for what was to come. Every piece was unique but they were all united by the very short one minute time limit.
One piece showed two hands using drum brushes on a piece of paper with a voiceover describing the worn-away texture that appeared as a landscape. Another was simply a minute of a hand making lines of coke on a small mirror with a razorblade. Some told stories or made implicit statements; one was a parable of a horse race using drops in water, another was a call to change the state of public schools, and another was a comparison of the two presidential candidates using eggs as metaphors. One short, where a man lip-synced on camera to a recording of a woman’s voice, was strikingly similar to the recently popular Citibank commercials that do the same. The most entertaining piece left the audience unsure about the true orientation of the room to the camera until the very end as a man rotated 90 degrees with his feet on a tightrope and his hands on a wall.
The short films that make up Commissioned Works are extremely varied in their content, but they all deal with time in some way. Some pieces were measured in regular intervals; one with a timer in the middle of the frame ticking away the four minutes, another by the buildup of snow on a dark surface until it became a white blur. The undeniably funny Dog/Ball showed a man throwing a foosball to his dog and trying to get him to drop it from his mouth into a can. Although there was no regular interval, the time was clocked by the repeated throw and drop action and the culmination of the goal at the end.
Several shorts dealt with time circularly. Spinning Knives showed two superimposed views of a knife being repeatedly thrown into a rotating circular board. Light reflecting off the metal of the blade created a kind of sundial-like image each time it stuck in the wood. Skylight at Monticello showed moving light beams on a dark background that looked like clock hands somersaulting across the screen.
Two films created a sense of timelessness. An Except from the Ambit showed a girl silently looking around while the camera slowly zoomed in and out. There was no beginning or end to it, and no interval with which to measure time. Book End showed a paragraph from a book with slightly moving plants subimposed behind the words as the only changing things.
In The Selling of a Video Artist, the author explicitly condemned the four minute time limit and decried the worthlessness of consumer film. In his words, “video art is the real thing!”. Paul McCarthy’s ironically titled Apology was of a naked man in a gargoyle mask dancing in a sickening yellow/green light. It showed that four minutes really can last forever.
The introduction before and Q&A after the show by James Melchert and one of the artists was both interesting and enlightening. As one audience member pointed out, every one of the short films is very much defined by the time limit. The anticipation of the end of each piece shaped both the way the piece was created and the way it is viewed. It shows how much and how little artists with no economic incentive can do with four minutes and a camcorder.
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