Christian Marclay-Clock Watch

I regretted leaving my gloves at home when I stood in the freezing cold with the light drizzle twinkling on my winter coat on a mid November’s day in London. It was 3.10pm on my wristwatch. I had left home at 2.15 pm. The glass doors were pulled at 3.43 pm. I found myself in a big room with huge white empty walls. I scrutinized each doorbell picture while I crept every centimetre towards the staircase leading towards the basement. Having descended a few short steps, I was then carefully lead by torchlight to help navigate my way into the packed room. The silver light reflected on so many bodies all totally enchanted, engaged and engrossed, sitting on the floor, standing against the walls, buried in sofas watching Christian Marclay’s latest video installation “The Clock”. I checked my watch, it read 4.10pm corresponding exactly the same time as on the screen!

The master of collage, Christian Marclay: Californian born American artist in this new work has constructed a chronological 24 hour film, piecing and slicing moments of cinematic narrative when time is shown on camera or checked by a character in selected film footage. Splicing these together and synchronizing it to local time zone makes it an accurate clock telling the right time. Localization of the time zone to the fictional event replaces fantasy with real time. As the famous Russian filmmaker Andrey Taarkovsky said, “Time is strange thing in cinema -perhaps the most mysterious thing about cinema. It resembles ‘real time’ but is always compressed, cut up, manipulated, expanded, mediated, abstract”. However, in Marclay’s case it has been cut, compressed and manipulated to create “real time” using contributory footage from some 300 films painstakingly worked on for three years, making it a technical marvel of perseverance.

Having every clip linked to actual time allows the spectator follow a somewhat unlinked narrative with total comfort in a very strange manner, merging fictional and reality in an unusual way. The link, of each event happening on screen during the spectator’s actual living time does not leave any space for distraction but total involvement and brings in existence an astonishing bond between film and spectator.

What makes this piece so extremely engaging is the seamless editing making each scene flow effortlessly from one mood/theme to another. Rhythm is the main formative element of cinema according to Tarkovsky. Editing puts together these pieces carrying different time, bringing a new existential awareness of the intensity of the stretches of time, already present in the segments. Time must flow independently and with dignity enabling ideas to find their place without hassle coinciding with the rhythm in the spectator. Tarkovsky writes in Sculpting in Time; “but there is still a dichotomy; for the director’s sense of time always amounts to a kind of coercion of the audience, as does his imposition of his inner world. The person watching either falls into your rhythm (your world) or becomes your ally, or else he does not, in which case no contact is made. And so some people become your ‘own’, and others remain strangers; and I think this is not only perfectly natural, but alas inevitable”. In ‘The Clock’, wiping out the time difference between reality and fiction creates an altogether new narrative, as the hypnotized spectator experiences a peculiar awareness of time and is unable to prevent him/herself from sliping in to its rhythm. The real time parallels, infiltrating and coinciding with the fictional blurring of the boundaries as well as questioning the reality of time itself.

Within the space of a few minutes the spectator experiences one narrative encompassing a vast range of time fractured narratives, moods, places and characters making time stream in to limitless directions all at once, yet preserving the real temporal sequence suggesting a continuing link between the fictional events depicted but which are infact narratively utterly disconnected. One can sense the simultaneous construction and rupture of temporal chronology.

An art critic wrote, “the central concept, certainly, is grand: the relentless passage of time, the moments of reality that infiltrate cinematic fantasy. Presumably, the idea is to instill in the viewer a kind of temporal awareness, a sense of mortality, even. And yet, if this really is Marclay's aim, then his decision to use sampled film clips backfires. Ultimately, the sheer spectacle of it all, the pleasure of recognizing cinematic episodes, becomes so distracting that there's no time for serious contemplation. 'The Clock', for all its technical proficiency, ends up simply as the artistic equivalent of one of those TV-clip shows, an exercise in viewing nostalgia”. As an Asian novice to western cinema, I had the luck of escaping distraction caused by indulgence in recognizing fragments of cinematic episodes, which would indeed not be the case with vast number of audience.

Zettle wrote, “The essence of dramatic effect is irreducibly linked to time: anticipation, expectation, hope, looking forward; regret, remorse, historical perspective etc philosophically require a sense of the measured passage of time to render them meaningful. Time is part of the warp and weft of memory: without the linear conceptual thread that time provides, the perpetual present of our immediate experience and the endless flow of events and experiences that constitute it have neither sequence nor coherent connection. Language itself is irreducibly temporal. Time we might say is part of the grammar of sense and memory”.

Marclay sows the seeds for such speculations. Disorientation sprouting out of juxtaposed real and fictional time proves to be strangely amusing and making it difficult for the spectator to leave the 24 hour long work.

“The Clock”, was shown at White Cube Mason’s Yard Gallery in London, 15^th October till 13^th November, 2010.

Therein & Besides-Sheela Gowd

Sheela Gowda’s works have been shown internationally at reputed places such as Documenta 12 & Biennales, so having her first solo in London seems a bit late. At her first London solo Therein & Besides at INIVA Rivington Place, the Bangalore based artist showed two works. Apart from Collateral (2007) which has been shown before, she showed a new commissioned work Of All People (2011) in which she has best exploited her long experience of creating large scale sculptural installations. With her signature style she has used the everyday objects and materials such as doors and windows as her vantage point, combining it with abstract forms drenched with social references. Her large scale works have been immersive pieces focused on a particular material and its configuration in a given space.

She was trained as a painter and went through conventional training, which required observational and representational skills, making her alert and inquisitive about her surroundings. She was lucky to have a teacher like KG Subramanian who encouraged her to negate narrative in her work. In 1984-86 she studied at the Royal College of Art in London on a scholarship. She understood that abstraction is not the absence of form but more a reading of a multiple-loaded form. In the early 90s she initially cooperated materials in painting and then gradually went for 3D forms. She strongly felt that to be able to address/respond to certain questions and observations she needed new more appropriate language and this brought a radical shift in her work. It was the time of growing fundamentalist tendencies in Indian politics - which politicized people and as a logical result forced a critique/a self-appraisal. As an artist she searched for the right means to express that angst. Religion was being used as fundamentalist element to devour people. What could be better material than cow dung with its paradoxical context of shit & sacred. This very act of picking material with its multi layered meaning and investigating the void of the spaces were her few early experiments when she mixed cow dung with paint for her still very figurative paintings.

Even though the use of installation and other media art was getting its base in India with artists like Vivan Sundram , what fascinated Sheela most was not the medium but the material intercepting with the social, religious and the practical usage. Gowda's use of materials includes both an investigation into its physical qualities, as well as its source to mark another kind of change : urbanization in India.

The archeology of the material that marks that particular site reveals certain kinds of social practices and transformations. In Kagebangara (2007), she had flattened steel tar drums used as temporary habitation by migrant construction workers, a material pregnant with its own narrative. This work gives an insight into the process of how she uses a material as it appears in everyday surroundings, addresses it as sculptural medium and presents it so that as it does not loose its original social context.

Although she stresses her multilevel readings by each individual viewer, one nevertheless cannot deny the precision of specificity. In Of All People she has played with a narrative projection with little iconic wooden sculptural figures alias for people appropriated for voodoo. These wooden chips are then placed in situations illustrating varying concepts of the human condition. At a first glance it just looks like a pile of wooden chips. However, it is the time stretch of interaction and engagement of the viewer which makes him/her realize that these are individually carved unique figures.

The objects in the gallery space decoy obstacles and contradict one another. The striking colors happen to have certain collective aesthetic appeal in combination to metaphorical scaling of self. The dismantled vertical linear doorframe makes one walk through its own physical presence, defining the space beyond and before it/inside or outside it. Its disjointed relationship with the abstracted wooden figures makes it recognizable, subtracting a new kind of narrative. The image’s debated representation is different from the actual object, placing it in a scenario of a slow revealing process and provides a sense of recognition.

The process of making work in a particular space accelerates imagination. The artist’s mind itself becomes a happening site. Collateral (2007) was meticulously created by rolling; arranging and burning incense on mesh frames to produce an intricate pattern, precisely calculating the fall of ash residues suggesting a broken fragile burnt down landscape placed on three different sizes of mesh frames, suggesting notions of masculine, feminine and childlike shapes.

The work Collateral physically transformed in the space it was displayed. In this particular work the transformative moment had to be highly orchestrated and was also a scary due to the strict fire regulations in UK. It has a captivating tension around it. The word collateral means: descending from same ancestral stock but by a different line, like a collective population with a different genealogy. It creates a parallel correspondence for both silence & melancholia.

Although both works might look different they both are transmogrifications of material thus conceptually related. What it was and what it is now, indicates metamorphosis and connections with memory: the mark of time. She ruled out turning her works in to personal dairies during her artist talk with the curator Grant Watson. However, one can still feel loss as one of the underlying triggers behind the work that evoke something in each viewer. As she said, ‘I work towards layers of meaning while trimming the form to the extent possible, where the reference or the source is suggested but not stated literally.' Gowda seems to be working totally on her own terms in this exhibition.

In response to the exhibition a film screening was curated and introduced by Shanay Jhaveri, art historian. The films were woven around the notion of commitment to in/visible processes, the duration and skill attached to it, as Sheela herself creates objects of ambiguous amalgamations by infusing certain physical performative labour processes to locally specific materials transforming them in to ambiguous abstract amalgamations. Films by Harun Farocki, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Wasim Mushtaq Wani, Ashish Avikunthak, Ayisha Abraham, and Avijit Mukul Kishore were screened.

The exhibition was on at INIVA Rivington Place, London from 19^th January till 12^th March 2011.

Gabriel Orozco-Retrospective at Tate Modern

As a child I was fascinated with the fact the earth is continuously moving all the time even when I feel static physically. We belong to an era when shifting geographical locations has become a norm in a rather fast paced life. Gabriel Orozco works in Mexico, New York and Paris and exhibits the world over, creating art of an age with floating extended roots, combining diversity sprouting out of these particular times and spaces.

'I'm not inventing, just reinterpreting', Orozco has said. He alters, reconfigures and transforms the familiar objects by placing them in new contexts, preserving the wider associations they might contain. An awareness of transience and the ephemeral is a persistent quality in his work, making his strongest works exist only as photographs of casually arranged materials in locations such as streets and supermarkets.

Orozco was born in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, in 1962. He emerged as an artist during the 1990s. An ear for spectacle persisted since the previous decade. Orozco responded to it with subtle interactive strategies with the viewer developing an intimate relationship with the human scale. His works make one ride the waves of drama, wit and poetry, reflecting upon the symbolic within everyday life.

In this retrospective show at the Tate Modern, the first work one encounters is a photograph of a performance which is a gesture of him pressing a chunk of humble brick factory clay (rather than fine sculptors clay) between his hands, thus creating a piece of sculpture . This work stands on the crossroads of photography, performance and sculpture, and it is all preserving the impromptu moment of creation, what he has described as 'a gesture of spontaneity'. The work is titled “My Hands Are My Heart “.

Orozco created more works like Pelvis, Torso, Head and Arms (2005-7), where he used similar technique as “My Hands Are My Heart “. He created these forms with intimate physical interactions by using his knees and elbows, incising these fine tactile marks of encounters between body and clay creating a dairy of reminders of our own mortality.

In Black Kites (1997) one sees one of the best examples of his appropriation . In this another confrontation with mortality, he worked with a genuine human skull : 'I was intrigued by something real, that is not a fake, something natural, real death (if that is possible)', he later said . With great patience, he meticulously created a chequerboard pattern on this skull with a graphite pencil in a time consuming seven months period . Making this grid pattern displays a sense of order on this emblem of death. This process of time was crucial in this work for Orozco, who had just spent months in hospital following a collapsed lung.

Orozco collected lint formed of skin, hair and fabric fibers that accumulates in the filter of a drying machine from a Launderette and hung those carefully like clothes on a washing line, forcing the viewer to meditate on the fragility of the human body and precariousness of life. Its first exhibition in New York after September 11, 2001 added more significance.

A famous example of his re-configuration and intervention can be seen in the La DS(1993) when he cut into three pieces, an old Citroen D car from a scrap yard in Paris, removing the central part. 'It is not enough to cut a car in half. You have to build it up again', he has said. The removal of the central part created a single-seater car without an engine - making it dysfunctional creates a paradox of a static object excellently shaped for high velocity.

In another work Elevator (1994) he again cut and removed the central part of an elevator levelling it to his own height, conceiving volume with human scale. He has explained, 'The interior of an elevator is its exterior… the illuminated part, the clean part, is inside, and everything outside is dust and grease. Taking it outside a building is like turning the peel of a half orange inside out.'

One could see several other works at the exhibition which reflect upon the itinerant nature of world we live in, like Four Bicycles (There is Always One Direction -1994), Until You Find Another Schwalbe (1995).

“I was interested in how to transform this object into something else, while also coming back to the reason for this material object to be...So in every work, the first concern for me is a connection with what the material is…” This quote reveals his characteristic approach to the materials he uses. In Recaptured Nature(1990) he made a rubber sphere:splitting, reconfiguring and resealing inner tubes of car tyres and then inflating it to its new form. In the whole process he remains true to the original object, commenting, “I'm using the material in the way it was made for: that is, to be inflated.” but now giving it freedom to roll in any direction.

Ventilator 1997,is another creation which was the result of his travels this time to India: everywhere he and and his wife stayed in hotels, he would be handed a roll of toilet paper as he was shown to his room. This combination of staring at revolving ceiling fans and rolls of toilet paper makes this kinetic sculpture circulating silently like a whirlpool.

“A board is a very bi-dimensional field, black and white. And all the other pieces, they move diagonally, up and down, etcetera. But when you conceive of that knight that is jumping between squares – it's a very beautiful notion.” In the work Horses Running Endlessly 1995 Orozco altered the chess game populating it just with knights running infinitely as the conventional aim of protecting the King is removed.

Orozco said, “I like the idea of the photograph as a shoe box in which you keep and transport objects or memorable events in your life.” In Breath on Piano 1993, one is again confronted with the mortal & ephemeral when one closely inspects the photographic record of the momentary trace of Orozco’s breath on piano. Yet another mark like a spontaneous scribbling as a record of an unsubstantial fleeting thought flips on the pages of personal dairy

Orozco raises the mundane everyday materials to art in Chicotes 2010. He used remnants of torn vehicle tyre from aMexican highway. The pieces look dead discarded remains, blasted, abandoned and tired of their long struggle to survive constantly upon the endless harsh roads. The surface retains the stories of their movement memory scars. One can almost hear the screeching sound echoing in the white space with blowing dry sand. He again succeeds in dealing with the horror of mortality with beauty.

Similiarly in another work, Orozco made a plasticine ball of his own body weight and rolled it on the streets absorbing and receiving the debris and imprints of the places it travelled, as a symbol of Orozco’s constant move and incorporating new places and experiences. The work is called The Yielding Stone.

During the exhibition one moment one deciphers the wit and then the next moment one is alerted with ringing reminders to one’s own mortality before in the next breath becoming submerged in the awe of beauty of the mundane. The rollercoster takes one to places of play, humor, wonder, ponderouness, order and choas . One has to squeeze, expand and twist one’s perceptions to fathom the depths of symbolism. He creates a world that fluctuates between the wonders of the living and dying and could even make one plan the words for one’s own obituary as a precaution, in a rather funny way, incase your whole life’s achievements get stamped with one nonsensical sentence like in the work Obituaries, which consists of a collection of headlines from the obituaries page of the New York Times in which the unnamed dead person’s achievement or notoriety is described in a few words. So: “Nicknamed Dr Strangelove”; “Dumbo’s Creator”; “An Advocate of Mammograms”; or “Wrote Patriotic Chinese Music”.

This retrospective of his works is a treat for those who had not had the luck of seeing his works before, though most of the works exhibited have been shown in London before in various exhibitions.

Gabriel Orozco was curated by Jessica Morgan, The Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, and Iria Candela, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.

The retrospective on from 19^th January till 25^th April 2011 at Tate Modern , London .