time zones: durational art and its contexts · work to the static ﬁne arts. ‘‘i maintain that...

SHANNON JACKSON AND JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

Time Zones:Durational Art and Its Contexts

DO W E H A V E A P R O B L E M W I T H T I M E? The we here is specific—it means not only the scholars, curators, and practitioners who think criti-cally about twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic production and itsrelationship to temporality but also the small collective of the two of us whoare writing this introduction together. We are a performance studies scholarand an art historian who have been thinking together about what makesquestions about time so persistent, and so vexed, within and between ourtwo fields. Duration, we have come to realize, might be the conceptualconnective tissue that links these two increasingly overlapping disciplines.But ‘‘durational art’’ is only one of the many names that have proliferated inan attempt to bound an unboundable set of practices that frequently violatethe borders of medium-specificity as they move from so-called ‘‘static’’ con-figurations into durational forms: time-based art, live art, hybrid art, inter-medial art.1

What happens when the same phrases—‘‘durational art’’ or ‘‘time-basedart’’—traffic back and forth between the traditional visual arts (painting,sculpture) and the performing arts, especially when, in the performance-based disciplines, time or liveness hardly feels ‘‘new’’? While the history oftwentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic experimentation is one of evermore blurry disciplinary borders, we often find that the habits and divisionsof labor within different art institutions persist. Moreover, the training ofartists and of critics separates skills and evaluative barometers within differ-ent art fields. Many kinds of cultural producers may be making, curating,and evaluating ‘‘live’’ art work, but our sense of what kind of work it is will bedifferent depending upon its context, whether it is housed in a museum ora theater, or whether it is analyzed by a dance critic, a film critic, or a critic ofvisual arts.

abstract Exploring the emergence of the rubric ‘‘time-based art’’ across several disciplinary for-mations, including performance and visual art, this editors’ introduction outlines some historical the-ories of duration across the arts and argues for a contextual approach that accounts for both mediumand institutional location. Representations 136. Fall 2016 © The Regents of the University ofCalifornia. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 1–20. All rights reserved. Direct requestsfor permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2016.136.1.1. 1

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‘‘Time Zones: Durational Art and Its Contexts’’ brings together six sub-stantial essays (by Bojana Cvejic, Andrea Giunta, Yi Gu, Andre Lepecki,Rebecca Schneider, and Wang Jing) and nine shorter reflections (by Wei-hong Bao, Natalia Brizuela, Allan deSouza, Suzanne Guerlac, SanSan Kwan,Anneka Lenssen, Jeffrey Skoller, and Winnie Wong) that approach time,duration, and liveness from an array of disciplinary and regional contexts.From the affective registers of contemporary sound art in China to thepolitics of labor and laziness in a collaborative performance collective inZagreb to archive-based interventions during the Uruguay military dictator-ship of the 1970s and 1980s, the essays plumb the specificities of practices asthey unfold in real times and physical spaces. Contributors consider how thepresumed presentism of ‘‘live art’’ puts pressure on the demands of histo-ricity, as well as how it reconfigures relations to art’s viewers or witnesses.The essays and reflections examine how notions of time and duration haveemerged as central, yet contested, in diverse projects that include public art,kinetic body-based sculpture, dance, and photography.

Together these texts make an argument, which is that the contexts thatframe durational art—whether rhetorical, or national, or institutional—mat-ter a great deal. Where and when does a piece take place? In what kind of site isit situated, and in what moment of time does it occur? What are the conditionsof its inception and its continued circulation? Who is in the audience, and whotalks about it after the fact? Is it applauded, or is it censored? These experi-ments with time respond to the local economic politics of particular regions aswell as to transnational circuits of exchange. Questions of time in art interactwith larger questions of migration, capitalism, and mobility in a global world.The ephemeral quality of time-based art can address and elude the politicalurgencies of volatile sites. Regionally specific themes and political issuesprompt artists to collaborate across disciplines in some contexts but dissuadethem in others. Funding models in different regions of the world both sup-port and limit the capacity of artists to work across disciplines. Time-based artcan in some cases disrupt and in others activate the demands of a market-based art calendar packed with biennials and high-profile festivals. It bothchallenges and enables the consumptive models of a globalized art world.

This special issue appears after several years of collaborative research atUC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center (ARC) and as a result of other projects,dialogues, events, and debates that we, as co-editors, have enjoyed andendured in a variety of art contexts.2 ARC hosted a series of symposia clus-tered together under the broad rubric Time Zones. Our title is meant tosignal that these inter-arts formations trespass across contexts, includingvarious spatial ‘‘zones’’ (gallery/theater/museum/classroom/street), andalso that they are often (mis?)translated across discrepant disciplinaryregimes, ones with asynchronous tempos.

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As the director (Shannon Jackson) and interim director (Julia Bryan-Wilson) of a research center charged with creating cross-disciplinary pro-jects in the arts, we had become increasingly aware of the odd myopias andredundancies of that charge. We have found that, while many kinds of artconvenings and artistic experiments tout their ‘‘interdisciplinarity,’’ they donot necessarily face the degree to which such gatherings are tacitly disci-plined by the art domain that hosts them. To cite one example: Jackson wasinvited to respond to a 2002 symposium, ‘‘The Visual and the Performative,’’only to learn that the venue defined ‘‘performance’’ and the ‘‘performative’’as that which disrupted the visual, that is, as a dematerializing force withina world of visual art objects. While acknowledging (and appreciating) thisimportant trajectory of artistic experiment, it took a little effort to explain tothe audience that there are also other genealogies of performing arts historythat would not define their relevance as dematerialized disruption.

Meanwhile, as a historian of contemporary art, Bryan-Wilson hasbecome more invested in performance and has also experienced frictionbetween these two admittedly porous worlds. She has found herself in sim-ilarly dislocating situations, including events in which she was presumed tobe the representative of a discipline that believes viewership to be a phantas-matic disembodied eye that encounters a work of art in an idealized andtimeless instant. As a result, we have shared experiences of feeling ‘‘out ofstep,’’ fielding disciplinary assumptions and disciplinary projections acrosscontemporary visual art and performance; our collective work at the ArtsResearch Center has been guided and recalibrated by such productivelydisorienting conversations.

In what follows, we elaborate on some of the ramifications of durationalexperience for current criticism, as well as on the challenges that have arisenin our own encounters with time-based art, in particular institutional ques-tions that are rooted in our own contexts and formations. How doesmedium experimentation across institutional contexts (gallery or theater)in contemporary art and performance challenge arts infrastructure, as wellas aesthetic analysis? How do art critics categorize and respond to this work?How does time-based work change the job of a visual arts curator? A per-forming arts producer? A curator of a film series? What are the emergingvocabularies that might account for these shifting contexts?

Though often understood as a relatively recent development, relationsacross temporal and visual forms have been debated for centuries. Indeed, itseems important to recall much longer histories that contrast durationalwork to the static fine arts. ‘‘I maintain that succession of time is the depart-ment of the poet, as space is that of the painter,’’ wrote Gotthold Lessing inhis seminal 1766 text ‘‘Laocoon: An Essay at the Limits of Painting and

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Poetry.’’3 Lessing went to great pains to delineate the temporal arts from thestatic ones, in order to celebrate the special potency of each. Writing aboutthe demarcation between what we might call the spatialized image and thetemporal word, his vocabulary could become entangled and tautological atonce:

If it is true that painting and poetry in their imitations make use of entirely differentmeans or symbols—the first, namely of form and colour in space, the second ofarticulated sounds in time—if these symbols indisputably require a suitable relationto the thing symbolized, then it is clear that symbols arranged in juxtaposition canonly express subjects of which the wholes or parts exist in juxtaposition; whileconsecutive symbols can only express subjects of which the wholes or parts arethemselves consecutive.4

From such premises he deduced others, arguing that it was because of thisdifference in means that the painter expressed subjects in juxtaposition byusing ‘‘bodies’’ and that the poet expressed subjects consecutively by using‘‘actions.’’5 Theorists of the theater have wondered about theater’s relationto Lessing’s time/space categories, especially since the wholes and parts ofthe theater use both bodies and actions in ways that are simultaneouslyjuxtapositive and successive.

In his Discourses on Art of 1771, Joshua Reynolds elaborated upon theperils of working in static visual forms, in particular the perception thatvisual artists have but a singular and fleeting chance to convey their aestheticimpact, not being able to rely upon the temporality of an unfolding encoun-ter to recuperate them. ‘‘He has but one sentence to utter, but one momentto exhibit,’’ said Reynolds of the painter (presumed to be male). ‘‘He can-not, like the poet or historian, expatiate.’’6 If the safety net of expatiationbelonged only to those in the time-based arts of poetry—or of humanisticfields like history—visual artists had only a singular moment to produce theunique effects of parts and wholes juxtaposed in space. ‘‘What is done byPainting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all thesatisfaction it can ever have.’’7 At one blow: the line between painting andpoetry (as with Lessing, these are Reynolds’s privileged objects of inquiry)asserts itself most prominently around the quality of instantaneity.

If it is now de rigueur to say that Lessing’s and Reynolds’s categories areoverly limiting, it would seem anachronistic to return to them. At the sametime, these anachronistic delineations are not only teachable but also per-sistent, as they still structure the ways in which aesthetic experiment isunderstood. Despite skepticism or confusion at different historical moments,visual art criticism’s perpetuation of these delineations proceeded apace,expanding upon the peculiar effects of painting’s juxtapositive techniques.This kind of eighteenth-century generalization—one that argued that the

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durational experience of visual art occurred ‘‘all at once’’ and ‘‘at one blow’’—would have its twentieth-century ratification in modernist art criticism, mostnotably in the writings of Clement Greenberg. In his promotion of mediumspecificity (in which painting concerns itself only with the conditions uniqueto painting, for instance), Greenberg wrote against what he called, after IrvingBabbitt, the ‘‘confusion of the arts.’’8 Referring explicitly back to Lessing inhis 1940 essay ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ Greenberg asserted that properlymodernist painting meditated on flatness and thereby achieved the ultimateincarnation of the all-at-once encounter.9

In fact, the blurring between the categories of painting, sculpture, liter-ature, craft, theater, and music was crucial to many early twentieth-centuryadvanced artistic movements, including constructivism, Dada, and surrealism.Greenberg does not account for these histories of intermingling, insteadclaiming that ‘‘the avant-garde arts have in the last fifty years achieved a purityand a radical delimitation of their fields of activity for which there is noprevious example in the history of culture. The arts lie safe now, each withinits ‘legitimate’ boundaries.’’10 Even as he was writing in the mid-twentiethcentury, and increasingly in the decades that followed, Greenberg’s vauntedpurities were besmirched, dismantled, or openly dismissed by various dura-tional forms. Many artists worked hard to unsettle the principles on which thedelineation of the art forms rested, as Duchampian gestures, Cagean experi-ments, experiential installations, language poetry, and postdramatic theaterreworked conventions of time and space. Midcentury networks of practicesuch as happenings, events, and assemblages took Greenberg’s premiereexample (abstract expressionism) to propose a diametrically opposing argu-ment; Allan Kaprow grasped that the primary lesson of Jackson Pollock wasnot flatness, but rather the painter’s integration of the matter of everyday life,the way his canvases ‘‘became environments’’ that entangled the viewer intime and space.11 Kaprow emphasized the action of action painting, as well asthe way in which viewers become ‘‘participants rather than observers’’; in hisown work, he expanded beyond the framed parameters of the canvas tostructure and release a host of experiences.12

Partially as a reaction formation against Greenberg’s strict categoriza-tions, minimalism emerged as a prominent movement, which, according toone of its premiere practitioners, Donald Judd, was characterized as being‘‘neither painting nor sculpture.’’13 The ur-symbol of this sculptural inter-vention is the minimalist cube, the geometrically shaped and highly specificobject that appeared in galleries and museums in the sixties, such as TonySmith’s Die from 1962 (fig. 1). Whether appearing on its own, together withothers, organized in a row, or suspended in a column, these minimalistworks not only challenged conventions of representational sculpture butalso, more radically, were said to provoke reflection in the spectator on the


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conditions (both spatial and temporal) of the viewing relationship. Beholdersarguably became more aware of the supporting apparatus of the pedestalwhen it was withdrawn or when the antigravitational supports of painting wereparodied by sculptures hung on a wall. Moreover, viewers became more awareof the visual art encounter as a specifically sited experience especially whenartists drew attention to architectural elements that had been ignored orrequired the beholder to adjust her own pace, approach, and circumnaviga-tion of the gallery space in order to craft an encounter with the art object. Inaddition, such practices put pressure on the economic and ideological frameof the museum, as viewers were alerted to the fact that these time-based experi-ences unfolded within fraught institutional spaces, ones subject to bureau-cratic and financial controls imposed by boards and wealthy patrons.

The interdependent relation between the viewer and the art objectunfolding in time, in a specialized space, was central to the espoused expe-rience of the work; the viewer was present and in a relation to an artworkwhere both beholder and art needed each other. Despite an aesthetic formthat was highly untheatrical in one sense—that is, nonornamental, theopposite of excessive—the effects of minimalist sculpture were consideredtheatrical in other senses, that is, by the spatial, temporal, and spectatorial

figure 1. Tony Smith, Die, 1962. Steel, 72 3/8 � 72 3/8 � 72 3/8 inches. (183.8 �183.8� 183.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with fundsfrom the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., James Block, The Sondra andCharles Gilman, Jr. Foundation, Inc., Penny and Mike Winton, and the Painting andSculpture Committee 89.6. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins. © 2016 Estate of TonySmith/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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relationships they induced. Some of this work explicitly unfolded over time:choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti further erased thedivision between the arts by conjoining sculpture and dance with their task-based actions, sometimes using minimalist forms as elements in their dancesthat elicited questions about the constantly reconfiguring relations betweenspaces, objects, bodies, and audiences (fig. 2).

These kinds of minimalist gestures were unwelcome to a midcenturygeneration of modernist art critics. In the wake of postvisual art expansion,there was a simultaneous effort to shore up the expanse, to question theheteronomous terms in which it was celebrated, and to argue for the impor-tance of autonomy and medium-specificity in art, in particular in visual art,whose dalliance with ‘‘theatrical’’ time imperiled it. Michael Fried’s essay ‘‘Artand Objecthood’’ argued for the need to ‘‘defeat’’ theater, whose primarynegative quality was its inability to suspend time, its almost unbearable dura-tion; it is most famous as a kind of antiprognostic.14 His essay has also becomeone that many in theater, performance, and contemporary art love to hate, in

figure 2. Yvonne Rainer, Carriage Discreteness, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering,October 1966. View of the performance, with Steve Paxton on the swing to theright. Photo by Adelaide de Menil. The Daniel Langlois Foundation collection ofthe Cinematheque Quebecoise.


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part because he attributes so much power to the theater.15 Who would havethought it could be an enemy worth defeating?

Indeed, minimalism was a pivot point for rethinking the temporality ofboth performance and art, especially as theorized in the phenomenologicalwritings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was widely read by minimalist artistsand critics such as Rosalind Krauss.16 In Passages in Modern Sculpture, Kraussproves herself to be acutely attuned to questions of duration, parsing thedistinctions between ‘‘time arrested’’ and ‘‘time passing,’’ ‘‘experienced time’’and ‘‘lived time,’’ ‘‘the pregnant moment’’ and ‘‘analytic time.’’17 At the sametime, ‘‘the body’’ moving through these various kinds of time in Krauss (andin minimalism more widely) was more often than not taken to be relativelyundifferentiated, presumed to be a universal subject unmarked by race, gen-der, class, age, sexuality, or ability. Krauss fails to account for how viewersmight not be enthralled with their own perceptual activation, but rathermade uncomfortable as they sit and watch with legs going numb or neckscramping.

Minimalism continues to be one durable schema in which to plot a dura-tional relation between the twinned contexts of theaters and galleries. Mov-ing from Lessing to minimalism demonstrates the continuity between thesekinds of medium-specific declarations about ‘‘the arts,’’ about whose properdepartment is time and whose is space, about who understands successionand who understands juxtaposition. For Greenberg, medium specificitydelivered its one blow; for Fried, that blow distinguished the ‘‘presentness’’that is grace from the ongoing ‘‘presence’’ of temporally expanded art.Theatrically expanding forms ‘‘defeated’’ art in time, that is, in succession,blow by blow by blow by blow.

Of course, when one broaches the idea of duration in the arts, andspecifically, the idea of the performing arts meeting the visual arts, manyof us feel that we already know what we mean by a theater-and-gallery nexus.We call that nexus ‘‘performance art,’’ a roomy and generalized term used tocapture a variety of practices that jolted art worlds and theater worlds invarious ways. This nexus has important precedents in music; for instance,John Cage and Yoko Ono moved nimbly between museums and concerthalls throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Roselee Goldberg’s pioneering 1979textbook on performance art trekked through a history of the twentiethcentury, beginning with Italian futurist theater and including chapters onDada actions and Bauhaus dance.18 Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Presentexplored practices that—whether they took place on the street or in CabaretVoltaire—challenged the aesthetic boundaries of art. In it, she defines per-formance as ‘‘live art by artists,’’ firmly placing performance within the pur-view of visual art rather than theater; in fact, theater largely drops out from

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her account after about the 1950s with the experiments at Black MountainCollege.19

The consolidation of ‘‘performance art’’ within the visual art field reachedits apex as the mid-1960s gave way to the 1970s, with its range of body artpractices, many of which commented on questions of identity and embodi-ment, from Vito Acconci’s testing the limits of his own bodily endurance toAdrian Piper’s probing work around race and gender. From theater’s loca-tion, however, we can also note that this expanded art or postvisual art practicehas coincided with a variety of late twentieth-century theatrical experiments,experiments that refuse the traditional parameters of theater in order toinstall durational, embodied, and spatial experiments that challenge the con-finements of the theater. Hans-Thies Lehmann gave the term ‘‘postdramatictheater’’ to this no less roomy and varied space of experimentation.20 What, ifany, relation exists between the so-called postdramatic turns of the theaterand the so-called postoptical turns of the gallery? Is this the same ‘‘post’’?

Take, for instance, a piece by the art group Temporary Services that re-occupies the urban infrastructures of Chicago (fig. 3). We will encounter itdifferently if we measure its distance from the gallery or from the theater.How is this piece like or unlike sculpture? How is it like or unlike dance? Orarchitecture? Is this a site-specific choreography or is it time-based architec-ture? Such a work may use visual, embodied, collective, durational, andspatial systems. But both the artists’ sense of their audiences and the critics’

figure 3. Temporary Services, 11 People 16Spaces/How To Guerrilla Art, 2006. Imagefeatures students at Columbia College,Chicago: Gary Amerine, PJ Borowiec, ClaireBruhn, Mary Carroll, Leanne Eicher,Allyson Gaston, Wesley Hall, Young-SunKim, Teresa Melter, Mark Moleski, MelissaPeifer, William Owens, Cheryl Sellers,Darian Tyler, and Lukasz Wyskowski. Imagecourtesy of Temporary Services.


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sense of their innovation will differ depending upon what art form or sup-port system they understand this work to be using or altering. In otherwords, our sense of the integrity, innovation, or banality of a work will varydepending upon which medium we understand a work to be disrupting;which medium is, after all, on the other end of whose ‘‘post’’?

Terms like ‘‘performance art’’ or ‘‘postdramatic theater’’ not only gavehistoriographical arcs to wide and not entirely coherent networks of practice;they also participated in the steady institutionalization of the interdisciplineof performance studies. It is no coincidence that five of the contributors tothis volume—Rebecca Schneider, Andre Lepecki, SanSan Kwan, AngelaMarino, and Shannon Jackson—received their doctorates from perfor-mance studies programs. Rather than the conventions of visual art, manyof the founders of performance studies in the United States (such asRichard Schechner and Michael Kirby) understood themselves to be dis-rupting the conventions of theater; that was the medium on the other end oftheir ‘‘post.’’21

Contemporary art history also grapples with the ‘‘postness’’ of mediumspecificity, and Krauss’s work on the ‘‘post-medium condition’’ haslaunched conversations about the role played by material supports in con-temporary art.22 In the case of Temporary Services, the ‘‘support’’ at issuehas been importantly widened to include the larger support system, includ-ing funding structures and the municipal management of Chicago.Though, as mentioned earlier, performance has been seen as the ultimateinstantiation of the dematerialization of art—a circumvention of the artobject’s commodity status—it, too, has specific materialities. Recent artistsand performers have agitated for their work to shift beyond the walls of anygiven artistic context (theater or museum) to consider the ongoing condi-tions of artistic production—how their labor is accounted for or underval-ued within the capitalist time of wages and worth. Historicizing the gallery/theater nexus demands new approaches to the particular conditions ofspectatorship as contingent, corporeal, and institutional. Such conversa-tions have been especially important for durational art that can place enor-mously taxing demands on the bodies of the performers.23

In the recent acceleration of art museum absorption of performance,these different registers of time—and these many kinds of bodies andspaces—have been unevenly accounted for. Moreover, the last decade—even the last five years—has seen a great deal of curatorial interest in bring-ing together the ‘‘visual arts’’ and the ‘‘performing arts,’’ a conjunction thatcan be quite different from ‘‘performance art.’’ What happens when tradi-tional durational forms such as ‘‘dance’’ or ‘‘theater’’ appear in the museum?There is often a stutter or gap when a work initially staged for a prosceniumtheater (that is, experienced as a single bounded event that flows linearly

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from start to finish), is moved into a white cube gallery and watched only inbrief, intermittent intervals with little regard for progression. The disjunctivetemporalities of the gallery and the theater have been increasingly forced tosync due to the upsurge in institutional initiatives that facilitate the productivecollision between these worlds.

In the United States, experimental performance festivals like AmericanRealness and Crossing the Line have considered the relationship betweenthe gallery and the theater, including the Under the Radar 2012 festival,which hosted a conversation on the relation between the ‘‘black box’’ andthe ‘‘white cube.’’ In the spring of 2012, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussmanoffered a Whitney Biennial that was lauded in part for the performancescurated inside it, including Wu Tsang’s Green Room, Michael Clark’s Who’sZoo, Richard Maxwell’s installed rehearsals, and Sarah Michelson’s DevotionStudy #1—The American Dancer, which made history for being the first cho-reographic work (that is, made by a trained choreographer) to win theWhitney’s Buxbaum Prize. Tsang’s project, for instance, created a semipri-vate space within the art museum, complete with specially designed furni-ture, mirrors, and carpet, that functioned as a dressing room andpreparation arena for the actors, musicians, and dancers in the biennial,thematizing the drastically different support services and architectural dis-tinctions that remain when performing bodies are imported into visual artcontexts (fig. 4). Antagonisms remain, as Marina Abramovic’s famous state-ment that ‘‘to be a performance artist, you have to hate theater’’ attests.24 In

figure 4. Wu Tsang, Green Room, 2012, installation view. Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, New York. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.Photograph by Andres Ramirez.


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2005, Roselee Goldberg founded Performa, a biennial that was meant toreinforce the category of visual art performance rather than experimentaltheater. However, Goldberg herself devoted Performa 2011 to exploring thecategory of ‘‘theater’’ in order to respond to this expanded form of perform-ing arts curation.

Though some versions of art history warned against the intrusion oftemporality into visual art spaces, conversations between scholars of theater,dance, performance, and art are now increasingly hosted by art institutions,especially as they seek to stage live events and exhibit the residue that perfor-mance can generate (including but not limited to photographs, ephemera,and sets). By fall of 2012, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New Yorkwas commissioning and acquiring all varieties of performances—from themaybe parodic, maybe activist, maybe earnest ‘‘events’’ of grand openingsto the siting of works conceived and commissioned by choreographers likeRalph Lemon, Steve Paxton, Faustin Linyekula, Dean Moss, Jerome Bel, andmore. Lemon’s keynote for ARC’s 2012 symposium ‘‘Making Time’’ pre-viewed this project (fig. 5). While ‘‘dance’’ is now more often found insidethe museum, ‘‘theater’’ can be found as well, defamiliarizing the apparatus ofthe gallery even as the gallery defamiliarizes the theatrical form.

Since taking over directorship of The Kitchen in 2011, Tim Griffin hasactivated both its gallery spaces and its theater to stage a conversation acrossart forms. And in a piece entitled Habit, theater director and visual artist DavidLevine installed a painfully ‘‘realistic’’ play inside a gallery, repeating itthroughout the day, conforming to the time of the gallery while bringing thetime-based conventions of ‘‘acting’’ more fully into view (fig. 6). Meanwhile,non-New York-based activity has been approaching those interart stakes fromdifferent angles. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has reconceived whatit means to collect Merce Cunningham’s costumes, debating along the waywhether their conservation required the preservation or the eradication ofthe sweat marks and make-up stains of the dancers who wore them.25

figure 5. Ralph Lemon, keynote,Making Time Art Across Gallery, Screen, andStage, Arts Research Center, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, April 19–21, 2012.

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figures 6a and 6b. (Top–a) David Levine, Habit, 2011. Luminato Festival,Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts. Photoscourtesy of the artist. (Bottom–b) David Levine, Habit, 2012. Crossing the Line Festival,Essex Street Market, New York. Photograph by Julieta Cervantes.


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In the United Kingdom, the Tate Modern opened a section of themuseum called The Tanks in 2012—committing ‘‘permanent’’ space to thepresentation and exhibition of ‘‘temporary’’ art forms—by re-siting chore-ographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase in its concrete space. Sincethen, De Keersmaeker has created new works in collaboration with boththeater spaces and visual art gallery spaces. Her recent piece of choreo-graphic endurance, Work/Travail/Arbeid, premiered at WIELS Center forContemporary Art in Brussels as part of the Performatik Festival 2015, theBrussels performance art biennial. Performatik was a citywide event conceivedin collaboration with experimental theater spaces such as Kaaitheater andvisual art spaces such as Bozar Centre for Fine Arts and WIELS; its organizer,Katleen Van Langendonck, strategically decided to market Performatik asboth an art ‘‘biennial’’ and a performing arts ‘‘festival’’ in order to invite andredefine different forms of durational art reception.

Work/Travail/Arbeid placed an ensemble of trained dancers within theWIELS galleries for six hours each day, inspiring them to move as sentientsculpture deliberately and responsively in and amongst the audience mem-bers who rotated in and out of the space each hour. In a public dialoguewith fellow choreographer Xavier Le Roy, De Keersmaecker spoke about theparadoxes of dance-art collaborations. Both she and Le Roy remarked onhow their disruptions of dance in one context actually appear to re-activatedance in another context. Le Roy noted bemusedly, ‘‘I am non-dance in thedance world, but in the art world, I am dance.’’26 (Even now, as we finalizeour introduction amid a trans-Atlantic exchange in the summer of 2016, LeRoy himself is taking over portions of Centre Pompidou to packed crowds.)

Listing this dense yet partial swarm of activities suggests a relationshipbetween temporal forms and what we might call the economics of ephem-erality. Some critics have cynically interpreted the uptake of performancewithin museums as a moneymaking enterprise, since it has grown alongsidethe spectacularization of the contemporary art market and has fueled itsconnections with the leisure and entertainment industries of the ‘‘experi-ence economy.’’27 If something occurs only for a few hours in the museum,a premium is placed on having been there in person to see it. Durational artcarries within it the anxiety of its very transience—it is always haunted by thespecter of an ending—which motivates the desire to catch it while it is hap-pening. The cachet that attends presence is augmented by academic argu-ments that performance cannot fully be understood after the fact. To citePeggy Phelan’s influential phrase (one that is often extracted from a muchmore complicated argument), ‘‘Performance’s only life is in the present.Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise partici-pate in the circulation of representations of representation; once it does so, itbecomes something other than performance.’’28 But these representations of

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representation—photographs, videos, films, audio scores—which for Phelandevolve into ‘‘something other than performance,’’ are still valuable forobject-based exhibition spaces, excised from their initial flow in present time,but still charged, perhaps nostalgically, by a connection to the energies ofliveness.

In addition to the growing demand for ticketed events, these annexa-tions of dance and performance into the collecting logic of a place likeMoMA or the Walker have material ramifications, not only for the choreog-raphers and theater practitioners, but also for scholars, other artists, andstudents who will have a more structured, yet arguably more limited, accessto these practices once they are ‘‘owned’’ by an institution. On the one hand,reperforming or recreating a piece might require a more stringent licensingprocess that includes a monetary charge, but, on the other hand, importanthistorical documents and archival items might be better safeguarded againstthe ravages of deterioration and overuse. After all, every art form is time-based in that each is subject to the slow destructions of physical decay andthe losses caused by failures of memory. These institutional experimentsforce an awareness of a fragile durationality that all art forms share.

The sweat stains on Cunningham’s dance costumes are a poignantreminder of some unresolvable contradictions regarding historicizing thelive event; any textile conservationist will tell you that sweat will eventuallyerode and compromise the fabric itself, yet it is an important testament tothe bodily effort of the performer. What is erased even as it is preserved?Some would argue that the museumification of performance is a betrayal ofits impulse to resist the commodification of art; others understand thatperformance has always sited itself within and among institutions of allkinds, and that it has, since its inception, been subject to circuits of market-ing and circulation.

Again, even if we can say that contemporary artists have gone past Les-sing, Reynolds, Greenberg, and Fried, their time/space conventions con-tinue in the ways that those artists understand themselves, not least in theways that they organize their work and are paid for it. There are substantialdiscrepancies with the monetary standards of remuneration for perfor-mance depending upon whether artists lodge their work in a museum ora theater or a dance space or a concert venue; whether they are representedby a gallery or by a talent agent; whether they get paid by the hour or bycommission; whether they sell documentation or secure a royalty contract.29

Beyond labor issues, such delineations around context also affect the orga-nization of reception—whether receivers expect to encounter the workfrom their seats or expect to walk around it, whether they know that theycan drop in any time to encounter the blow, or whether they know they haveto show up at a precise time to experience the blow by blow.


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Though this introduction has focused primarily on examples sited inthe United States and the United Kingdom, ‘‘Time Zones’’ in its entiretytakes place across many locations. The contributors to this issue take thecontexts of ‘‘time-based’’ art as their departure point. Each of the six anchor-ing essays derives in some way from a presentation given at an ARC confer-ence at Berkeley, and many of the contributors to the ‘‘Reflections onDurational Art’’ section were crucial collaborators in organizing theseevents. Across both the longer essays and the shorter reflections, durationemerges as an issue that ramifies differently across global spaces and disci-plinary locations. Such contexts are often decidedly political. Performancestudies scholar Andre Lepecki returns us to the work of Brazilian artist HelioOiticica, long touted as a prescient pioneer in cross-medium experimenta-tion. Rather than locating durationality only in his ‘‘performance’’ or‘‘dance’’ works, Lepecki finds living time—vivencia—in Oiticica’s relation-ship to the object world and, even more compellingly, to his sense of color,or ‘‘color-time.’’ Lepecki finds in Oiticica’s musings and practices a strikinglink to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, finding an enactment of ‘‘pureduration’’ that exceeds spatial parameters or what Lessing might have calledpainting’s ‘‘proper department.’’ For Lepecki, Oiticica’s formal gesture alsoanticipates and embodies a minoritarian politics, one that ‘‘queers’’ materi-ality from its position in the global South.

In ‘‘Archives, Performance, and Resistance in Uruguayan Art UnderDictatorship,’’ Andrea Giunta analyzes a 1983 installation by the artist Nel-bia Romero as it ‘‘proposed a reading of a past massacre in a contemporaryrepressive context.’’ Giunta argues that Romero’s use of archival materialsfrom 1831 (a moment in the violent colonization of Uruguay and the dec-imation of indigenous groups) made visible, via a kind of refraction, thecontemporary, and no less bloody, circumstances of the Uruguayan dicta-torship. The presence of projected, performing bodies, including theartist’s own female body, within the installation does not function as a simplerestaging of history, according to Giunta, but rather unsettles dominantnational memories as ‘‘the archive actualizes the past into the present.’’ Inaddition, she articulates how genealogies of performance in Uruguay, orwhat is called ‘‘placing the body,’’ unfolded simultaneously within protestmovements as well as within art and dance beginning in the 1960s.

Rebecca Schneider, in her self-reflexive essay, ‘‘What Happened; or,Finishing Live,’’ articulates some of the tensions, noted earlier, regardingthe preservation of performance and being disciplinarily ‘‘out of step.’’ Shenarrates her own thought process regarding a comment about the ‘‘patinallive,’’ tracing her own swerving thoughts and shuttling back and forthbetween moments in time as a way to reckon with ‘‘the intervals that interlaceacts and their aftermaths, otherwise imagined to be discrete.’’ Evocatively

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drawing on examples as varied as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and a dura-tional performance by Mona Hatoum, Schneider refuses Phelan’s assertionthat the residue or remainder of a performance is inert, reckoning insteadwith what she terms a complex ‘‘inter(in)animation’’ between a live event andits lifely materiality. In so doing, she richly theorizes how gaps, interruptions,and pauses inform not only how she understands performance but also howshe conceptualizes her own immediate context: that of writing an essay.

Wang Jing’s ‘‘Rethinking Affective Listening: The Case of China’s SoundPractice,’’ takes up both the issue of a national context—she focuses onChina and its emergent sound art movement—and the formation of distinct‘‘listening cultures.’’ In some of the art she describes, including Dajuin Yao’s1997 A Study on the Kinetics of Mandarin Tones, no audible sound is produced,and instead the work vibrates within the mind of viewers as they see, pro-jected on parallel screens, two written Chinese characters of whose namesevoke similar tones. Scrambling the static/durational distinction, Wangturns to Gilles Deleuze to elaborate upon the spatiality of time itself. Shedescribes various ‘‘sonorous situations’’ produced by Chinese sound artistsin which ‘‘still time’’ and ‘‘poetic space’’ resonate together.

Gu Yi explores a different network of contemporary practices in China,specifically focusing on the ‘‘peasant’’ in Chinese socialist history and asa figure of the durational experience of labor in a globalizing art world.Gu focuses on contemporary efforts to forge solidarity between a class ofcontemporary artists and a class of contemporary peasants, including workslike Song Dong’s Together with Migrants and Dancing with Peasants (bothworks from 2004) that challenged harmonious projections even as theybecame embroiled in their own wage-labor politics. Through these andother examples such as Cai Guo-Qiang’s ‘‘Peasant Da Vincis’’ (2010), Guargues that the Chinese peasant brings into high relief—and sometimescalls the bluff of—the politics of time-based art. While a contemporary artcontext might seek to endow the peasant with agency of action, it does so byrepressing a history of agency granted to the peasant under earlier socialistregimes.

The question of action under socialism receives new treatment inBojana Cvecic’s provocative essay on the work of BADco, a performancecollective based in Zagreb, Croatia. Working as a collective of choreogra-phers and dramaturges, BADco shows how the formal politics of time aredifferently addressed in a region of the world—‘‘Eastern Europe’’—that isstereotypically tagged as ‘‘behind,’’ ‘‘delayed,’’ or ‘‘blocked’’ in its progres-sive history, and whose citizens endure the charge of ‘‘laziness’’ as a postso-cialist projection. BADco’s time-based works thus strategically re-embodydelay and overtly perform and examine laziness as a choreographic proposi-tion. Cvecic is a trained philosopher and a practicing dramaturge—indeed,


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she is a dramaturge and teacher with Anne Teresa De Keersmaecker, an artistwho reappears throughout this volume. It is no wonder then that she posi-tions BADco’s art making as its own proximate and adventurous argument,adapting the concept of the ‘‘parallel slalom’’ to explore how the group asartists and she as a critic interpret the poetics and the postsocialist politics inand through art.

In a collection of shorter reflections, we asked colleagues at UC Berkeleyfrom many different academic departments (including film, theater/dance/performance studies, literature, rhetoric, history of art, and areastudies programs) to respond to the following question: ‘‘What does thephrase ‘time-based art’ mean to you? What are the central stakes, conven-tions, challenges, and opportunities of durational art in the contexts inwhich you work?’’ Collectively, they provide probing evaluations of a widerange of practices and contexts, including Mexican festivals and midwesternAmerican carnivals (Angela Marino), Syrian documentary films and the‘‘image-event’’ (Anneka Lenssen), bystander recordings of US police andstate harassment of black men (Jeffrey Skoller), and projected photographyby the Colombian artist Oscar Munoz (Natalia Brizuela).

Many of these writers focus on the unevenness of our neoliberal present,with its inequitable accelerations and drags, and contest the presumption thattime unfolds in the same way across the uneven formations of globalization.Winnie Wong looks to the unacknowledged ‘‘labor-time of painting’’ in worksthat are outsourced to Shenzhen’s Dafen village but conceptualized by inter-nationally known artists, reminding us that ‘‘time-based art’’ takes place‘‘against the backdrop of the massive globalization of artistic labor.’’ Parsinghow contemporaneity functions differently across recent concert, commer-cial, and non-Western dance spheres, SanSan Kwan notes that if ‘‘we localizeand delimit ‘contemporary’ as designating a coherent set of aesthetics thenwe relegate so many other forms as ‘not contemporary.’’’

In a related vein, Brizuela argues that formations of ‘‘contemporary art’’have eclipsed much current Latin American art and dampened its urgen-cies, concluding, ‘‘There is no time for History in the global contemporaryart world.’’ Allan deSouza, writing as a theorist and a practicing photogra-pher, discusses how his own work intervenes in the ideological constructionof precolonial ‘‘timelessness.’’ Many seek to complicate, or even reject, thenotion of time-based art: Weihong Bao returns us to Lessing as she discussesnew media and film in China, proclaiming the need for an understanding of‘‘technics’’ as we shift from duration to temporalization. Last, Suzanne Guer-lac contends with Bergson, photography, and Marcel Proust, returning us toquestions of time and space while resisting what Lessing would have called‘‘proper’’ departmentalization. Revisiting Lepecki’s echo of Bergson thatonly lived or concrete time exceeds spatial constraint, Guerlac inventively

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combines an array of unexpected sites, actions, and objects to demonstratewhat it means to take ‘‘duration seriously.’’

Indeed, together our interlocutors demonstrate that duration is seriousbusiness. Moreover, that seriousness depends upon a willingness to chal-lenge one’s own disciplinary conceptions of time and form, and to live withthe discomfort of syncopated encounter. The willingness to do so provokesrealizations of one’s own disciplined interdisciplinarity, as well as ourregional, nationalist, and globalized habits of assessing time and space,tradition and innovation, stasis and duration. In the end, ‘‘durational art’’is not a stable noun, much less a demarcated category, but a placeholder formarking gestures and actions that undo the contexts that house them.

N o t e s

1. For more on how some of these terms have been deployed, and come intoconflict, see Beth Hoffman, ‘‘The Time of Live Art,’’ in Histories and Practicesof Live Art, ed. Deirdre Heddon and Jennie Klein (London, 2012), 37–64.

2. See http://arts.berkeley.edu/category/video-archive/ to find documentationand video archives of ‘‘Curating People’’ (2011), ‘‘Making Time’’ (2012), ‘‘Tem-poral Shifts’’ (2013), ‘‘Spiraling Time’’ (2013), ‘‘Living Time’’ (2014), amongstother events in the series.

3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing et al., Selected Prose Works of G. E. Lessing (London,1889), 103.

4. Ibid., 91.5. Ibid.6. Joshua Reynolds, The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds . . . : Containing His Discourses,

Idlers, A Journey to Flanders and Holland, and His Commentary on Du Fresnoy’s Art ofPainting: To which is Prefixed An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author(Edinburgh, 1867), 32.

7. Ibid., 80.8. Clement Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ Partisan Review 7, no. 4

(July–August 1940), 296–310, reprinted in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock andAfter: The Critical Debate, 2nd ed. (London, 2000), 60–70.

9. Irving Babbitt, The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston,1924).

10. Greenberg, ‘‘Towards a Newer Laocoon,’’ in Frascina, Pollock and After, 66.11. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, 1993), 6.12. Ibid., 6.13. Donald Judd, ‘‘Specific Objects,’’ Arts Yearbook 8 (1965).14. Michael Fried, ‘‘Art and Objecthood,’’ Artforum 5 (June 1967): 12–23; reprinted in

Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley, 1995), 116–47.15. See Martin Puchner’s related argument in Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-

theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore, 2002), and Julia Jarcho, Writing the ModernStage: Theater Beyond Drama, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.

16. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York, 1977).17. Ibid., 5, 108, 114.


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http://arts.berkeley.edu/category/video-archive/

18. Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present (London, 1979).19. Later editions of this book begin in 1960 rather than in 1909 and do not

attempt a chronological overview of the sweep of the twentieth century; RosaleeGoldberg, Performance: Live Art Since the 1960s (New York, 1998).

20. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theater, trans. Karen Jurs-Mumby (London,2006).

21. Michael Kirby, ‘‘The New Theatre,’’ Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 2 (Winter1965): 22–43; Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadel-phia, 1985).

22. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-MediumCondition (London, 2000).

23. See our own respective thoughts on these issues in Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Work-ers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley, 2009), and Shannon Jack-son, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (London, 2011).

24. Cited in Rebecca Schneider, Theater and History (London, 2014), 71.25. For more on these conservation issues, see Abigail Sebaly, ‘‘Cold Storage and New

Brightness: The Merce Cunningham Acquisition at the Walker Art Center,’’Brooklyn Rail (December 10, 2011), http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/dance/cold-storage-and-new-brightness-the-merce-cunningham-acquisition-at-the-walker-art-center. Jonah Bokaer (former Cunningham dancer) and Walkercurator Darsie Alexander engaged in lively conversation about this issue at ARC’s‘‘Making Time’’ (2012).

26. Public Conversation, ‘‘Dance the Exhibition Form: Anne Teresa De Keersmae-ker, Xavier Le Roy, and Elena Filipovic,’’ WIELS: Brussels (March 22, 2015).

27. See, for instance, Claire Bishop, Radical Museology, or What’s ‘‘Contemporary’’ inMuseums of Contemporary Art? (London, 2013).

28. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York, 1993), 146.29. For more on issues of compensation for performers, see Sara Wookey, ‘‘Open

Letter to Artists,’’ The Performance Club, November 23, 2011, http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/open-letter-to-artists/.

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http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/12/dance/cold-storage-and-new-brightness-the-merce-cunningham-acquisition-at-the-walker-art-center



http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/open-letter-to-artists/

http://theperformanceclub.org/2011/11/open-letter-to-artists/

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