Time Frame
PS1 June 25th - Sept 18th
Cory Archangel
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Roni Horn
Paul Pfeiffer
John Pilson
Thiago Rocha Pitta
Robert Smithson
Sugimoto
Andy Warhol
Exposed for the duration of the film they depict, Sugimoto's theatre series frame the white light of narrative in the architectural vernacular of different cinema settings. If these like all photographs are images of time, they are also condensations of the narrative journeys to which they refer.
Reversing that polarity is Thiago Rocha Pitta's 'Rio de Janeiro X Sao Paulo' a four-hour attenuation of the shuttle commute between the two cities. And if time is here revealed to be a fiction of great elasticity it is one that stretches across objects as well as images. Like Robert Smithson's 'Mirrored Vortex' with its play on the refractive indices of both time and space, Roni Horn's minimalist cast blocks provide discrete versions of similar types of experiences as they are commuted between the separate but non the less similar elements. Pairing and the mirroring of experience is also made visible in Felix Gonzalez Torres' Orpheus Twice with its allusion to Jean Cocteau's cinematic rendition of the Orpheus myth. Referring obliquely to the dialectics of site and non-site, of actual presence and its indexical equivalent, the twinned mirrors, like Horns blocks, make literal the intended pun on vision and its absence on sight and non-sight. In this sense both Cory Arcangel's 'Colors' and John Pilson's 'Dark Empire' are non-sights that frame the original - in Arcangel's case Dennis Hopper's 1988 film 'Colors' and Pilson's Warhol's 1964 film 'Empire' - in a time of their own making. 'Colors' keeps the soundtrack and dialogue of the original. Reading the visual script line by line the linear narrative of the original is rendered as a vertical abstraction told over a period of months not hours. John Pilson's film Dark Empire was shot during the 2003 blackout. An elegy to Warhol's famous dusk till dawn shot of the Empire State building, Pilson's slow fade to black sees the electrical acculturated skyline of the city disappear into the older crepuscular darkness of medieval gloom. The diurnal cycle is also the subject of both Warhol's "S leep' and Paul Pfeiffer's 'Burial at Sea' in which we see a molten sun endlessly dipping above and below the reflective shimmer of a distant horizon. As the camera tracks the sun so the horizontal time-line of the solar fix is de-stabilized and pitched into the throes of and endlessly looping temporal funeral. Framed in these ways time becomes not the stable entity of duration but rather the visual and sculptural presence of an abstraction understood through the compression and attenuation of what is better known as real time.