Time

It is May 2007. I am at the MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona) exhibition Un Teatro Sin Teatro (A Theatre Without Theatre). I watch films of events that took place when I was a child: Allan Kaprow’s Fluids (1967), where heavy blocks of ice continually threaten to dissolve as a wall is agonisingly built by the participants, pressing their foreheads to the unyielding surfaces, and a blow torch melts and joins the seams, after which the wall is lovingly hand scrubbed and textured into existence; Robert Whitman’s long vanished American Moon (1960) in the Reuben Gallery New York with its ‘very rough’ set of card and polythene, daubed paint, cloth and canvas making ‘layers of space’ continually revealed through the polythene, the figure on a swing sweeping suddenly and startlingly above the audience in the circular central enclosed space. Claes Oldenburg explains how Whitman has a ‘feel for slow time’ and can put you in a space and make it feel different, creating a claustrophic, intimate experience, opening up the space or closing it down ‘one way or another’. Judith Malina of the Living Theatre describes how her mininalist sets are brought about through lack of money not aesthetic principle and yet how the sparseness suits the work; how when we are on stage we are in a heightened state, responsive and alert—‘then I am responsible, aware’. Finally I stare at a video by Peter Friedl, Liberty City (2007). I am drawn to this sequence of a policeman being beaten up over and over again. I feel voyeuristic but am compelled to watch it to the end. Eventually I realise it is on an endless loop, the beating will never end, time has been stretched and I have been fooled. My mind is ever in the Schlemmer room on the second floor, where next to the photographs of Schlemmer as Musical Clown, and opposite the mounted production photographs including Feininger’s photograph of the white figure standing on stage amidst the taut white rope lines, ¹ and behind the glass cases of documents and published works, the space is dominated by the huge reconstruction of Hoop Dance (see Figure 4.1) on a stage at the end of the room. Periodically set in motion mechanically, its intriguing space, both centreless and multicentred, connects in my mind with the fluidity and materiality of Kaprow’s ice wall, with the expanding and contracting space of Whitman’s American Moon and its ‘slow time’; with the performer’s heightened sensibility on stage at the Living Theatre that Judith Malina identified and the minimalism of means she used; and finally with the sense of linear time slipping away from me in Friedl’s video. In all these there are pluralities of meaning and the uncertain contours of experience; yet they also appear to engage with form in a particularly rich and enigmatic way. This tension is exhilerating. Moreover the aesthetics are intimately connected to the material world from which and for which these artists forged their works, not a mystical ‘beyond’ which as Molina pointed out avoids the here and now reality.