3 views of the Sydney basin across time.

All images screengrabs from the First Footprints website

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/firstfootprints/

Context and Time

Week 6, ADAD1002

UNSW | Art & Design, ADAD1002

Aims for Week Six

Examine how professional art and design practitioners
contextualise their concepts to ensure they are rigorous
and timely.
Locate the various contexts that inform your project.
Research other practitioners who have worked in this
context.
Think about how context shapes the way your work is
understood and approached. Analyse.

UNSW | Art & Design, ADAD1002

Keywords
social; position; relationships; politics;
status; frame; history; contemporary;
situation; movement; meaning; copies;
re-working; covers; remake;
recontextualise; juxtapose; temporality;
spatiality; public space; long-term
thinking; design futuring...

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Discussion
All concepts are shaped by their time and location. Being able to contextualise your ideas and
approaches is vital to developing a critical practice.

This is not just about finding your

influences, but understanding that there
are multiple narratives that exist
simultaneously. Creative practice assists
in locating, listening and responding to
these multiple channels.

Time as a context

Whats happening NOW?

Research popular examples, latest developments, contrasting approaches
and controversial issues relating to the problem you are researching

What is the DEEPER history of this problem/ phenomena?

What can we learn about how other humans across time and around the
world, have approached this problem, or aspects of the problem we are
researching?
Focus on the basic needs, desires and impulses that are driving the
issues you are researching - not just what is new. What can we learn
about the question we are investigating by studying how it has been
addressed throughout history?

Exhibition and display contexts

In his introduction to Inside the White Cube: An
Ideology of the Gallery Space by Brian ODoherty,
Thomas McEvilley writes:
It has been the special genius of our century to
investigate things in relation to their context, to come
to see the context as formative on the thing, and
finally, to see the context as a thing itself. In this
classic essay, first published as a series of three
articles in Artforum in 1976, Brian O'Doherty
discusses this turn toward context in twentieth
century art. He investigates, perhaps for the first
time, what the highly controlled context of the
modernist gallery does to the art object, what it does
to the viewing subject, and, in a crucial moment for
modernism, how the context devours the object,
becoming it.
Read more

Image: Elmgreen and Dragset, Powerless

Structures, Fig. 45 (Dug down gallery)
(1998), Wood, epoxy paint, halogen
spots, table, chair, 300 x 500 x 225 cm.
Installation view, Reykjavik, Iceland

Visualising context: mapping, genealogies, relations

Sydney-based artist Justin Trendall is concerned with the creation of small monuments and the construction
of histories. Part of Trendalls practice involves producing maps that experiment with ways of representing
linkages between history/memory and cultural identity.
In this video Trendall discusses how his work critiques the canon to expose the space between a personal
and official view of art history. [503]. Relating this back to Week 4s topic we could think of these works as
ways of representing particular, idiosyncratic ecologies.

Justin Trendall, One Is Art, 2014, screenprint on

fabric.

Context as site specificity / situatedness

How might the specific spatial conditions in which a creative work is experienced change or contribute
to its meaning? How do creative practitioners respond to sites to develop their work?
Heather and Ivan Morisons temporary public artwork, Journe des barricades, was installed on a central
city street in Wellington, New Zealand in 2008. The work acts as a rupture in the everyday comings and
goings of the city. In its barricade form, the sculpture might suggest associations with the history of
political actions and social unrest, but as a collection of discarded consumer products it may also bring to
mind questions about our environmental and economic future. In stark contrast to the sculpture's
grandiosity is its temporality - installed overnight between dusk Saturday and dawn Sunday, the work was
in situ for just 24 hours before 'disappearing' overnight. Read more.

Heather and Ivan Morison, Journe des barricades, Wellington, 14

December 2008. Right: installation process.

Changing contexts: Re-staging

Sydney-based artist (and ADAD1002 lecturer)

Diana Smith and artist Kelly Doley (Sunday School)
re-staged a lecture originally delivered by
American art critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard at
Sydney University in 1975.

Lippard's 1975 visit is now legendary. In reaching

almost mythical status, it is said to have
kick-started the Women's Art Movement and other
important feminist activities in Australia. For 'The
Lucy R. Lippard Lecture', Sunday School re-visits
this historic moment through re-enactment and a
discursive program of events held at Artspace.
Sunday School will examine the significance of
Lippard's visit through collecting a range of eye
witness accounts, memories, and stories from
those who were 'there'. Forty years on, this project
considers the legacy of feminism in Australia and
how it ghosts and overlaps with the contemporary
context.

Image: Sunday School at Artspace, July 2015

Historical context:
understanding the
present as informed
by multiple and
intersecting histories

Media archaeology, a current

trend in media arts research,
involves delving into past
technologies and processes to find
out how they might have influenced
our contemporary situation.

This often involves the investigation of obscure or obsolete devices and alternate histories.
In this video Professor Erkki Huhtamo shows his collection of pre-cinema devices. Huhtamo discusses how
his collecting was triggered by a kind of research question - what were the things that came before silent
cinema? This video also helps us think about how different collections and archives construct particular
understandings of the past and present:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks9tyaft7Gs [538]

Time and Contemporary Context

The anachronism of the Contemporary and indeed its

un-graspability are set out by a few important people. Albert
Einstein: in a letter to a family of his departed friend wrote:
For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction
between past, present and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion.
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agambens sets out his definition of
the contemporary: that a true contemporary holds his/her gaze
firmly on his/her time so as to perceive its darknessthat is, to
create figuration from sites otherwise in obscurity. That
darkness sets off other receptors not available in light: he
writes The absence of light activates a series of peripheral
cells in the retina called off-cells. When activated, these cells
produce the particular kinds of vision we call darkness.
Contemporariness is, a singular relationship with ones
own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time,
keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that
relationship with time that adheres to it, through a
disjunction and an anachronism.

Juan Snchez Cotan Still Life, Mid 17th Century, Oil

on Canvas

He takes from Fredrich Nietzcshe who stated the true

contemporary was untimely, and also the notebooks of
Rolande Barthes who wrote:
The contemporary artist gives figuration to the obscurity
of their time.

On Transdisciplinary and Connective Practices: listen to Dear

Radical Artist mp3 by critic Lane Ralyea with sound
effects/musicbyartist/writer Steve Reinke
https://soundcloud.com/baybface/dear-radical-artist.

Projects across time

In 1985 the American composer John Cage created ASLSP - a piece to be played as slow as
possible. Most performances of the work (originally for composed piano and modified in 1987 for
organ) range from 20 to 70 minutes. However an extreme interpretation is currently taking place at a
church in Halberstadt, Germany - one which began in 2001 and is scheduled to play until 2640 - a
total the duration of 639 years.
Listen to the October 5, 2013 note change + Read more
Listening to the note change hones our attention to the very perception of time. As an
intergenerational project the work also sparks questions about long-term thinking and how we might
design objects and situations for the future.

The purpose-built organ uses small sandbags to weigh down the keys. Right: the original score.

Time as Practice

Tehching Hsieh - One Year Performance 1980 1981 (Time Clock Piece), View
some documentation and Hsiehs comments on his work:
https://vimeo.com/16280427

Time and Space in

Fluxus Structures
Good John Cage is bad
John Cage, and only bad
John Cage is real John
Cage, for instance when
John was doing Electric
Circus Chess Game and
many musicians thought it
was bad but I really
enjoyed it because its like
eating sand.
-Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik, TV Fish, 2004, 2 aquariums, two 19" Samsung TVs model CT-5071 XVC,
fish rocks, one channel original Paik video on DVD, 1 DVD player, Dimensions variable.

Nam June Paik, Merce Cunningham, John Cage: Time and Space Concepts in Music and Visual Art.
Suggested viewing from 20min 10sec - 24min 35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_OfNSx0ykE

Time and Temporality

Hesse knew that her work would

deteriorate and expressed
sadness for those who collected
her work but also considered the
complexity of issues at play.
I feel a little guilty when people
want to buy it. I think they know
but I want to write them a letter
and say it's not going to last. I am
not sure what my stand on lasting
really is. Part of me feels that it's
superfluous, and if I need to use
rubber that is more important. Life
doesn't last; art doesn't last.

Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969, cheesecloth, latex, fibreglass

installation, Collection of the National Gallery of Australia

The Untimely

Artist Paul Thek best suits the Nietzschean definition of an

untimely artist. His interest in cybernetics, the body and
death and his experimentation with the body and the
abject do not look of their time.

Theks preoccupation with the character of

time was obsessive and explicit. The pyramid
as a symbol of historical and sacred time.
Paintings made on newspapers, the universal
medium of temporality, dramas and disasters
that one day stun us and fade away the next.
Holland Cotter, Theks most astute and
sympathetic critic, writes about the artist in
the early 70s in Rome, passing day after day
in fluid, memoryless drug time chemical
vacations cruising monuments and bridges
and baths seeking time-suspending sexual
encounters.
Ironically, Thek had this in common with his
enemies, the minimalists. In 1966, the artist
Robert Smithson described his friend Dan
Flavins monuments as objects in which both
past and future are placed into an objective
present Time breaks down into many times
A million years is contained in a second
(New Entropy)
The art writer and novelist Chris Kraus wrote
on Theks preoccupation with time:
Time is all anyone is ever left with. Theres
nothing pretty about the diaries Thek was
writing. Reading them this Friday evening in
Berlin made me understand that writing can
be bad and still be part of something good.
That art is really artifact, Exhibit A, Exhibit
B, of something else: a persons whole
experience and life. And that always there is
the chance that this will fail. That things will
not work out.

Paul Thek, Untitled (1965-66) (from the series Technological Reliquaries), at

Nothing But Time: Paul Thek Revisited 1964 1987, Pace Gallery London,
2013

Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia, Semiotext(e),

2000, pp 65-67 and 76-77.

Design futuring: Can we design back from the future? What are the
consequences and effects of our designs in time? How can we foster long-term
thinking in design?

Tony Fry
Tony Fry lecture: Futuring, the City & Sustainment - the Remaking of Design
https://vimeo.com/36145380 [Play from 606 to 1040]
Tony Frys book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice (2009) looks at design as a
world-shaping force rather than a process of producing objects or situations. In the opening of this
lecture (from about 6 mins in), Fry articulates how and why he has come to think about the future as
intrinsic to the question of design.

Thinking the Future

Amplified by political and social violence,

digital technologies have become not only
the midwives of history but also its (plastic)
surgeons.
Hito Steyerl, The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal
from Representation, 2011, eflux.

How do we talk about the future in current

practice?
There is an incredible speed that is now
afforded to art practices, their products and
images yet the enabling of such data flows,
cool invisible transfers of information, value,
and data are dependent on objects that are
very real and static.
One thing to think about is that digital waste
acts like any other in the physical world. In
fact it is the fastest growing waste industry:
130,000 computers were thrown out each
day in America in 2008.(1) An e-waste town
such as Guiyu, China, is a scene of illegality
and new poisons, e-waste being shipped
from America and plastics from computers
are burned to access the precious metals in
them by impoverished and at-risk workers.
(1) "Following The Trail Of Toxic E-Waste.", CBSNews.
(November 6, 2008) Accessed March 10, 2015.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/following-the-trail-of-toxice-waste/.

Guiyu, China, 2015

Of course, the trouble about any writings about the future: it is unknowable. We know what we
dont like about the present and why, which is why all manifestos are best at denunciation. As for
the future, we only have the certainty that what we do will have unintended consequences. Eric
Hobsbawm, at Manifesto Marathon, October 19, 2008

Suggested studio activities

Consider how your current research is contextualising your project. What

additional research do you need to do?

Assess your project from a variety of different time scales and design an
experiment to test a different temporality.

Re-stage or re-enact a creative work that you have researched for your
assessment. Document the piece in its new temporal and spatial context what has changed? What has stayed the same?

For next week (study week)

Reflect on the best way to present your research
documentation and final work/s on Tumblr. How do all
the elements relate to and contextualise one another?
Consider how you will curate (select, organise and edit)
your documentation to convey your project in the most
compelling and interesting way.
Formulate a draft of your concept statement. Reflect on
how this statement situates your project within a
contemporary and historical context.

UNSW | Art & Design, ADAD1002