Living in the moment : duration now and then

This essay explores duration as the notion of time passing there and then in the life of the performer/spectator. It reprises the Bergsonian account of duration (as less a measure of time, and more a function of the feeling of time passing) to suggest that Bergson’s work has a fresh charge. The construction of time in digital culture – to do with simultaneity and synthesis, where an accumulating past is held within a continually reforming present – provides points of connection with Bergson’s interest in experience as a succession of moments lived in the present. The essay takes a longer historical view, looking at accounts of renaissance painting, nineteenth-century melodrama and contemporary performance art, along with works and ideas by Abramović, Barthes, Beckett, and Cage, to examine relations between (hetero)chronology, duration, spectatorship and experience. It argues that in many instances duration in artworks is formed of proliferated moments, whose effects are to emphasize aspects of actuality by putting us in the face of the lived experience of action and consequence, and our own awareness of this (and our own) particular lived experience. Performance itself has a further charge, for its (re)presentations are encountered chronologically, precisely in and through a passage of time inhabited by both the work and the spectator/participant. The essay argues that duration is nonetheless always cultural; and is expressed and experienced in relation to a particular historical moment. The value of duration varies, whether it is a particular length of time, a passage for endurance, a field for ethical contention or a commoditized span of engagement. In a contemporary performance economy that privileges encounter and experience, duration provides the substrate for extensive and realisable kinds of living in the moment

A Study of Curation, Location and Temporality in Contemporary Art Fairs

This PhD by Published Work critically analyses a series of five exhibitions curated by the author at London Art Fair between 2016-2020, which form the portfolio of projects within this thesis. Each exhibition explored notions of temporality and site, focusing on how these concepts are reframed and problematised by being examined within a contemporary art fair. The motivation for the projects stemmed from researching curated art shows from recent years that addressed notions of time and finding a lack of analysis in relation to how these might be affected by their location, which suggested a new field of enquiry. To address this area, the curatorial aim of each exhibition within the portfolio sought to test how differing conceptions of temporality – whether an artwork might be considered permanent or ephemeral, finished or unfinished, occurring now or in the past – might impact upon and be impacted by ideas of site – such as whether an artwork is physical or virtual, located within the art fair or situated elsewhere. The methodology that guided the portfolio of projects was transversal and brought together analytical systems from three differing areas of intellectual enquiry, combining a rhizomatic approach, which emphasised the interconnected nature of the exhibitions, with methods derived from phenomenology (to promote a questioning of received definitions relating to location and time) and institutional critique (to critically engage with the art fair setting). The outcomes from the portfolio support the contention that curatorial practice, temporality and site are not discrete elements within a contemporary art fair environment, but rather forces that are wholly interdependent. Additionally, the physical and temporal boundaries of the exhibited artworks, and the exhibition as a whole, might be considered problematic to define with any fixity. This PhD thesis proposes a twofold contribution to new knowledge as a result: firstly, that a fuller appreciation of the interaction between curation, setting and temporality within curated exhibitions at contemporary art fairs requires a conceptualisation of these three factors as being a single entity; secondly, that this entity can encompass, without contradiction, multiple definitions of both location and temporality

Movement, Time, Technology and Art

This book explores the ways in which artists use technology to create different perceptions of time in art in order to reflect on contemporary relationships to technology