The Times of Art

The last three decades have witnessed a large increase in moving image artworks, particularly in exhibitions like the Venice Biennale, documenta, etc., but not only. The concept of repetition has played an important role in the production and the reception of these works. It has also taken many forms. Notable examples of the centrality and variety include Francis Alÿs’ work with the concepts of rehearsal and re-enactment as variations of repetition and Stan Douglas’ work with combinatorial mechanisms in works like Inconsolable Memories (2005), where repetitions of a different order and scale simultaneously constitute and conceal one another.

Not least amongst the forms that repetition has taken in contemporary moving image art is that of cyclical repetition in time as embodied in the mechanism of continuous looping that almost always characterizes the display of these works. Continuous looping and the modes of reception (of the artwork) that it affords tend to undermine the evental character of contemporary moving image art qua time-based art. On the one hand, it makes the work available at ‘all’ times; on the other hand, but related to the first, it opens up the relations between the images that make up the sequence that is being repeated to all manner of reconfigurations, so that any image could come before and after any other image. As such, its ubiquity in the gallery or museum environment raises a number of questions concerning the borders of the work of art and the imaginary of the “full” artwork, the concepts of time and historicity, the art space as non-space and looped time-based artworks as a point of departure of thinking non-time and recent attempts at theorizing what has been called ‘art-based time’.

Considered proposals may engage, but need not be limited to, themes such as:

• Repetition and (in) art and (the experience of) duration;
• Non-places and non-times, the disarticulation of time and space in gallery and museum environments;
• Time and history, the tension between revolutionary concepts of history and traditional conceptions of time;
• The limits of the work of art, engagement with the infinite and timelessness;
• The distributive unity of the work of art and the imaginary constitution of the “full” artwork;
• The everyday experience of time and the experience of time in time-based (particularly moving image) artworks/exhibitions of time-based (particularly moving image) art;
• The relationship between technology, medium-specificity, or lack thereof, and time in contemporary moving image art;
• Contemporary moving image art as a point of departure for thinking problems of temporality of contemporary art more generally.

The conference “The Times of Art,” to be held in the National Gallery inTirana, Albania on June 6-8, 2014, and will be accompanied by an exhibition.

Those interested in submitting a proposal are kindly requested to send a 2 paragraph abstract to jonida [at] departmentofeagles [dot] org and vincent [at] departmentofeagles [dot] org before December 6, 2013.