Repeat, fast-forward, rewind, pause, recycle, live, delay: these terms are part of the language we use to describe how temporality is manipulated in the contemporary world. Recent technological advances facilitate an unprecedented alteration, compression, and extension of time. These new possibilities coexist with a vision of history as fractured, contradictory, and subject to multiple interpretations.
The present display of contemporary art from the Museum’s collection explores some of the tensions embedded in recent experiences of time, as expressed in art made in the past few decades. These experiences include watching time pass, as in Andy Warhol’s Empire; marking, suspending, condensing, or elongating its flow, exemplified here by the work of Martin Creed or Jeff Koons; subjecting the creative process to time, as William Anastasi, Janine Antoni, and Robert Morris do; developing narratives based on cyclical, organic, or illogical models of time, as may be seen in the video work of Bill Viola and Pipilotti Rist; addressing history through the memory of oppressions, displacements, and alienation, as Carrie Mae Weems and Jane and Louise Wilson do; and considering how the past inflects the present, an experience suggested by the work of Shirazeh Houshiary and Gerhard Richter.
Out of Time is not organized chronologically; rather, it endeavors to draw connections across decades and across a variety of mediums, illustrating the interdisciplinary character of contemporary art. The history of contemporary art is in the process of being written, updated, and revised, and for this reason the presentation in the Contemporary Galleries changes at least once a year.
Organized by Joachim Pissarro, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and Eva Respini, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography, in consultation with Luis Enrique Pérez-Oramas, Adjunct Curator, Department of Drawings.
