Pictures

Here is a selection of images of Time's Arrow, taken throughout its duration.

(above left and right, and elow centre) Myer Taub devised the performance Three Acts to Florence for the closing event of Time's Arrow: Live Readings of the JAG Collection on April 11. Taub played the deranged ghost of Clement Greenberg (Photos: Simon Marcus).

 

(below) Taub with performer Patricia Boyer, playing Florence.

(above) An installation view of Time's Arrow in week 1 (photo: Simon Marcus)

(above) Two views of the exhibition in week 6 (photos: Simon Marcus)

(above) By week 6 Serge Alain Nitegeka's Equilibrium had moved almost to the very end of the room. 

Pictures coming soon...

Just a note to let you know that more pictures of the exhibition in its entirety are coming soon. I will upload them shortly after May 3. Until then, I'm in Harare and the images are still being edited (in the most innocent way).
Come again soon!

The End

Time's Arrow came down on April 19 after a busy schedule of changes during its two-month run at the Johannesburg Art Gallery.Alexander Opper's earth work Negotiation (pictured to the left and below), grew closed and wilted, the main exhibition hall expelled its contents in accordance with Rodan Kane Hart's Work Developments of Space, and Murray Kruger's Archiving Absence - a cumulative documentary on JAG's archival practice - is now in full swing.

I'm not sure how many people saw the entire exhibition, besides a group of high school pupils who visit the gallery almost daily, and the security staff who switched works on and off every day. That's how I wanted it, and so I am relatively happy. Time's Arrow was intended as an experiment in exhibition temporality, an attempt to move away from the conventions of exhibition-viewing that tie the perception of art to fixed structures of time and space amd from the assumption that an exhibition can ever be mastered by its viewer.

Alexandra Makhlouf's untitled installation in the 

reading room.

The project has had some interesting off-shoots, which will develop in the months to come. Since the perennial question of the relevance of the fence between the JAG and Joubert Park was raised at the closing discussion on Sunday April 11, we have decided to form a "fence committee" from those participants in the discussion who felt that they would like to think more about the fence and perhaps ultimately find a way of transforming it into a less prohibitive feature.  Watch this blog for the fence committee's progress.




Myer Taub will continue to develop a series of performances around the history of the JAG and its public spaces, which he developed in three contiguous performances called Three Acts to Florence, made for the closing of Time's Arrow.

Towards the end of the year, the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre and JAG will co-host a colloquium on the histoy and possible futures of art and archival practice in Johannesburg.

Only When it Rains

On Friday April 9, Myer Taub conducted an"invisible" performance within the grounds of the JAG and in Joubert Park. This is the first of three related performances that foreground the relationships between the JAG's history and its engagements of different publics in the present. In Only When It Rains, Taub, disguised in a luminous yellow protective suit and a mask, embarked on a journey from the JAG buildings to the Joubert Park fountain. However, he was intercepted along the way by a group of children who proceded to direct his actions. They were interested in showing him 'their' Joubert Park, and took him to play on the jungle gym, to look at the "Weather Stone" (a stone whose surface regularly changes pre-empting changes in the weather) and to watch a chess match on the Joubert Park public chess boards.

Here are some photographs of Only When it Rains:
 

Closing event on April 11

On April 11 at 3pm, the JAG will host a closing event for Time's Arrow featuring performances by Myer Taub and a public  roundtable discussion.

Here is the flyer for a little more information about the performances (click on it to view it larger):

Week 5's changes: some views

Week 5 is the second week in which major changes to the exhibition took place in this week, all of the works from the JAG collection that remained in the exhibition from their installation right at the beginning of the project were removed and replaced with a selection of works and archival material that probe the possibilities of loss, erasure and reversal as archival fuctions. This phase of the exhibition features two stolen paintings from the JAG collection: Pienture 6 - 59  by Pierre Solages (which was stolen around 1990 and turned up on a Christies auction in London in 1997) and the Studio El Greco painting St Thomas, which was cut out of its frame (displayed in the exhibition) in 2002.

Surrounding these works is a nest of written material gleaned from the JAG archives - newspaper clippings, letters between former JAG staff members, Christies and police investigators and internal JAG reports. It's interesting reading. What I have found troubling, though, is how few visitors to the exhibition bother with text when it is displayed alongside pictures. They head straight for the pictures. Of course, reading text is widely thought to be more work than looking at pictures, but I think this tendency points to habits of looking in galleries: we tend to consume pictures without thinking of the possibilities of looking through them or around them. We don't doubt them enough.

Anyway, here are some more views of the exhibition in its present state. Next change: April 6.

An installation view of Time's Arrow in week 5-6. 

In the distance, that's James Sey's video installation Submlimation and Reversibility. 

 

Each week Serge-Alain Nitegeka's work Equilibrium has been fleeing the

encroaching erasing line stipulated by Rodan-Kane Hart's work Developments of Space.

 This and the two pictures below are of an installation in progress by Alexandra Makhlouf. The artist began this work as an interaction with the books on the reading table, which were originally part of Chaaya Dubashi's installation Snoop. As the work progressed, she introduced a selection of novels which she felt resonated with the themes of the exhibition and is using material fromboth lots of books to create a growing bookscape in one corner of the exhibition.

Below are Makhlouf's modified copies of Samuel Beckett's Molloy and Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium.

Curatorial appraisal: March 24 at 9pm

On March 24 at 9pm, I went to the JAG, with a bag of pencils, charcoal, tape and some Handy Andy, to execute a curatorial appraisal of the exhibition thus far. Finding my intentions of maintaining the order of the exhibition in spite of weekly changes thwarted by various factors, understaffing at JAG probably being the most effective of these, I set out to appraise the exhibition as a whole and look frankly at its shortcomings (and try to make something of them).I wanted this appraisal to have some manifestation in the exhibition spaces, but I didn't want it to adopt any of the textual forms that are proper to the exhibition  and are already present in it, coding it as a museum exhibition. So I rummaged in my bag and picked the charcoal and decided to find the margins of the exhibition, metaphorical or real, and write, by hand, in those.

Within a traditional museum exhibition, which is more-or-less what Time's Arrow started out as, the wall spaces between pictures, captions and standard vinyl wall texts are treated as at once sacred and invisible. Almost no one spends any amount of time examining the bits of wall between works, unless there is something wrong with them, and in the latter case, curators generally hope that if nothing can be done about the grotty walls, no one will notice them. I decided that these bits of wall would be my margins to start out with, and I went about marking all the places in which the purity of this space had been disrupted by a screw left in the wall from a removed picture or a pencil line marking the height of a painting.

Then  it occurred to me that the wall space below the dado rails is very seldom used in exhibitions at JAG (as it is well below eye-level), and in this sense it is properly marginal. I devised an autodialogue which would give readers some insight into my earlier circling activity, and transcribed that in the space below the dado rail.

As Rodan Kane Hart's work makes more wall space available for the rest of the exhibition, I will add questions and answers to this text.