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.

An important notice about changes this week (23 - 28 March)

Since Monday March 22 was a public holiday (and the JAG closed), the changes that would have been made today are being made on Tuesday 23 March, with some final addititions to the show taking place on Wednesday 24 March. The exhibition will remain open to the public while we work.

Two new works are being added to the exhibition in the next two days. The first is a data artwork by Tegan Bristow, which graphically represents various archives of taxonomical information sourced in the JAG annual reports. The second is an installation by Alexandra Makhlouf that interacts with and modifies prior exhibition material.

A great new addition worth seeing is James Sey's video installation Sublimation and Reversibility, which was installed last week.

An installation view of James Sey's Sublimation an Reversibility, a video projection and installtion that took painting x-rays from the JAG archives as its starting point.

If you are not interested in seeing works mid-installation, you might prefer toavoid the exhibition on Tuesday and Wednesday morning and visit instead from Wednesday afternoon onwards. Visitors are, however, welcome in the exhibition space at all times during gallery opening hours.

Regimented changes

For the four weeks of Time's Arrow's installation at the JAG, the show has been changing on a weekly basis according to a regimented program prescribed by Rodan Kane Hart's art new artwork for the show, Developments of Space. Rodan responded to the artists' brief with a work that would force weekly curatorial changes in the largest room of the exhibition by means of a moving line that causes a displacement of artworks as it gains ground in the room. The movement of this line is marked in the space with white insulation tape, and the displacing line moves two metres along the length of the wall every Monday.  In place of the displaced works, photographer Mikasa Sonnenberg is displaying photographs I have decided to respond to Rodan's work by removing other works each week, rather than moving and rehanging them as the line approaches. made this decision because I felt it would be more interesting to highlight how duration on a gallery wall carries with it an implicit value ascription. I have found this disciplined programme of removal difficult precisely because certain sequences of works that I felt were strong or that were popular with viewers had to be removed relatively early in the exhibition. The removal of William Kentridge's video Mine, particularly, made some people very grumpy. Picking a bit of vinyl text off the wall  letter by letter - a citation from Jacques Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind of which I am very fond - was almost heartbreaking. So far the line has spared any new works made for the show, but I am quietly dreading its arrival at Thenjiwe Nkosi's Gallery paintings and Alex Dodd's installation Making Room. It is hard to break the habit of thinking that certain works deserve more wall-time than others, that preservation and endurance are signs of importance.

This is what the exhibition looks like for now:

Serge Nitegeka's Equilibrium flees the approaching line.

Mikasa Sonnenberg's photodocumentation of the shrinking exhibition

A view of the northern-most end of the exhibition. On the left wall is Murray Kruger's Archiving Absence, text excerpts from a series of interviews with JAG librarian Jo Burger which will later be incorporated into a video documentary.

The three changes the exhibition has undergone so far have established the process of regular modification in the exhibition, and from now until the end of the month, while the regimented movement of Rodan's work will continue, other changes will be made in response to the exhibition's own progress, its public reception and curatorial difficulties, mistakes and successes. Regular updates and warnings of these changes will be posted on this blog from now on.

Some images

For those who are eager to see what the show is all about, but haven't yet managed the journey to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, here are some photographs taken by the excellent Simon Marcus.

 An installation view of the exhibition in week 1.

 

 Alex Dodd's installation Making Room, which uses works from the

JAG Collection, found objects and a text written by Dodd. 

 Thenjiwe Nkosi's three paintings Gallery 1 (1915), Gallery 1.1 (1940s)
and Gallery 1.2 (1980s)

A better view of Thenjiwe Nkosi's Gallery paintings

Alexander Opper's work

Accumulation #1 (approximately a century's worth of cornice dust from the Johannesburg Art Gallery)
(found dust on paper)

Phillip Raiford Johnson's Running Clock, a working digital stopwatch with flourescent tubes.
The clock runs in minutes and hours and is attached to a movement-sensor device that causes it to reset whenever someone walks past.

We are open for something that feels a lot like business, minus the money

  Alexander Opper, Negotiation, 2010, Site-specific installation – equal volumes of repositioned soil and lawn from the main courtyard of the Johannesburg Art Gallery and Joubert Park respectively . Image courtesy of the artist.

A huge thanks to everyone who came to the the opening of Time's Arrow at the JAG last night. We had a great crowd, enough wine, and plenty friends from the insect kingdom in the wings to help direct the party elsewhere after nightfall.

This time-based exhibibition has now begun, which means that curatorial changes will start taking place from next Monday, and every Monday thereafter, for the duration of the exhibition, works will be moved, added or removed from the show (please note that the JAG is closed on Mondays). Works to look out for in the coming weeks are James Sey's video installation Sublimation and Reversibility, which uses painting conservation x-rays from the JAG archives as a starting point for an examination of sublimation and sublimity in the formation of art and urban archives; a growing installation by Alexadra Makhlouf, which responds directly to works in the exhibition; and lots more. Watch this blog for updates and documentation of changes.

The work pictured above is Alexander Opper's land work Negotiation. For this work, Alex excavated three square metres of grass from Joubert Park and grafted it into the courtyard of the JAG to spell the word "PARK". The are dug out of the park was then filled with soil from the JAG courtyard to spell the word "Museum". See Alex's page (in the sidebar) for his persctive on this work, and on another work of his on the show, Accumulation #1: approximately a century's worth of cornice dust from the Johannesburg Art Gallery (a huge hit at the opening).

Stolen moments during installation

The exhibition is just about up, and looks good for a half-cooked something. Sunday is showtime, and more pictures and content will come after then.

 This is Serge Nitegeka installing his work Equilibrium
in the East Wing of the Johannesburg Art Gallery

Serge with Equilibrium again. In the backgroun you
can seeJane Alexander's Integration Programme
and Phillip Wilson-Steer's Lime Kiln (1887).

This is Thenjiwe Nkosi rearranging the display case from
the JAG's Foundation Collection room with some previously
un-displayed photographs and newspaper clippings
dug up in the JAG library archives.

Before the beginning

Welcome to the Time's Arrow blog. As this exhibition progresses towards its opening next Sunday, this blog will track its progress. It will also provide readers with information about the exhibition - press releases, details of curatorial changes, walkabouts, events, images, background information and some texts and quotes I just can't help but share. I will start adding this content over the next few days. Thanks for visiting, and don't forget to come to the opening at the Johannesburg Art Gallery next Sunday, February 21 2010, at 5pm.

 Yesterday and today we hung some historical and contemporary works, and whatever it is that comes between them, from the JAG collection.

Opening Sunday Feb 21, 2010 at 5pm