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.