Duero

In the 20th century, the definition of art, and with it our understanding of the "artist" as a cultural producer, was exposed to numerous transformations. One of the key factors for these receptive shifts in and out of the cultural field has since been the increasing proximity of art and economy. Art has become part of a marketing mix, and as any other cultural and social sector, it is determined by trends, ideological forces, and social values//////////////////////// Art doesn't just move, bewilder or fascinate the viewer with the subject matter it is conveying but also through the way and manner of communication. Seduction techniques taken from cinema and mass media are often jump-started with universal themes that everyone can relate to: the yearning for change and rebellion, the fascination of beauty, as well as the loss of youth, and the futile search for self-realization and individual happiness.///////////////////////////////// Debates about the relationship of art to politics permeate the history of modern art, but during times of war and intense political conflict, they appear more pressing and raise a number of questions for practicing artists: What does art have to do with politics? Should political conflict inform artistic production and the content of artwork? What power does art have to make social and political change?The contemporary trailer, advertising and music clip industry confronts people with a density and speed that has never been seen before. Short films that have the same emotional quality as feature films but last only a few minutes are now enjoying a boom on the Internet as well. Visitors to museum exhibitions are confronted with a variety of video and film booths, which always produces the same pattern of behavior: the viewer enters the room, joining the film at minute 4 or 5, only to become anxious at the thought of all the works left to see, and thus leaving at minute 11 at the very latest in order to rush to the next film. The film may be eighteen minutes long and chronologically structured, but it remains unseen///////////////////// Does the precinct of the black box draw a line of incommunicability between works of art?////////////////// Do we suffer amnesia passing from one room to another, able only to understand discrete blocks of experience, unable to link more than one temporal event?These are problems for curators, for not only do we arrange individual objects and images in an exhibition, we direct the attention of viewers through the installation. Through the progressive arrangement and juxtaposition of artifacts, we presume to control the movements of the viewers and ultimately bring them to the disclosure of the “meaning” of the exhibition – which is never a predetermined thesis but derives from the display of objects and images themselves – although, realistically, we know we never totally direct the viewer. This process takes time traced through the movement of the viewer through space but is of another order than the temporality of projections. How then do we arrange spatial sequences of video projections and organize blocks of time for an audience’s perception? Given the changes in artistic practice that have foregrounded video and film, it is no longer possible to segregate time-based work in separate programs in a space apart from the exhibition. Thus, the example of film programmers will not help us: their curatorial practice is no less articulated; moreover, we are still talking about durational works that do not just succeed each other temporally – as they do in film programs – but coexist in the same exhibition space. Video projection demands that we organize time-images, not just wall-hung images or objects in space. Have we understood the implications of the change that video projections offer us? *********************** Obviously not, since we still think, as evidenced by curatorial practice, in spatial terms. We are oblivious to how substantial these changes are, since they are disguised in audience dismissal. We are unaware that we are witnessing a new species, not just genre, of work. The new concept of duration that thus derives must change our understanding of art and curating with it. Let us examine some of these changes by way of an analogy. When some artists abandoned single-channel video for video projection, the image was not merely enlarged, although the bad press video projection has received is partly due to many artists merely translating, not transforming, the image through the medium of projection. The switch from monitor to screen may be comparable to that of painting from easel to wall and, thus, would demand consequent changes in our perception.***************