Out-of-Sync
The Paradoxes of Time
17 February–22 May 2011
Artists
Manon de Boer, David Claerbout,
Tony Conrad, Valie Export,
Dan Graham, David Lamelas,
Marco Godinho, Laurent Montaron,
Bruce Nauman, Anri Sala, Hiroshi Sugimoto
Curators
Christophe Gallois, Marie-Noëlle Farcy, Clément Minighetti
The time-related figures of non-synchrony, disjunction and delay play a significant part in works produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their development went hand-in-hand with the rise of the moving image in the visual arts, marked by the emergence of video and the growing use of film by artists, together with the busy dialogue struck up between the various art disciplines, focusing in particular on questions of time and process. The Out-of-Sync exhibition brings together a series of key works from that period, linked, dialogue-like, with more recent works illustrating the topicality of this question in contemporary artistic practices.
The matter of recording is central to the show. By way of straightforward techniques, the works on view in Out-of-Sync highlight the way the recording of time and its recreation may give rise to unconventional temporal forms. The installation Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) by Dan Graham is emblematic of this approach: using a video system which retransmits a picture of the exhibition area with a lapse of a few seconds, it offers us a perception of an “extended present time”. A similar time-frame is conjured up by Laurent Montaron’s Melancholia (2005): taking the form of a Space-Echo a musical analogue device designed to produce echo and reverberation effects displayed like a bas-relief in a pierced niche at the base of a wall, the work presents our eye with the ever-changing loops produced by its magnetic tape.
Another important aspect of the exhibition, underscored by the title Out-of-Sync indicating a discrepancy or lapse between sound and image is the place taken up in it by the sonic and musical fields. Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham have regularly compared the dimension of time in their early works with the musical output of composers like Steve Reich, whose “phasing” technique, based on the superposition of several identical lines of sound played at slightly differing speeds, foreshadows the use of a time delay in pieces like Bruce Nauman’s Lip Sync (1969). This interest in complex forms of time possibly suggested by the musical fields occurs, in particular, in the activities of Manon de Boer, several of whose films take as their point of departure musical works such as John Cage’s 4’33″ and Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Solo Violin Sz. 117, as well as in works by Anri Sala, whose video diptych After Three Minutes (2007) plays with the clash between the beat of a cymbal lit by a stroboscopic light and the frequencies peculiar to video recording.
Event in the context of the exhibition
Performance Time by David Lamelas on Sundays at 4pm, with the participation of the audience. (On the condition of a sufficient number of participants)
Address and information
Mudam Luxembourg
Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean
3, Park Dräi Eechelen, L-1499 Luxembourg
t +352 45 37 85 1, info@mudam.lu, www.mudam.lu
Opening hours
Wednesday–Friday: 11am–8pm. Saturday–Monday: 11am–6pm. Tuesday closed
Press contact
Valerio D’Alimonte, presse@mudam.lu, +352 45 37 85 633
*Image above:
Collection Frac Alsace, Sélestat
© Laurent Montaron, courtesy galerie schleicher+lange, Paris.
