[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 167, Issue 2

[Kate Brettkelly]

1. Maybe there is also such a thing as mountain time that's inhabited and
experienced differently by people attracted to mountains for the
sublime/universal time or as in Chiang's film, for the duration of survival
2. In this case, duration itself might be running still and flowing deep
but not in the sense of 'movement' or 'perspectival depth.'

With respect to Liz’s contributions, I’m so pleased this conversation has
touched on the work of Hou Hsiao Hsien - a filmmaker whose lengthy,
durational scenes has inspired my own research.

What fascinates me here is the intersection of multiple temporal vectors: A
personal, phenomenological experience of passage, a continuous reassessment
of authoritative historical narratives and momentous encounters with
seemingly universal timescales that go beyond human experience. Works of
art allow us viewers to variously “inhabit” these temporal vectors by
focusing experience on a specific set of aesthetic conditions.

The NZ-based art collective Local Time have achieve this by focusing
aesthetic experience on the act of drinking water. They serve exhibition
visitors glasses of fresh spring water drawn from the Horotiu stream – a
significant historical resource for indigenous Maori peoples of Auckland –
that has been paved over and now runs beneath the roads of Auckland’s
central business district. Local Time approach this as a gesture of
hospitality, but I’m wondering if visual arts such as this offer a special
means of implicating viewers/experiencers in durational passages that are
‘unknown’ to them. Is there such thing as subversive experience of
duration? How might this relate to the survival of subjugated histories and
natural phenomena that have been “paved over” by dominant ideologies? So
many thoughts!

- Kate

On Thu, 8 Nov 2018 at 15:00, Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Elizabeth Wijaya wrote  "On Kate's point on deep time and the danger of
> obscuring/forgetting
> historical subjugation and social inequality,  maybe there is also such a
> thing as mountain time that's inhabited and experienced differently by
> people attracted to mountains for the sublime/universal time or as in
> Chiang's film, for the duration of survival."
>
> Something I've been discussing with artists and students over the past
> couple of months are the traversals and transversals of duration as
> cross-inhabited by differing populations and by differing epistemologies.
> While nature frequently has been figured vis à vis the "sublime" or the
> "universal," its understanding remains contingent on the populations
> inhabiting it.  Just as "understanding" itself carries the footprint of
> historically fraught philosophical traditions.  For Liz's cinematic
> characters, habitation runs contrary to the inhibitions of constrained
> passage and labor.  Flight itself is both liberatory and terroristic
> depending on whether the look goes backward or forward.  But in this case,
> the artistic engine still might remain to be tied to "projection" in
> relation to "distance" or "distancing."  I'm wondering whether this isn't a
> peculiarly cinematic condition, one that signals the historical discussion
> of the gaze in all of its complexities.  Might Chiang's cinematography and
> still off something different?
>
> Along the lines of plastic arts, I'm also wondering whether the
> counter-to-deep time of indigenous art might not signal something different
> both in apparatus and epistemology? In this case, duration itself might be
> running still and flowing deep but not in the sense of 'movement' or
> 'perspectival depth.'  Just a thought provoked by Kate and Liz's posts.
>
> Tim
>
> Timothy Murray
> Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
> http://cca.cornell.edu
> Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
> http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
> Professor of Comparative Literature and English
>
> B-1 West Sibley Hall
> Cornell University
> Ithaca, New York 14853
>
>
>
> On 11/7/18, 1:16 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on
> behalf of Elizabeth Wijaya" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> on behalf of ew388 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>
>     ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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