Temporal Practice

I enjoyed hearing about some of the artists that use time as a medium or element in their practice. I've never considered this concept before and it is a really appealing one. I found I was drawn to artworks that point out natural phenomena like Hans Haacke and his 1965 'Condensation Cube' and Walter de Maria's 'Lightning Field', Both involve time in some way.


Hans Haacke - Condensation Cube, 1965

Walter de Maria - Lightning Field, 1977

The question was raised whether 'Lightning Field' only exists as art when lightening is present, or indeed if it is art at all: In my view it is art, and I think it always is because I don't think it is completely reliant on the visual aesthetic of the lightening bolts... It is about the concept, the anticipation, the way it makes the viewer change their behaviour and look to the sky to search for something that may never come (in this way I think it easy to interpret it as a metaphor for religion, spirituality etc but this interests me less). Walter de Maria's use of the whole landscape in the work I find hugely exciting, and it is something I really want to investigate further. I think I consider this in my own practice to some extent, involving the gallery space and outside environments in installations, but I intend to develop it still more.
My initial idea in reaction to the brief is to show one of my maquettes decomposing or losing its form over a period of time, such as the 'tentacles' of the cardboard 'spider' falling down from their positions. I have been thinking about Erno-Erik Raitanen's 'Cotton Candy Works' and how it disintegrates throughout the day. I have thought about tacking lengths of string or pieces of cardboard to the ceiling in a cluster, and then perhaps recording them gradually falling down or just documenting the end result: I quite like the idea of there being a missing time period, in which it is quite clear what has happened by the result, but the viewer is made to imagine something that is not presented to them ...as with Rauschenberg and Cage's 'Tyre Print', 1953.