This is the time (and this is the record of the time)* gathers together nine artists who differ from one another in terms of age and geographical origin. They range from Michael Dean, a young British artist who recently began to show in official venues, to Tehching Hsieh, a Chinese-born American performance artist who was working from the 70s up until 1999, and though he's nearly unknown in Italy, is regarded as a "master" by Marina Abramovič. They present their work for the very first time to an Italian audience, as does Paul Hendrikse.
The title of the exhibition is an extreme synthesis of its contents. On one hand, there are works that show the passing of time while in progress, and on the other hand, works that preserve its trace. More explicitly, processes as they progress are shown together with their graphic, video, and audio-recorded documentation. From this point of view, we can consider the exhibition as a group of metronomes: some of them still beat time, each with a different velocity - the rhythmic unit, i.e. the beat, can be five seconds, ten minutes, four days, or two weeks long (these are the actual cycles of some of the selected works); others are run down, and the rhythm they'd been beating can be seen on the displays. (The resemblance of this image to Muro del tempo, the historic work by Enrico Castellani, is not entirely coincidental). And yet this is a simplification because things are more ambivalent and complicated. Video and sound recordings do echo the past, but they're also operative presences; they beat in accordance with the spectators' time with their loops, as well as they have been beating in the time of their authors. The work by Tehching Hsieh, for instance, was created in the space of a whole year but is presented as a six-minute long video. And, moreover, other works show time as the outcome of a manual job, whose dynamics can only be roughly reconstructed.
On an immediate level, the beating of time is committed to a simple, tangible, and objective means: a voice counting from 1 to 100 (Luca Vitone, Dominique Petitgand), the slow running out of a light box (Massimo Grimaldi), the transit of a cloud in front of a mountain (Paul Hendrikse), the gesture of folding paper (Michael Dean) and that of piercing it with a pin (Ettore Favini). Since time is a subject of capital importance, though, every little thing ends up with having a symbolic potential and an existentialist tone. A roll of thermosensitive paper, which slowly darkens and turns from white to black (Albin Karlsson) immediately evokes the cycle of day to night and its non-reversibility. The attempt to outline the fleeting shadow of a pencil on paper (Goran Petercol) concerns the impossibility to stop time. And so on up to works that unequivocally express mortality and obsolescence.
In so far as it indulges in an emotional inflection, which rarely happens, the exhibition is gloomy. There are no hourglasses, nor withered flowers, nor any other codified symbol of vanitas here, and yet such associations may arise spontaneously in the spectator's mind. The wish is that the works, both separately and as a group, would act as an anti-entropic emotional mechanism; that the pleasure of art would counterbalance and even overcome the eventual displeasure at its content.
This was Giacomo Leopardi's persuasion almost two centuries ago, and this is our persuasion now.

Simone Menegoi

*: The title of the exhibition comes from a verse of the song From the Air by Laurie Anderson (from the album Big Science, 1982).

We thank the following galleries for their valuable help: Alessandro De March, Milano; Emi Fontana, Milano; gb agency, Parigi; Gregor Podnar, Lubiana; Suzy Shammah, Milano; Zero?, Milano. Special thanks to Renato Alpegiani.