Capturing time and motion

A new exhibit at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork asks us to consider the vital connections between drawing and film and also the critical issue of time

IN THE flickering, grainy video, a man is drawing on the back of a boy, as the boy attempts to trace the same lines on a piece of paper in front of him. The man is Dennis Oppenheim, and the boy is his son, Erik. The video, made in 1971, is one of the most famous works of the artist, who died last year. Oppenheim described it as being about father and son looking both forward and back: “I am drawing, therefore, through him . . . Because Erik is my offspring and we share similar biological ingredients [. . .] In a sense I make contact with a past state.”

Two-Stage Transfer Drawing, is, like all genuinely successful art works, about a great deal more than a single idea, and the various meanings of this small-scale video are at the heart of the questions and thoughts that make Motion Capture, at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork such an excellent exhibition. Exploring the connections between drawing and film might seem like the type of intellectual conceit that curators love, and the gallery-going public cheerfully ignore in their quest to see art that actually moves them, but here, curatorial intent and visual satisfaction come together.

Both drawing and film are, after all, about time, and time is a critical issue. The average length of time we spend looking at art is getting shorter. In the 1990s, research shows we gave a painting thirty seconds. Now it’s down to four, with an extra ten seconds added on for looking at the labels, and although averages can be misleading, this shortening time even applies to the most famous paintings in the world: the Mona Lisa gets fifteen seconds of visitor attention in the Louvre.

Drawings and film represent time in different ways: a drawing is the accumulation of gestures, it is the time spent creating it, a period of building up, and, in the case of William Kentridge’s work in Motion Capture, also rubbing back to create the image. Yet drawing seems to represent a single frozen moment, when the image is caught and held forever.

Cleverly chosen to disrupt this notion, Henri Matisse’s drawings Dessins: Themes et Variations, 1943, are like a series of frames in an animation, alive on the pages. Pierre Bismuth’s movie-stills photographs reverse this. Both Sophia Loren and Greta Garbo are caught in all their celluloid beauty, framed in the perfection of stillness, like Snow White in her glass coffin. But the artist has traced the hand movements of each actress, in marker pen over the image. Frozen perfection is an illusion, life happens in the movements, the messy gestures that impart meaning and emotion.

Brian Fay’s work has explored the question of time in both painting and film. Using x-ray technology, he has exposed and re-drawn the cracks in the pigments of famous paintings, and then painstakingly drawn them, to show time’s effects on art. In this exhibition he turns his attention to Buster Keaton films from the 1920s and 1930s. Revealing the scratches, flecks and imperfections that grain the film stock, Fay builds up a compelling portrait of the relentless erosion of time on both art and humanity.

This sense is echoed in Tacita Dean’s film, Still Life, 2009, in which the artist shows us the traces left in the studio of painter Giorgio Morandi. Using an old-fashioned 16mm film projector, the sound of the projector whirring and clicking, and the dust motes and marks on the surface of the film combine to create an uneasy balance between the indelible nature of the marks that have outlasted the artist (Morandi), and the fleeting fragility of this record of their preservation.

There is so much more in this exhibition too: William Kentridge’s Drawing for ‘What Will Come’ (Fly II), 2007, is a still-image installation, that animates as you walk around it, underlining the fact that the other key element of the time of an artwork is the time we bring to look at it, coupled with the time that has gone into creating our own aesthetic and emotional likes and dislikes. Alice Maher’s Flora, 2009, is a constantly morphing video animation of fantastical drawings. Ailbhe Ní Bhriain shows haunting videos that mark time’s eroding effects, while Susan Morris creates large inkjet images showing traces of the artist’s movement in a space. These ghostly, almost indecipherable lines mock the monumentality of the images, implying that what we leave behind us may, in the end, be not very much at all.

All these explorations add up to something greater than meditations on time. Oppenheim’s video is also about the fundamental impulse for and meaning of art: that restless quest expressed in so many different ways – to try to create the perfect communication of idea, image and meaning; to enable someone else, someone quite separate, even if it is your own son, to actually feel what you are feeling, and to see again what you have seen with your eyes and in your mind. So, when we go into a gallery and find that described, the very least we can do is give it some more of our precious time.

Motion Capture, curated by Ed Krèma and Matt Packer, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, until November 4. glucksman.org