…there’s no time to make art, there’s no time to make art, there’s no time to make art…

I think of these paintings’ sentiment as both comic and tragic.

Tragic because they’re too close to the bone of so many artists’ private experience and of broader problems in the culture at large, not just the art world.

The comic part is emphasized by the fact that I did a series of 8 nearly identical paintings and several drawings in which “there’s no time to make art” is visually reiterated three times per image. The more of them are exhibited in a sequence, the more the comic element emerges from obsessive repetition of this thought (something like John Cage’s “I have Nothing to say but I am saying it,” here “there’s no time to make art but I am making art that’s saying it.”).

The effects of the paintings’ technique have tragic-comic aspects as well. The words appear eerily trapped inside a white ground. The paintings are made through a process that is quick and yet produces an effect similar to traditional wall fresco. The paintings are produced by the seepage through layers of white gesso of repeated inscriptions of the words “there’s no time to make art.” Handwriting, an old technology of language communication, is captured within the language of an old technology of imaging, fresco painting, while the repetition from one work to the next speaks to, if not in, the language of mechanical reproduction. The seepage through the layers of white gesso occurs because of the effect of dye-based inks: by the same token, the ink’s chemistry suggests that eventually the paintings may fade, potentially leaving no trace.

The effect of a lack of time on art and thought is also the subject of some recent critical writings, including “The Art of Nonconformist Criticality.”

Excerpts:

“Let’s take the question of time. If you examine Artforum, the actual magazine, not the trope, you see that it’s as predictably scheduled as a minuet. If it’s September it must season preview month, if it is December it must be Best of …., if it’s January it must be First Takes and Winter Preview, there’s the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, major retrospectives are planned years in advance as are the articles to be published just before the show. Anything that is not specifically about something that is occurring in the market in that bracketed present tense of first takes and best of but may nevertheless have import for art practice cannot appear. Speculative and associative thinking that isn’t market oriented is not going to have much play. There is no time for second thoughts, afterthoughts, thought.
Time is also repressed at the level of space. Time is money, money is time and space. You can’t run long, you are given word counts. … Word counts can be good for writers: there is an important formal challenge in having to zero in on what you really must say. However there is a limit to the effectiveness of that logic. Some things must take the time they must take in order for the full complexity of a point of view to be articulated.”

&

What I would want to give my students, if I had a magic wand:
I’d give the gift of time, for wandering around the Met and MoMA until you could feel that you could make everything in there, time to work or not work in your studio, time to study history and critical theory, time to just take a walk, not just because you are going somewhere but to experience the city or land you live in.”

 “The Art of Nonconformist Criticality,” a February 14, 2006 lecture sponsored by the MFA in Art Criticism and Writing at SVA, can be accessed and downloaded at: http://www.wps1.org/include/shows/living_history.html#schor

“The Art of Nonconformist Criticality” will be included in a new collection of essays by Mira Schor, forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2009.

These works are included in Air Kissing: An Exhibition Of Contemporary Art About The Art World, curated by Sasha Archibald. The exhibition is currently at Momenta Art 359 Bedford Street, between S. 4th and S. 5th, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through December 17.


Look for a more comprehensive website at this url in 2008.