… 5 minutes later
KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany
‘… 5 minutes later’ at the KW Institute is ostensibly an exploration of the role of immediacy in the creative process. For the exhibition, the participating artists – the list includes Douglas Gordon, Ceal Floyer, Andreas Slominski, and Thomas Demand – have all created a single work in five minutes. The rigor of the premise invites questions as to what constitutes deliberation and preparation, and, crucially, what spontaneity and activity might look like in the gallery.
The result is work with a sense of playfulness and motion, as in Floyer’s Taking a Line for a 5 Minute Walk (all works 2008). In this elegant sculptural solution to the challenge set by the exhibition’s premise, Floyer’s white line meanders across the gallery floor and carves out a spatial expression of temporal delineation. Meanwhile, Sven Johne’s Stasifasching 1984 features a newspaper clipping that has been absentmindedly doodled on. Johne’s work lightly subverts the Romantic idea of artistic inspiration; at the very least, it implies that the inclinations of the artistic mind are not unlike our own.
Indeed, much of the work in ‘… 5 minutes later’ rapidly moves beyond the initial question of inspiration, jettisoning the basic schematic of creating a work in five minutes. (Almost all of the works appear to be the product of extended thought and preparation, and in some cases the constraint of the premise is barely noticeable.) Instead, the exhibition moves beyond a rigid sense of temporal delineation, and into a more fluid sense of time that is distinguished by relativity.
In particular, what permeates the exhibition is a concern with permanence, the flipside of the transience suggested by the five minutes proposed by the show. Gordon’s Around and About, a tattooed line across the neck of a gallery invigilator, is a surprisingly melancholy articulation of the indelibility that lurks beyond the seemingly immediate and the seemingly spontaneous.
Thomas Rentmeister’s installation of detritus, ranging from Q-tips and napkins to foam packing material and tampons, is a literal representation of how easily the disposable present is converted into a static and intransigent future. The most enduring works in the exhibition are less concerned with the process of creating work than with shifting the manner in which we experience time and duration. This is, perhaps, explicitly declared in Robert Barry’s contribution to the exhibition: a single sentence of wall text reads, ‘VISITORS CAN CONTEMPLATE FOR 5 MINUTES THE INVISIBLE ASPECTS OF THE VISUAL ART IN THE EXHIBITION’. One of these invisible aspects is undoubtedly that of permanence – both our anxiety in relation to its threat, and the power of the artwork that strives to achieve it.
Katie Kitamura
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