Week 19 - Episode 101 - The Arrow Through Time

Podcast Transcript

Last week we looked at time, and it seems wholly appropriate to move on to arrows, especially since I spent most of the weekend reading and trying to understand Carlo Rovelli’s mind-blowing book “The Order of Time”. 

Be warned: this book will collapse all your current ideas about time and reality - and I’m only halfway through so I can’t yet say what they’ll be replaced with…but it is definitely a thrilling ride. 

Time’s arrow is the (if I’m correct, as yet unproven) conjecture that time isn’t symmetrical; that you can only go in one direction. 

Well this week we’re going to focus on what has become a widely accepted symbol of direction: the arrow. 

Although maybe not quite as enigmatic as time, there is plenty to uncover when it comes to arrows. 

As an object, they are ancient.  The oldest found stone-tipped projectiles date back to c. 64,000 years ago. 

As a symbol, they are surprisingly young. Other than a fascinating article by Robert Finkel, I haven’t been able to find much on the history of arrows as directional devices (if you know more, do let me know), but it seems they were first introduced in print in the 18th century. 

Isn’t that astonishing? If you’d have dropped me off at some Roman ruins and told me to look for arrow signs I would have happily obliged - but apparently there aren’t any. Romans used images of hand or feet to indicate directions. 

What seems perfectly natural and obvious to us, to indicate direction using an arrow, was, back then, a brand new idea. 

Those first arrows in print by the way still had their fletching, but lost them in the 19th century. 

And nowadays we don’t even need a shaft anymore: a simple triangle suffices to give us a sense of direction. 

I went on a quick arrow-quest in my local area and found lots of arrows. They are so ‘normal’ that we hardly notice them. We simply do as we’re told whenever a directional triangle appears. 

The arrow - once a moving object itself - now moves multitudes in the proper directions at airports, in and around football stadiums, on very busy roads. 

I’ll be looking at arrows all this week, in art as well as in daily life, and I suggest you do the same. 

How many arrows do you encounter during the day? And what do they make you do? 

I’d love to see what arrows look like in your part of the world - so do share them using the hashtag #kramerseye on instagram. 

Enjoy your arrow-hunting, and I’ll be back tomorrow, with more on arrows and 15th century skimpy underwear 

Week 18 - Episode 100 - Federico Pietrella and the Essence of Time

Podcast Transcript

Today is May 31st, 2019 and This is Episode 100, quite the milestone, so it couldn’t be more fitting that all week we are looking at time. 

I for one can’t believe I’ve created 100 short podcasts on art, design, photography and looking. 

It has been so much fun researching and creating these, and I look forward to creating many, many more. 

Today seems the perfect occasion to dive further into time itself:

What is time? 

Seriously, take a moment to ask yourself this question. Pause the podcast. Think about it. What do you think time is?

Some years ago, my daughter asked me this question and I had a really hard time answering it. 

I think I came up with something like ‘something you need to be able to measure change’ - but that didn’t satisfy her at all. 

Sure, you need it to measure change, but what IS it? 

What is this magical measurement? What is its essence?

I couldn’t answer that. And to my relief, after some research, I found out that no one can. 

There is no agreement on the nature of time. Just on how we measure and use it. 

Isn’t it astonishing? We can’t really specify what this thing is that rules our lives. 

But maybe we can show it.

Italian Artist Federico Pietrella is an artists whose works is built out of time. Literally. 

He uses a date stamp and acrylic paint to masterfully ‘paint’ images of daily life. 

People. Plants. Clouds. 

It takes up to two months to create his paintings, and he changes the stamp every day he works on the painting. 

When it is done, we have something amazing: an image portraying time itself.

His monochromes are mesmerising - once you zoom in they show you how, and when, the artist’s hand moved. 

They show you time itself.

And I think we should love time, even if we feel we never have enough of it.  

If everything stays exactly the same, if the hand of the clock doesn’t move, there is no time.

The desire to stop time then is futile - it’s a desire for nothing. For a complete vacuum. 

Without time, there is no next. 

No tomorrow. 

No new podcast. 

Tonight, I’ll use my time to celebrate - and I’ll be back on Monday with podcast 101, and a fresh theme. 

Week 18 - Episode 99 - Capturing the Passing of Time

Today I’m looking at something completely inevitable - the passing of time. 

In a way this has always been a subject in art - many a grandiose tomb or portrait painting attempts to stop time.

And yet. 

And yet…we do, now have power over the passing of time. 

Or at least, we can make it visible in an instant. Which makes for a lovely paradox. 

A photograph can use long exposure to capture time passing and make it visible in a split second. Magical. 

German photographer Michael Wesely has specialised in long exposure photography, and created an amazing body of work. 

Take his self portrait for example, which I’m looking at right now. I see a blurred image of a man moving his head slightly from left to right, resulting in two pairs of eyes and glasses.

If you’re used to taking snapshots this one would go straight into the bin. But this isn’t supposed to be a sharp portrait of someone’s face. It’s a portrait of five minutes of someone’s life, which is something completely different. And in a way, it can tell us maybe even more about the sitter than a standard portrait would.

From these it’s a logical step to his flower still lifes, for which he photographed flower bouquets for exposures around a week. It’s quite amazing to see them blooming, wilting, dying, all in one, still image. 

These are the most explicit memento mori ’s I’ve ever seen - much more effective than the picture of a skull or rotted fruit you’ll generally see in vanitas paintings. 

And for those of you who think this might be quite an easy thing to accomplish: think again. It’s easy enough to achieve in multiple exposures, but not in one single one. 

If you use a normal camera this will never work, your photograph will be quite overexposed before any flower has wilted. 

I can still imagine making something like the wilting flowers in a very dark room, using lots of neutral density films on my camera, but Wesely most famous projects are impossible to imitate. 

He took multiple year (yes, YEAR) exposures of construction sites, like Potsdamer Platz in Berlin or the renovation of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

This is incredible work. When you look at one of these pictures, you’re actually looking at a collection of moments of several years in one image. Mind-boggling. 

In Wesely’s own words: 

“It’s a shock to see a picture that’s collected so much time - so many things happen and the entire picture is a huge accumulation of time and it’s hard to digest.”

“Time is creating AND erasing at the same time on the picture“

Wesely builds his own large camera’s to accomplish these multi-year projects and hasn’t yet disclosed how he manages to create these stunning cityscapes. 

I find them mesmerising and magical, both on a visual and a conceptual level. 

And what about this image of tourists on a bridge in Venice. Here he is not only playing with time, but also with the act of looking. We are looking at people looking at Venice for a couple of minutes. In capturing the passing of time, he is slowing us down to look - and to think about the act of looking. 

We don’t need to argue about the question whether a photograph is a ’true’ depiction of reality, it never can be. But if there is such a thing as truth in photography, then maybe Wesely’s multiple year exposures come very close to it. 

What I’m taking away from this is an increased awareness of the complicated relation between photography and time. Of our ability to capture change. And I’m definitely tempted to start playing with longer exposures and see where that leads me. 

I hope you’ll do the same, and I’ll be back tomorrow, with another episode on Time.  

Week 18 - Episode 98 - On Kawara, Beyonce, and Being There

***Podcast transcript***

Today I’m focusing on marking time. On saying ‘I was here’. 

If time moves on relentlessly, how can we get a hold of it? 

How can we tame our fear of being washed away, of our existence being meaningless?

By making a mark. 

And the artist who devoted his life on making marks, and remarks, on time itself is On Kawara.

Day after day, year after year, he produced his day paintings. Deceptively simple canvases consisting of a monochrome background and the day’s date painted in white letters which look so perfect you think they’ve been stencilled or made by a machine. 

Time plays a role in most of Kawara’s other work as well. 

The ‘I got up’ postcards which he sent for over 12 years bear a stamp stating ‘I got up’ and the time he got up at. 

And the ‘I am still alive’ telegrams are exactly that: telegrams he sent stating ‘I am still alive’. 

So what’s going on here? 

Kawara is making his mark on time, on history, within extreme constraints. He uses rigour and discipline, repetition and rules, to defeat death. 

Almost every day he ‘uses’ his art to confirm his existence. And in doing so, he confirms it not only for that day, but for posterity. 

If you think this is some weird gimmick, think again. 

It took him hours to produce a single day painting. If he didn’t finish it on the day, he destroyed it. But on some days he produced more than one. 

He produced more than 3,000 day paintings, taking his practice with him wherever he went, and adapting the language to the country he created the painting in. After a while, he started creating boxes to put the paintings in and lining them with a pages from that day’s newspaper. 

This is not a vacuous conceptual gesture. 

This kind of consistent effort is an act of devotion, prayer almost. 

 It is a continuous effort to ward off mortality.

Looking at one of his paintings you see the man who painted it, on a particular day. He uses the way we specify a certain day in time as an invocation.  As we wee it, read it, he lives, again. 

On Kawara made his mark. 

And this made me think of Beyonce’s song, I was here. If you don’t know it look for it on YouTube - I can’t share it here for copyright reasons. 

This song, which was used for a very successful UN campaign on World Humanitarian Day, is all about the impact our lives can have on the world. 

In saying, or rather, singing ‘I was here’, she states ‘My existence mattered, I made a change’ - I made my mark. 

Beyonce’s song is much more morally charged - it’s about making your mark in a positive sense, making the world a better place. 

Kawara’s work is ever so neutral. 

But he too, was here. And made a difference. 

Today, I will be thinking about how marking time could impact my life and art practice - and I will ponder on what will be my way of saying ‘I was here’. 

I hope this podcast will inspire you to do the same - and I’ll be back tomorrow, with more on time.