Shortly after seeing Andy Warhol’s epic ‘Empire’ 1964, a silent black and white record of New York’s Empire State Building shot at twenty-four frames per second and projected, for eight-plus hours, at sixteen frames, filmmaker Jonas Mekas wrote of Warhol’s ‘celebrating our existence by slowing our perception’. Warhol’s minimal variation opened up time, feeding the illusion that we are seeing more: time appears distended as we watch. Warhol’s generosity here is on a par perhaps with that exercised in his multiple portraits screened on a single surface—the Elvises, or Marilyns--but now the tragic edge that underlay his redemptive gestures is more apparent. Writing on the 1964 Flower paintings in 1970, at a time when it was not certain Warhol had a practice with a future, John Coplans noted how their ‘flash of beauty…suddenly becomes tragic under the viewer’s gaze’. Warhol filmed the building from daylight to dark, mimicking the film image’s own passage into oblivion. Arrested in a flash of light, the image, like the landmark, passes into darkness.
‘Empire’ opened ‘Out of Time’, the Museum of Modern Art’s most recent re-installation of its Contemporary Galleries, a task undertaken as part of its ongoing revision of contemporary art. A show hung on the idea of ‘exploring some of the tensions in recent experiences of time’, the exhibition was more simply and correctly a survey of work from the past forty years loosely concerned with time. Included among the artists were Jeff Koons, William Anastasi, Vito Acconci, Janine Antoni, Robert Morris, Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Jane and Louise Wilson, Gerhard Richter, and Luc Tuymans, an impressive enough roster but the work included here generally lacked the phenomenological depth of a work