Moving Pictures, Moving People

Modern advances in technology have allowed artists to push the boundaries of art further than ever before. The old guard may question: Is photography Art? Are videos Art? What would these doubters think of an artist who combines both of those media? For over a decade, the Belgian artist David Claerbout has blended both still and moving images. His work has been shown in many prominent museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Fortunately, Cantabridgians don’t have to travel to Paris; a survey of his innovative work is currently on display at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT through April 6, 2008.

The exhibit features seven of Claerbout’s works, ranging in duration from three and a half minutes to nearly fourteen hours. While few people will have fourteen hours to devote to the exhibition, viewers should plan to devote a good deal of time with the works. One of his explicit artistic purposes is to explore the passage of time, which can only be understood after the viewer passes time with Claerbout’s art.

One of the earliest and most fascinating installations is the 1998 piece “Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia.” For the piece, Claerbout selected a black-and-white photograph from the early 1930s portraying the opening of a kindergarten in Italy. In the original photograph, children, frozen in time, stand in a garden with two trees in their midst. But Claerbout replaced the still trees with superimposed footage of two trees gently blowing in the wind, creating a striking clash between the still and the moving that is made even more powerful by its reversal of real life, in which the children would be the active element and the trees relatively motionless. By juxtaposing the fixed children and the moving trees, “Kindergarten Antonio Sant’Elia” underscores the fleetingness of human life by opposing it to the ageless-ness of nature. The message is made even stonger by the use of a historic photograph; the children, aged 5 in 1932, would now be white-haired grandparents of 80 years. The trees, on the other hand, would have grown, but would not have changed significantly.

Another powerful piece is “Vietnam, 1967, near Duc Pho.” Claerbout selected a photograph from the Vietnam War in which a plane, approximately forty feet above the ground, has been hit by friendly fire. He then traveled to Vietnam, found the spot where the photograph was taken, and filmed the sun’s movement over the course of a day. After condensing the change in light into three and a half minutes, Claerbout superimposed it on the photo. The viewer sees time stand still for the doomed plane while days pass within minutes, prolonging the inevitable crash.

Arguably, the most ambitious work is 2004’s “Bordeaux Piece.” Claerbout had three actors repeat a ten minute sequence seventy times a day for a number of days, with the only major difference between the sequences being the time of day. He then strung seventy-five of these segments together to create a work that is nearly fourteen hours long. Over time, the actors gradually recede out of the viewer’s mind, while the background eventually becomes the focus, inverting the viewer’s normal perception of people and their environment.

The most recent work in the exhibition is “Sections of a Happy Moment,” a sequence of 180 black-and-white photographs capturing a single moment. A Chinese family stands in a sunlit square, while a few of the children throw a ball that hangs in air. The perspectives of the shots range greatly, as some of the shots are from twenty stories high on a nearby building while others are just of individual faces. The vast number of perspectives allows the viewer to see and understand the many layers of interaction between the family members. Once again, Claerbout extends a fleeting moment in time into a lengthy study.

Claerbout’s art gives a great deal of insight into situations and elements that normally seemed mundane or simple. His presentation of the passage of time also shows how it adds significant perspective to any situation. In the end, seeing the exhibition manipulates time in one unexpected way: the powerful experience leaves a long-lasting impression that can’t be easily shaken.