 حسناً، يمكننا أن نبدأ. شكراً جميعاً لكم all for coming. أعتقد أنك لا تريد أن ترغب at all. أعتقد أن هؤلاء who didn't come because there are not many people here. أعتقد أنك لا ترغب at all this evening although we are podcasting the events so some people rely on the ability of watching the lecture afterwards but it's never like being here so thank you for coming again and shame on us. أعتقد أنك لا ترغب at all this evening although we are podcasting the events so some people rely on the ability of watching the lecture afterwards but it's never like being here so thank you for coming again and shame on us. أنت قمت بعمل رئيسي على رئيسي في فرنسي في العام 19 سنة مهمة جيدة ولكن then he moved from working on the 19th century and also after teaching at universities during his research in the United States and then in Britain he moved to working on contemporary art and very contemporary actually because now we'll be in the very very contemporary forms of art so Marcus as you probably read from his description on the posters teaches presently at the Sospice Institute of Art and at Goldsmiths, I mean University of London our colleagues at Goldsmith has published in I mean dozens of articles so over 60 articles in various reviews and journals and the topic today is I mean you see it has a very puzzling title and globalization and time would make you think that it's some lecture I don't know the sociology of globalization but then the subtitle and the fact that he's an art historian really gets it rather puzzling and I'll just in a way of introducing what he'll be saying but he will discuss because he's sent me some short abstract the slow movement, you know so we'll learn things, I'm speaking as an ignorant here and precisely this reaction against this acceleration of time that is at the very heart and core of globalization and I also regret that I can hardly see students even from my own course on globalization but we are very much in a talk and there are quite a few we are very much in the topic here so thank you very much Marcus for coming and thank you all for coming and welcome Marcus with me thank you thank you Jilbert for a very generous introduction so in this lecture I'm going to be talking about video art globalization and time more particularly I want to talk about the effects of globalization on our experiences and our understanding of time and about the use of video as a means of tracking and exploring those effects in museums and galleries today and we see more and more video work and of course video and film are unlike most other artistic media in that they have a temporal dimension a video or film unfolds over time so a work in film or video asks us to stop and watch and wait until the work is over it commands and fills our attention over a period of time and I should say immediately that my own interest in this topic started in about 2005 in fact it started when I went to see a show called Time Zones at Tate Modern it was the first show at the Tate consisting only of film and video and it was very explicitly international in scope so the works in the show were made in locations across the world in Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia and various other countries and I thought I would show just one work right at the beginning of my lecture or a still from one work that was in the show this is a piece from 1999 it's called Zocalo after the square here in Mexico City it's also known as the Plaza de la Constitución and around this square are various government buildings there's the Supreme Court, the City Hall, the National Palace all of them bordered on this square the square has also seen many demonstrations so it plays a crucial and rather complex role in the recent history of Mexico now here in this work which incidentally lasts 12 hours it's a single take, single 12 hour take and when you see it what draws your attention is the people who are standing in the shadow of the flagpole people walk around the square and many people as in this still here stop for a while to enjoy the shade of this shadow cast by the flagpole so here Alice is he's effectively tracking what is an impromptu human sundial and in doing so he's crossing the time of history the time of the Zocalo the flagpole, the demonstrations and so on with the time of the everyday the time of quotidian experience so the show at the take left me wondering can video, can video art illuminate the changes that globalization has brought to our experience or our experiences of time now before I talk about specific artists and artworks and the answers they give to that question I want to make a few fairly obvious comments on a video and on how video organizes our impressions of time and space in my view the temporality of video has three dimensions you have the duration and the pace of the video you have the temporality of the events that are described in the video and then there's television time the pacey uninterrupted time of television of total flow it's often called the total flow of television clearly television together with commercial film and video games television is a central pillar of modern culture so necessarily it colors our approach to the moving image today you could say that video art carries within it carries television culture as a kind of phantom structure within it now video is also a very attractive medium for artists who travel and of course today most artists many artists travel constantly artists travel more than before to study, to attend residencies to participate in shows and biennials in faraway places and for many of these artists the camcorder and a computer with editing software on it now take the place of a fixed studio in part because they're easily transportable and as critics keep pointing out video is the medium of choice at biennials at these mega shows that have become such important fixtures in the now global art circuits in other words the globalization of the art world and the rise of video art are mutually reinforcing trends video is a medium that has a privileged connection with globalization now I'd like to step back for a minute and think about the larger stakes here what does it mean to look at the temporalities of the global isn't time experienced in broadly the same way from place to place and from time to time well the short answer to that is of course no clock time is a relatively recent invention it's the result of the rise of industrial capitalism and the availability from the beginning of the 19th century of cheapish time pieces it would seem that earlier time was in general understood in more clearly experiential terms so many historians have argued starting with E.P. Thompson in his famous article on time and work discipline which was published in 1967 prior to the 19th century according to Thompson and others time was parceled out according to agricultural cycles and according to the events of the religious calendar different periods were seen as having different meanings and uses and those meanings and uses varied from place to place today on the other hand we tend to think of time as empty in itself as a measurable dimension of experience that itself exists independently of the experiences that fill it we tend to think of time as essentially unvarying in texture in density, in pace and so on we take this conception of time for granted but we do well to remember not only that it's a relatively modern conception but also that it has clear drawbacks that it comes at a cost and the cost of our understanding of this modern understanding of time was clear, it was clear to other figures working in the 60s like the situationist Guy Debord who spoke of abstract irreversible time pointing out that time is now seen as resembling money it's abstract and exchangeable we buy and sell blocks of time package holidays for instance that's the example he gives another example would be the minutes per month we buy on our mobile phones time has become a commodity time is money according to the old maxim time is money and for Debord this wasn't a cliche but a crucial insight into modern society more recently the cultural geographer David Harvey spoke in fairly similar times of time as abstract and homogenous pointing out that the rise of capitalism required the very careful coordination of complex activities in different locations in other words it required the synchronization of the sourcing of raw materials the production of finished goods and the distribution of those goods to distant markets to give you just one example of how far we've come before 1883 a train traveling from Washington DC to San Francisco passed through more than 200 time zones the Pennsylvania Railroad for instance operated by Philadelphia time which differed from New York time by 5 minutes so industrialization necessitated the harmonization of all such local temporalities and as Harvey stated as Harvey emphasized this process of harmonization required a new understanding of time the understanding that time was universal and measurable more recently Harvey and others have pointed out that the processes of globalization are underpinned by new technologies that allow high speed transport and communications globalization relies on quick transactions and movements over large distances and those transactions and movements are made possible by various technological developments starting with the cybernetic revolution this is what he calls time-space compression today we can travel and communicate rapidly over great distances and so expect to accomplish ever more in the same blocks of time and as the French philosopher Silvian Agasinsky has pointed out globalization has harmonized the rhythms and temporalities of different states and regions it's brought large areas of the globe interline with western notions of time that's to say with productive clock time Agasinsky goes on to argue that one effective resistance to the current order of time is to spend waste or give time to let it pass to use it unproductively her book her book is titled time passing modernity and nostalgia it was published in 2000 and it's in my view a little glib but it's worth mentioning for two reasons because it's been widely read in the art world and secondly because it's one of a very large number of recent books that have presented time as a battleground in the struggle to resist global corporatism and its effects I'll mention just a few of the other books you will probably have come across some of them Carl Honore's in praise of slow is one Tom Hodgkinson's How to be Idle is another Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves Chris Moran's Hardly Working and most famously Corrine Meyer's Bonjour Paris are others Bonjour Paris was translated in English as Hello Laziness all of these books counsel against working too hard like Agasinsky the authors enjoin us to waste time Maya an employee of the French energy conglomerate EDF got into trouble which isn't surprising with chapter headings like Business Culture Maya and passages about how to waste time at work and get away with it the energy her employers tried to impose disciplinary action and failed now I mention all this to press home the point that time is a crucial stake in important cultural and political battles you might also consider the recent emergence of time work balance as a political issue in this country the debate in France over the introduction and then the partial repeal the 35 hour working week the growing concern in Japan over the incident of that's to say death from overwork or the overtime disputes they erupt on a regular basis in companies around the globe those those disputes are nothing new of course they echo battles between labor and capital in the 19th century over the efforts of the managers to extend the working day through the introduction for instance for artificial lighting or other battles still earlier battles over the observation of Saint Monday I don't know whether you've heard of Saint Monday in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and into the 19th century artisans were for the most part paid at the end of the week so come Monday many still had money in their pockets and so stayed away from work and that's that's what was once called Saint Monday now video operating in time can obviously insinuate itself into these debates that was the founding premise of the show I mentioned earlier Time Zones the curators clearly saw new temporalities as a crucial dimension of globalization and video as a means of highlighting exploring and possibly challenging those temporalities as this show demonstrated it's easy to lapse into a facile celebration of the slow and I'm going to give a couple of examples starting with this piece now here when this is shown it lasts for 10 minutes and you see virtually nothing changes it's a static shot it was done in Jakarta and in the foreground you see a cemetery this is where the wife of Sokarno Indonesia's first post-independence president is buried she's buried in this cemetery now the film was shown at 10 minute intervals so for 10 minutes you would see nothing on the screen and then you would see this film which would last for 10 minutes but there would be you would see nothing move or almost nothing move every once in a while you would see someone walk between the rows of tombstones so very clearly the artists here forced their viewers to adjust the pace of their viewing experience their mode of attention given that it was shown at these 10 minute intervals you couldn't just walk in watch a couple of minutes and walk out again as people so often do in shows featuring video arts you had to wait for a while to see footage that was short and framed to exclude virtually all traces of movement now in the dialectic of enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer speak of film as calling on the quick reflexes of men and women who were used to working with machines in their eyes film and they were thinking of Hollywood film of course film facilitated the internalization of the economic system the slowness here in this work on the other hand can be seen as offering a model of attention that stands in opposition to the very rapid cadences of both commercial film and TV and the modern workplace now this film clearly shows two spheres one the foreground symbolically representing the temporalities of nature and the nation given that Sokhana's wife is buried here the other the tower blocks in the background clearly representing the accelerated tempo of global business it shows that the two exist side by side that the local is penetrated by the global and vice versa having said that the static camera the near-emotional screenings are all significant the film is organized around these binary terms the slow and the fast the local and the global but it's shot and framed to favor one side of the equation plainly presenting its own slowness as a vindicating reflection of local cadences local concerns the piece is non-immersive our attention in watching it is initially guided by movement but there are few movements and what movements there are turn out to be unscripted so the tendency inculcated by TV to read movement as directing meaning is frustrated in fact the piece comes across a little bit as a kind of animated photograph and the artist the work of Derek Enderoy is often seen as painterly so why work in film why not make paintings or photographs instead well presumably because film brings with it the expectation of movement quick plotting changing camera angles and so on it's by frustrating those expectations that the piece makes its slowness resonate as it does that it fills its slowness with meaning but there's something troubling to me about their symbolism their pitting of the cemetery against the office block it's a little facile the cemetery is a place of refuge the trees as offering a natural counterpoint to the concrete jungle that's springing up in the distance these are neoromantic cliches a similarly romantic vision is put forward in this work which consists of a continuous live feed of an 11th century Benedictine monastery in Baden-Württemberg here the image when you see this piece and I have a feeling that it's viewable over the internet when you see it the image a new image is uploaded every 4 seconds so it sort of shivers every 4 seconds and you see the trees moving in the wind and that's about it again this piece like the last one doesn't fill and monopolize the senses it's non immersive the focus here is on the cycles of nature and devotion but they're not visible to the naked eye the monastery here fulfills a similar role to the symbolic role to the symmetry in the Dereke and the Roy piece it points to the time horizons of a pre-modern age when the temporalities of nature and mankind were more closely attuned slowness here is presented as curative and I want to quote something Steyler himself said about this piece in an interview I wanted this is Steyler speaking I wanted viewers to consider how they experience time we're all running around all the time I wanted to make people feel aware end of quote but this is to skirt the issue of the medium which surely gives this piece a very particular slant and one that may not be in keeping with the curative tempo of rural or monastic life as webcams aren't generally pointed at largely motionless vistas and their footage isn't normally blown up to fill a wall as this is in the gallery the viewer here is as likely to marvel at the technical novelty as to reflect on the quiet unfurling of time in Komburg a webcam confers immediacy it allows you to see two places at once in real time the webcam is used in videoconferencing it's one of many tools that have contributed to the ratcheting up of spacetime compression bridging space and so saving time for those who feel they have little to spare so the work offers not just the serenity of slowness but also the thrill of speed that's to say it reminds us of the speed at which information is transmitted across great distances so it could be seen against the grain of Steyler's comments and imagery as suggesting not that you can escape the global information society in remote places where life proceeds at a saner pace but that the information society is tentacular and can embrace an isolated community in rural Germany just as easily as it can embrace metropolitan London or New York now how am I doing for time all right if I can if I remember the instructions I was given earlier I can show you here I'm going to show you a short passage from another work a piece by Fikret Atte it's called Rebels of the Dance it was shot in 2002 in Batman in southeastern Turkey it's a predominantly Kurdish part of Turkey Batman is a city that has become relatively wealthy in recent decades on the back of its oil refining industry it's also a town that has a very very high unemployment rate so let me show you a couple of minutes from this so so in this in this work by Atte we see these two boys they're performing what is presumably a traditional dance though it also seems to have an improvisational element and they perform it fitfully in stops and starts often looking self conscious before the camera next to them is an automatic bank machine it's an emblem for financial networks that operate with great speed executing transactions almost instantaneously according to the maxim I mentioned earlier time is money and this machine clearly saves money for the bank which needs fewer tellers and it also saves money for the customer but the boys who stand and dance near the machine apparently have no use for it as the machine effectively reminds us they are time rich and cash poor they can't save money and they have no need to save time Agasinsky says that wasting time is an act of resistance but Atte's piece leaves me wondering are the boys resisting the encroachment of an alien notion of time as symbolized by the bank machine or are they simply unemployed I don't think they're rebelling against productive clock time or are they just economically marginalized for them slowness is a deeply ambiguous prize the work effectively reminds us that you have to upshift before you can fully enjoy the benefits of downshifting now what is appealing about this work is that it doesn't what's appealing to me is that it doesn't romanticize the local and the slow offer worthy but flat and obvious meditations on the benefit of slowness meditations by artists like Steyler who tended to gloss over the associations of video as a medium its connection with TV and with commercial film and through them with the global and the fast and it's worth remembering that romanticizing the local is a common topos a tendency in commercial cinema that's to say it's a common topos in a certain kind of global culture and I want to give you two examples this is this is a still from a film called local hero by Bill Forsythe in which Mack seen here on the right played by Peter Reigert is sent to Scotland to a small village on the Scottish coast to buy land rights for an oil refinery before leaving Houston Mack is seen driving his Porsche with the radio blaring the very picture of the fast living executive Mack is a man in a hurry but once in Scotland he's won over by the villagers including the old scavenger who lives on and owns the beach that the oil company covers and who refuses to sell it to the oil company so Mack becomes a different man and the transformation in him is signaled by changes in his appearance he drops his suits for woolly jumpers for instance it's also signaled by his interest in a local woman to the slow pace of life and business in this village a very similar message is conveyed in the more recent film A Good Year 2006 in which Russell Crow plays a London trader who inherits a vineyard in France he wants to sell it initially but he falls in love with a local woman and decides to give up his frantic London existence for a slower life in the French countryside there are many films that tell a similar story and I mention them because I want to get across the point that this vision, this vision of slowing down this vision of embracing a different pace is part of the dream life and is based globally connected society now by way of conclusion I want to discuss another work a work that I'm personally very keen on and I want to show you the whole work from start to finish I have to quickly change the DVD I understand that this may take just a second while the DVD player learns to forget about this film and here we go I apologize for this is a viewing copy try and imagine it without the writing right so in this piece by Laura and Kelsadia the turtles are static we see them against a changing backdrop in the Pearl River Delta in China we see river traffic children playing on the banks men unloading barges and trucks and slowly the surroundings become more and more clearly industrial we see crane shipping containers, tug boats a motorway in the distance and finally a busy shipyard at night so the artists show here that older new technologies older new industries this side by side modern ships and old boats modernist housing developments and old shanks and throughout we see the six turtles in a row on the log and of course turtles are an age old symbol of slowness and these as I said these turtles are near motionless but lining up on the log as they do they can also be seen as forming a queue and so acting as a kind of parodic reminder of the log jams and tail backs that result from explosive growth now at certain times we seem to get a turtle's eye view of the surroundings when we watch the footage of the banks gliding by we seem to see them from the vantage point of the turtles that the footage is shot from a very low vantage point and in as much as our gaze is aligned with theirs we're implicitly invited to view the unfolding landscape as alien and unintelligible which in a sense it is given that industrialization in Guangdong province has been very rapid but uneven turning the delta as we see in the footage into an anarchic patchwork of sweatshops and factories slums and condominiums at other times the camera dwells on the turtles which then look alien themselves their immobility standing in very stark contrast with a buzz of economic activity on the banks what the artists show here is that in a globalizing world different temporalities mesh and collide that the fast tempo of global trade coexist with the different cadences of local activities and that dislocation is repeated in the video itself the camera work being smooth at some times and choppy at others while the editing is alternately brisk and breezy this is no facile defense of the slow and I mention this piece because like Ate's work it suggests a subtler more convincing approach to the temporalities of the global these works are more convincing to me than the pieces by Dereke and Roy and Wolfgang Stühler because instead of positing some ideal world that stands outside global networks these works these works insinuate themselves into those networks and there they create disturbances disturbances in both the logic and the temporalities of global trade thank you very much now very much Marcus for this really extremely captivating lecture and I think I won't be speaking for myself saying that you could have so gone on and it was really captivating and actually felt rather too much compressed in time to deal with the topic but really very interesting thank you so we have as usual actually plenty of time for questions remarks discussion whatever so since we are also a small group relatively small group so this can also provide more time if you wish to elaborate than having to just speak for 2 minutes so anyone want to yes please