TIME FOR ART

What is Durational Exhibition-Making, Anyway?

“What if an exhibition was not about occupying space but about occupying time?” This was the question asked by the 2007 project “Il Tempo del Postino” (this is haute art-world stuff so you have to say it in Italian, even though it debuted in darkest Manchester).

Organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist, a renowned curator, and the equally illustrious artist Philippe Parreno, the exhibition brought together a group of artists active in the movement of Relational Aesthetics, which sought to understand the art object and exhibitions around social rather than material lines. What if art’s purpose was just to bring people together in a better way?

For “Il Tempo del Postino” Obrist and Parreno set a series of rules – 15 artists would each make a new work, no longer than 15 minutes, in any medium but film or video. Despite a typically morose reaction in the press – the Guardian wrote “The problem with conceptual art in postman performance is that you are stuck with the punchline for as long as the artist’s self-indulgence allows” – it has become an important exhibition.

There are plenty of other examples of exhibitions that change day by day: the Chiang Mai Social Installation’s Weeks of Co-operative Suffering of 1995; the Berlin Biennale of 2008; exhibitions where the artist lives in the gallery (too many to count, sadly) but Lawrie Shabibi’s might be the first to link the form to Ramadan – a new first for our city of firsts.