Julieta Aranda

June 2009 Field Guide

Yinka Shonibare, MBE

Edward Tufte

Patricia Esquivias

No Sound

Richard Long

Irwin

“JOL”

Fleur Elise Noble

Matthew Barney Jenny Holzer Nam June Paik Frank Lloyd Wright Dia’s Big Day Guggenheim Announces Hugo Boss Finalists The Appendix: The Value of Curators, the Paik Prize, and David Beckham’s Footprint I.M. Pei Goes Gold

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Few museums provoke site-specific interventions as spectacular as those inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The spiral rotunda has been transformed into a LED billboard by Jenny Holzer, a waterfall by Nam June Paik, and a fantastic obstacle course (replete with a trough of molten Vaseline) by Matthew Barney. Now a new contemporary art series, initiated by the Guggenheim’s chief curator, Nancy Spector, tries an opposite tack. "Intervals" will quietly showcase the work of up-and-coming artists by employing the interstitial and underutilized spaces of the museum, such as the staircase, and even sites that lie beyond the museum walls. In contrast to hefty blockbuster shows, these solo exhibitions are meant to be fluid, scheduled on a quick rotation to ensure that they keep up with the pulse of a fast-moving artworld. Fittingly, the inaugural presentation, by 34-year-old artist Julieta Aranda, explores alternate ideas of temporality. A peephole reveals an hourglass whose grains of sand flow upside down, while elsewhere an oversize clock keeps "decimal time," recalling the short-lived initiative introduced during the French Revolution to reorganize the day into 10 hours, containing 100 minutes of 100 seconds each. In this case, however, the clock’s second hand corresponds to the varying rhythm of the artist’s own heartbeat, which was recorded over the course of one day, thereby combining a revolutionary gesture with an entirely subjective experience of the passage of time. Meanwhile, quotations about time are scrawled on the walls of the stairwell. Transcribed with phosphorescent paint, the words become visible only when the space is darkened, every nine minutes. Julieta Aranda sat down with Claire Barliant to talk about her latest project.

Given that you had so many options in terms of location, how did you settle on using the staircase?

I wanted to do something on the staircase because it was unused. Also, initially I was thinking of installing wallpaper that would fade throughout the course of the exhibition, and the staircase seemed a logical place to put it because it requires special UV lighting, which is something that actually damages art objects quite a bit. Later I changed my mind and used phosphorescent paints, but by that point I had decided on this space.

Did the museum’s architecture influence your project at all? Is there any relationship between the architecture and the concept?

No. It’s funny because in a lot of conversations people would ask, "Are you going to go against the architecture?" I think that’s a bit of lazy thinking. I think that if you want to be critical of a situation, maybe it’s not about taking your anger out on it, or distorting its image, but rather considering the conditions of the site and talking about them. I was trying to avoid a reactive strategy. So I decided to retain a meaningful disengagement with this structure, with the architecture of the place.

That’s an interesting phrase: "meaningful disengagement."

In other words, I am aware of that staircase. I didn’t want to approach it with the feeling that I need to defy the architecture or break down a wall. Because that’s not productive. But it was very funny, because eventually I realized that, as a condition of one of the pieces, I was actually going to have to build a new wall.

Your show incorporates several different forms of time and temporal measurement. Can you talk about why you chose to bring all these together for this one project?

I’ve been working on this idea of challenging universal conventions of time for a while. I guess it all goes back to an earlier project I did based on the Kiribati archipelago in the South Pacific. I found out that in 1995 the nation decided to reroute the international date line, the arbitrary, imaginary line that had formerly divided the islands between two different days. This began my investigation into time as an artificial construct imposed on people, rather than individually determined.