Edinburgh Napier University

  Despite their growing presence in galleries, screen-based artworks present conceptual and theoretical challenges that have yet to be fully met (Mondloch, 2007). Extended films containing fictional or documentary narrative often feature in these spaces, yet there is a mismatch between the habits of the typical gallery-goer and the duration and timing of these works.

I am a video-artist using practice-based research to investigate the nature of moving images as a gallery-based medium. In this paper I use my own work, and that of other artists, to argue that time-based art works should address this problem by eschewing the conventions of narrative cinema, delivering a ‘levelling out of the effects of temporality’ (Krause, 1978).

My works generally tell no story, yet time is an essential component of the flux of action and expression within them, a feature that is unique to this medium. They have shape in this fourth dimension, as a sculpture has shape in the other three. If sensation is understood in the context of what has gone before and what is still to come (Rodemeyer, 2015), then the viewer appreciates the work through temporal memory (and anticipation of the future), much as they explore a sculpture through spatial memory (and imagination). A gallery-goer may only watch a few minutes of my extended time-based works, yet the meaning of the whole is imparted, just as that of a sculpture is without the viewer examining it from every possible angle.

Krause, R. (1978) “Video, the Aesthetics of Narcissism”, in Battcock, G. (ed.) New Artists Video. New York, E.P. Dutton, pp. 43-64.
Rodmeyer, L. (2015) “The Body in Time/Time in the Body” in Grant, S. et. al. (eds.) Performance and Temporalisation, pp. 129-138. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan.
Mondloch, K. (2007) “Be Here (and There) Now: The Spatial Dynamics of Screen-Reliant Installation Art” in Art Journal, Fall 2007, pp 21-33.