The Eternal Moment
by Amanda Douberley

"Affect" and "effect" are perhaps the two words in the English language that, when I am writing, trip me up the most. The distinction between them is not something I can ever manage to grasp for an extended period of time. So, here I am again, juggling two dictionaries and searching in vain for my thesaurus. I have gotten myself into this predicament trying to find a way to introduce "The Eternal Moment," a theme I devised for Interchange that, in its overall shape, is a departure from how I typically understand works of art. An advisor once told me I tend to want art to do something, which I have taken to mean that I want artists to do something. Thus, I write a lot about the influence of technology on artistic process, for example, and artists' engagement with the rules governing specific media. This is all pretty concrete stuff that, I've come to realize, falls under the heading of "effect": a change occurring as a direct result of an action or set of circumstances, an impression that is deliberately intended or engineered. With "The Eternal Moment," however, I find myself in uncharted territory, for here I've taken up an emotion—or, really, more of a mood—that I associate with the art works presented in the gallery. I've strayed from what the artists are doing to what the art is doing to me.

This "affect," then, can be described in one word: stillness. The choice of a paradox for the show's title is driven both by the impossibility of an "eternal moment" and an acute sense of longing that this were not true. In an essay on the work of Donald Judd and Andy Warhol, Jonathan Flatley asserts, "the affective nature of aesthetic experience is always at least partly compensatory. In other words, the experience of art has an emotional force because it offers us something in the space of 'art' that we do not get elsewhere."(1) In my case, perhaps it is their endurance as objects, coupled with evocations of stillness and sheer beauty, that allows the art works gathered here to offer something unavailable elsewhere. In Alec Appl's sculpture, Anna Krachey and Laura Turner's photographs, Joseph Winchester's film, and Cecelia Phillips' painting, the world has slowed down—almost—to a complete stop. And unlike life, it doesn't necessarily have to start up again.

Light is the trigger with the work of Turner, Winchester, and Krachey. The latter artist sometimes works during the magic hour, that time of transition from day into night when atmospheric changes are drastic enough to be noticeable from moment to moment. The light is softer and warmer, intensely beautiful, but because it is fleeting, also achingly so. Krachey's family photographs capitalize on these aspects of the magic hour and provoke the notion that moments such as these should somehow last forever—in all of their startling beauty—along with the people in them. Likewise, Winchester's film captures a few seconds of calm infused with muted light. The view out of a window as a piece of cloth waves in a soft breeze might be savored in the moment but later forgotten; here, however, that time is immortalized on film. I get a similar impression from Turner's photographs of domestic interiors. Rather mundane environments are made notable via the kind of light that might strike one room in the house for just a few days during a particular time of year. Such an event isn't really worth remarking upon, but maybe, in that instant, it proves to be worth stopping to observe. In both Turner and Winchester's work, we can inhabit these depopulated spaces that are suffused with calm, and ultimately, stillness.

Appl's sculptures suggest a much slower concept of time, where change is undetectable yet actually occurring before our eyes. He incorporates living plants into his sculptural installations, here arranged on a forest of columns. The stillness and quiet of growth, coupled with a concrete bowl containing sand mounded into concentric circles, makes for a meditative environment that tackles time on more of a geologic scale.

Finally, the muffled silence of a snowy forest in Phillips' painting, St. Bernard with Ptarmigans and Sleeping Boy, returns me to the frozen moments of Krachey, Turner and Winchester. But here, rather than life, the indeterminate time of storybooks and fairytales is represented. This may sound strange, but it is almost as if all of the air has been sucked out of the scene as the boy forever sleeps. This is not a space for us to live in; it is the realm of literary allegory and metaphor that, nevertheless, engenders a sense of absolute quiet.

Historians like Flatley examine aesthetic experience at the level of affect because "subjective affect is the shuttle on which history gets into art and how it comes back." And if, as Flatley argues, "history is only conceivable as an absent cause, the problem or contradiction to which an aesthetic practice tries to offer a solution,"(2) then how do we deal with the present moment? Critic Peter Schjeldahl concluded a recent review of an Edward Hopper exhibition with the following observation: "We exist in the middle of a rush so constant that it resembles stillness."(3) Schjeldahl's thought expresses a paradox along with betraying a desire to be still, to achieve a state of tranquility or even silence, in the midst of relentless speed and change. Might the need that nurtures affect be as simple as that?

 

(1) Jonathan Flatley, "Allegories of Boredom," in Ann Goldstein, A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958-1968 (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 2004): 51-75. p. 52.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Peter Schjeldahl, "Ordinary People," The New Yorker, 21 May 2007, pp. 88-89. p. 89.