Week 3 Responce (((Time & Narrative)))
"Despite yourself...you're impressed by the fact that you're going to completely disappear." was an ominous beginning to the chapter "Time and Narrative." Although broad, that sentence covered the potential, and preferred submersive capability of most of the installations in this chapter. While some installations were soused in their stories, other sites found entrapment through the ability to publicly displace the audience in their comfortablity. At time's the artists intentions were the successors of their own memoragraphic history, and at other time's the personalization came from the view themselves. I'd like to focus on these two occurrences in two separate installations; one in which the time and narrative comes from the viewpoint of the artist in comparison to exhibits created for the sole purpose of integrating the time and narrative of strangers to fulfill the installation.
To focus on these two installation, the first of which being Bob & Roberta Smith's Paint It Orange [1997], we see a childhood based memory of when the artists mother painted everything orange in their household. The sophomoric inhibition of this memory came as a recreation of all things painted orange and placed them in a gallery space. Although this was a public piece with the obligatory response from the audience, it came with personal background, based out of personal recollections and anxieties to create a public display. The autobiographical irony of taking a personal reaction and proposing a replication through the public is almost paradoxical. The allowance of that feeling (although success is not always immanent) can spread an understanding of the anxiety, although may morph the concept to be something other then what it was intended.
As a publicly narrative and time-based work, we can look at David Bunn's I feel better now, I feel the same way [1996] which appropriates thousands of boxes of now obsolete library database cards in their death to online databases. This brings public memory to fulfill the cards to receive the sympathetic attention that is pleaded by their assemblage together. The installation is not based on any personal experience David Bunn has undergone, but rather it is a public feeling he knows the audience will understand in the lonely removal of so many pieces of now impractical information paper. The artifact returned as a "living archive of reverie" and was controlled in it's completion by the audience and their feelings, rather then the implicit thoughts of the artist and creator himself/herself.
Do personalized works of Time and Narrative complete processes in same way publicized, assumed works of Time and Narrative do? Where does the line become drawn between an idea being personal or public considering it always comes from the mind (which is solely based on memoragraphic ideas)? Is any public concept actually public-thought based? Can public be private, and can private remain public without losing itself?
