In the article “A matter of time,” I found Andy Warhol’s concept of time to be most interesting. The reason being is that both videos are literal representations of time passing, one being eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building at night (Empire 1964) and the other which is six hour footage of poet John Giomo sleeping (Sleep 1963). I thought the concept to be interesting as an onlooker because it’s hard to fathom why anybody would take long hours of footage without any drastic occurrence of change. But given his ideation behind the video about “being the machine”, it almost seems like a mockery on people’s interpretations. In other words If people did not think hard enough or even read an artist statement on the footage, it could easily be conveyed as redundant amounts of footage of a single subject.
Cheryl Donegan’s work, to me, comments on the inability of a person to have a difficult conversation about the ways in which the constant evolution of the arts influences the current culture. If these difficult conversations are had, almost immediately perspectives on art concepts that are taken too literally are revealed across various media (scenes and commercials), so much so, that they become monotonous. Moreover, she uses visual representation to nearly accurately depict the effects of not having these conversations or taking “art” too literally. Her visual representations allow you to reflect on the current culture on a whole and why it is seemingly difficult to differentiate one type of media from another.
Anri Sala, on the other hand, to me, was more interesting because of his technique. He uses visual representation with the combination of audio to represent controversial/crucial moments in political history in a sensory challenging way. His work combines this idea of what has occurred in these moments in history with an emphasis on the faint colors that they convey and the audio that goes with it. This audio and color combination made me think about how his work seemingly comments on this notion of easily looking past the role of sensory inputs (visual and audio, specifically) on our perception of controversial/crucial moment and whether they are more of an influence than just the general effects of these events.