Timecode
Until March 8; Dundee Contemporary Arts

Time is a strange and elusive concept. We can measure it in years, hours and seconds, but depending on our personal circumstances, these intervals can seem to move at different speeds. We can never quite catch “now” even though it’s always here, and try as we might, we can’t quite grasp the enormity of geological time.

DCA’s latest exhibition, Timecode, is not, as might be imagined, a celebration of time-based art. Half of the show is made up of videos, sound pieces and the like, but the other half is perfectly still in time and space. What binds them together is a preoccupation with the idea of time.

On walking into the first of the two gallery spaces, you wouldn’t guess the theme of the show. A silver splash on the wall to your left, a painted constellation in front, layered cubes of paint to your right, among drips of white on white running down the wall: you might guess that this is an exhibition about the nature of paint itself.

You wouldn’t be totally wrong; while all of these works investigate notions of time, we are living in an era when studio-based art has to be about itself, before it’s about anything else. So Christian Stock’s monochromatic cubes of paint, rising up from their canvas shelves after months and years of patient layering, are meditations on the painting as an object. But they are also a poetic analogy for geological strata laid down over millions of years.

Ross Birrell’s spontaneous splash of silver, it turns out, is a laboriously pencilled pattern – a saccade – the imperceptible eye-movement of someone looking at art. In itself it contains numerous layers of time: the mili-seconds it took for the original saccade, the time it takes for yours, the hours it took to draw the pattern with an ordinary pencil, and the years between the work’s first incarnation and its re-rendering now.

Perhaps the art world’s most famous time obsessive is On Kawara, who has painted a canvas with the day’s date every single day since the 1960s. Having shown one of these paintings before, DCA chose this time to include a soundpiece, of deadpan voices reeling through a million years from 998,031 BC, and a bookwork using different codes to represent the passing years. The result is a feeling of distance between the unimaginable reality of a million years, and our abstract ways of measuring and defining it.

While this first gallery – largely concerned with the vastness of geological time – is elegant and poetic, the second places the human being at its centre, approaching time in ways often more blunt, and prosaic. Two works which are little more than digital counters contribute only as a foil to the more detailed pieces dotted around.

Canadian artist Kelly Mark lists in her sound piece hundreds of things she “really should” do. In turn humorous, mundane, and ambitious, it illustrates the very human gap between our ideal, accomplished self, and the one we find ourselves being. It makes you wonder if, given all the time in the world, you’d manage to narrow that gap.

Thomson & Craighead’s Beacon, made especially for the show, is by far its most compelling work. A mechanical railway sign dominates the gallery, its spluttering flaps revealing, every few minutes, the text of an internet search which someone in the world is performing right at that moment. This old analogue technology linked up to the latest digital software reveals with a prophetic rat-tat-tat the private thoughts of someone who will never know we spent that moment rummaging in their head.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 01.02.09