2016 10 07 Cynthia Daignault on Not Commodifying Your Art
Highlights
- "I talk a lot about the depiction of time in painting, about painting as a time-based medium. This is a huge topic for me. Take I love you more than one more day, the sky room. On one level, there is conceptual time. One year. That piece is an abstraction of 365 days, like a calendar, a way to understand the unit of measurement by which we measure our life. Sixteen cups in a gallon. Buy how many years in a life? Then, there is also the specific time, depicted time. That piece was made in 2013, a very specific year. It is a portrait of that year, its specific light and specific weather. Indexical document. Then there is creative time, the time it took to make the piece, my time, performative time. Like the rhythm and tempo of all the brushstrokes that aggregate to a duration, 3 months. Think of the piece as a kind of live concert recording. Dicks Pick #69. A recording of a 3-month long performance that I did when painting the piece. Then there is phenomenological time, real time, the time when the viewer is inside the piece looking at it. The time is takes the viewer to see the piece, walk around it, experience it. Maybe 10 minutes. Then there is timelessness—the space above, outside of time, containing all of those timelines. There’s a timeless space in the mind of the viewer where they can aggregate all those timelines into one multi-dimensional universe. Like different realities all layered on top of each other, like a stack of transparency paper, meta on top of meta. A Russian nesting doll. Inside the viewer—that’s the god perspective, totally outside of time and space."