THE REFUSAL OF TIME : WILLIAM KENTRIDGE

The Refusal of Time is an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with installation which called as breathing machine or elephant, five channel video with sound by William Kentridge who is South African artist. The entire show is about 30 minutes length. This is collaboration work with Peter Galison, Catherine Meyburgh, and Philip Mille.

The first thing that you will notice is that there is a machine at the center of the room. The light is pretty dark, so it is little bit hard to see it, but you can still see the movement and details of this breathing machine. There are five video is played on three side of the wall. There are two video for each side wall, and one for center wall. Chairs are not movable. They are not organized in line. The direction of each chairs are different. Soon or later, people who walked in that room realize that the sound is coming out from the cone shaped speaker.

If I try to think about the story logically, it is really hard. I don't think think logical about this exhibition is not necessary. What matters is that the mood and the atmosphere that the installation brings. It looks like Kentridge is trying to study time, and all those group of African people are those who trying to make time. This might not be Kentridge intention, but to me the fact that people in the video are Black makes the video more interesting and powerful, because I remember that I read an article which said that our first man kinds are Black. Those people remind me of this article, but also helped me to understand the video in my way. I think those people are either from far future when every time is broken, so they are trying to re-build it, or from far past before time was built. 

NON LINEAR

MEMENTO

Leonard can't remember long-term memory. The only thing that he knows is that his wife was murdered after raped by the killer. He tries to find this killer by getting tattoo about what he find out about the killer. He took picture and left some note to recognize people. The time line of this video is non-linear. It goes backwards. This kind of sequence remind me the book "My Man" This is a Japanese novel, and it has same sequence with Memento. This is about father and daughter(actually there is more than that..), and it starts from awkward moment of stepfather and daughter at the coffee shop, and the story end with when they first met. There is another movie called Wicker Park, this has similar aspect from Memento. The sequence just does not go back. The basic sequence is chronological sequence, but it is mixed with past a lot. Basically, the story is telling us that what you see, and what you experience is not everything, and even truth. What you remember is simply just your perspective, if you heard same story from another person, the story will toward to totally different direction. This is similar theme that people can find from Memento.

 It starts from present, and move towards to past. The characteristic of this kind of sequence is that makes people to assume the past by each 'present', but at the end people will realize that what we see now can not tell everything what happened in the past, maybe even truth, but also if we see our past as a third person, we might not recognize them as our past.