Bethan Huws' artwork "The Lake Writing" from 1991 describes a landscape in only a few sentences of text, reducing landscape painting to simple description and acknowledging the inability to fully capture the natural world. By using so few words and resources, it serves as a reminder that art does not need excessive consumption or space.

1. Art 318

2. Bethan Huws, The Lake Writing, 1991
"the grass is very very dark green and reflecting a
kind of rich brown color in between. And there is
some kind of brown color in the grasses as well”

3. By limiting the factors of landscape painting,
by writing a landscape instead of painting it,
the artist reduces landscape painting to
description, acknowledging the impossibility
of any attempt to definitively capture the
natural world. The Lake Writing is
refreshingly simple. Reading it is a kind of
meditation. Its economy of production
serves as a reminder that art doesn't need to
consume a lot of resources or take a lot of
space.
-Marcus Civin

4. Time

5. Watch Andy Warhol’s “Empire” Film
Look it up on you tube.
Watch it for 10 min

6. Time
Art that considers how time is counted and
calculated—using clocks, calendars,
metronomes, and other devices—is at the
heart of many significant works of
contemporary art.
Human awareness of time also is deeply
tied to our consciousness of our own
bodies.

7. On Kawara: Date Painting 1966–1968, 1989

8. Theme: Time
Transience, permanence, change, moment,
now, then, duration, pause, minute, hour, year,
past, present, future, eternity.
These words identify some of the concepts we
use as we think about time.
Markers of tense, which distinguish the past,
present, and future, are features of languages
across the globe.

9. Theme: Time
• In contemporary society, a powerful
change in our sense of time is being
shaped by the relentless, rapid, never-
ending, never-stopping flow of information
and capital.

10. Cynthia Daignault’s installation, I Love You More
Than One More Day (2013)

11. Time as a Medium
Time becomes a medium whenever an
artwork can actually move and change.
Sometimes movement is an optical illusion,
as in a film, which is a sequence
of still photographs
shown in rapid succession.

12. Watch “The Way Things Go”
by Fischili and Weis

13. Peter Fischli and David Weiss | Still from Der Lauf der
Dinge (The Way Things Go), 1985–1987

14. Performance Art
Time as a medium:
When time functions as a medium, the artist makes
the variability or plasticity of time itself an integral
component of the artwork.
For example, since ancient times, many cultures
have had live art activities that encompass elements
of theater and visual art (with similarities to what
today we refer to as performance art).

15. Kinetic Art
Another ancient form that requires the artist
to consider time as a medium is kinetic art,
art that contains moving parts.
Contemporary artists continue to create
projects involving kinetic components.

16. Tim Hawkinson | Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years), 1995

17. Theme: Time
Visual artists who utilize film and video as
mediums explore temporal dimensions (such
as duration, pacing, and the unfolding of a
narrative) in ways that differ profoundly from
how a visual artist works in a static medium.
According to artist Tacita Dean, “Film is time
made manifest.”

18. Live Art
Live art take place in real space and time.
In 2010, at the Museum of Modern Art, an
artist performed an intense version of
interhuman exchange every day the museum
was open for two and a half months. She sat
in silence for hours at a table and visitors were
encouraged to sit
silently across from her, one at
a time, staring into her eyes.

20. Process Art
Artists interested in showing the passage of time
might build observable physical change into their
works.
The term process art refers to art made from
mutable materials, such as
asphalt, wax, plants, felt, latex,
ice, and water, whose form is a
result of natural processes or
forces.

21. Andy Goldsworthy | Early Morning
Calm (1988)

22. Jennifer Bartlett
Rhapsody
“Most paintings, perhaps, attempt to isolate for their purposes
the narrowest possible increment of an event; a consensual
approximation of time tends to be assumed. But in these
paintings, time is the stated subject.”
-Deborah Eisenberg on Jennifer Bartlett

23. On Midnight: “this is a light fixture above my bed, seen form
lying flat underneath It. It’s the moment when you absolutely
can’t go to sleep.” -Jennifer Bartlett

25. “The paintings
have a directness because
they’re about terror and safety,
and everyone experiences that
in some way”
-Bartlett

27. Ai Wei Wei

28. Sunflower Seeds 2010

32. Heide Fasnacht

34. “Confronted with such an intense created space, the viewer is left to meditate on
the shape and meaning of the illusion.”
-Megan McMillan

35. Tehching Hsieh

36. Tehching Hsieh

37. Memory

38. Theme: Memory
Memory is a focus of research in a broad range of fields.
Memory also is an important topic in contemporary art.
What do we know about how our memories operate?
Memory is not a simple recording device that preserves
everything our senses take in.
Memory filters and selects, reorders and distorts.
Our memories are fragmented, scattered, and often unreliable.

39. Doris Salcedo | Atrabiliarios, 1992-
2004

40. Theme: Memory
In art, memory relates closely to the themes
of time and place.
For example, artists might explore how a
landscape and cityscape are marked by the
passage of time as physical changes are
wrought on places by human and natural
forces.

41. Theme: Memory
History refers to a recording and analysis of
the past, performed from a perspective that
aims for factuality, even neutrality.
But as professional historians recognize,
history can never be impartial.
Memory recognizes that our views
of the past are never impersonal.

42. Anselm
Kiefer

43. “Kiefer worked with
the conviction that art
could heal a traumatized
nation and a vexed,
divided world.”
-Simmons

44. Felix Gonzalez-Torres

46. Kerry James Marshall | Many Mansions 1994

48. Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz

51. “We feel our way around things
we don't understand. To imagine a
world after the worst has happened
somehow relieves some of the
anxiety of anticipation and unknowing”
-Martin/Munoz

53. Relic
An artist who wants to suggest that he or she is being more or
less truthful and accurate about the past can use found
materials that have a history.
They can use a relic, an actual piece of a thing made and used
for some purpose in the past.
Lovell’s GRACE is a tableau using
antique church pews, intended to
transport viewers back in time to
an African-American church from
over one hundred years ago.

54. Whitfield Lovell | GRACE, 2003
The worn qualities we observe today more accurately signify the
distance separating our time from the bygone era rather than
representing that era in its original state. The materials carry the
evidence of their own history in the wear they show.

56. Place

57. Virginia Katz

60. Liza Lou

64. Student Work