Day 3: Time & Duration

Think About

What is the longest time that you have ever done one activity? What are your thoughts on durational performance? What is the longest performance you have ever done? What is your relationships between your body and durational performance? How do you practice and prepare for a performance? Does this differ depending on length?

 

Play

Prompt One

  1. You have one hour to create a one-minute performance.

Prompt Two

  1. You have one minute to create a one-hour performance.

Prompt Three

  1. Think of a durational work that you have a strong reaction to (positive or negative).

  2. Do it for at least 60 mins.

  3. Document.

Prompt Four

  1. Sit or stand for one hour.

  2. Document.

 

Dig Deeper

Test of time: Marina Abramović on the transformational power of performance art, The Calvert Journal

One of the world's most important living artists, Marina Abramović has been pushing boundaries and pioneering new forms of performance art for over 40 years. She talks to The Calvert Journal about her Method, role and legacy.

André Lepecki on Duration, In Terms of Performance

Duration is not time extended. Actually duration has little to do with extension or other spatial references—this was Henri Bergson’s insight in Time and Free Will (1889).

Ralph Lemon on Duration, In Terms of Performance

A physical meditation exercise. A body-placement task and event. Simply: Set up a thing, an idea, a place, and be there, in it. Stay in for fourteen hours.

Art About Waiting — and What It Takes to Endure, Andrew Russeth

In a time of crisis with no end in sight, durational performance, or endurance art, surfaces in our consciousness. Is this the art of our age?

Miles Greenberg, mentee of Marina Abramović, on televising his nightmare, Emily Dinsdale

LEPIDOPTEROPHOBIA invites viewers to witness the performance artist being locked in a perspex box with live moths

Questions of Practice: Ernesto Pujol on Durational Performance, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage

Performance artist and social choreographer Ernesto Pujol is known for creating site-specific, durational performances. We asked him how he thinks this extended passage of time affects our experience of an artwork. “It fights our cult of speed,” he says. “To do something over a span of time…puts us in another frame of mind and materiality. It immediately throws us into experiencing, rather than consuming.”