Time 1

- Time 1
- Vrijeme 1
1977
16mm film, b&w, no sound
6min, 58sec

The film “Time 1” shows the minute hand of a wall clock moving forward past six o’clock for more than six minutes. Here, Mladen Stilinović tests the perception of the viewer via an intervention in terms of the minutes that the clock indicates. After the second minute, the hand of the clock goes to minute five and then back to minute three, followed by four and six. In this, the artist references the three dimensions of time. While the first two minutes refer to the present, minute five denotes the future, followed by three and four as the past and then six again as the present. During the editing of this film, not a single frame was removed from the time shown. The artist produced 28 experimental films altogether from 1970 onward. It was especially during the 1970s that people formed film clubs and produced films that were then shown at amateur and experimental film festivals. Stilinović developed experimental filming methods that adhered to his conceptual artistic practice at that time, methods that also gave rise to a subsequent film entitled “Time 2” (1980). In the interim, he had created his iconic piece “I Have No Time” (1979)—an artist’s book in which the titular sentence is written over and over again as an ironic comment on everyday life. Moreover, Stilinović addresses ways in which time had become an means of gauging economic performance in an increasingly capitalist world, being used as well as misused and ultimately relating to notions of emptiness. To the artist, having time meant living in freedom, an idea that he also addressed in his prominent works “Artist at Work” (1978) and “The Praise of Laziness” (1993). W.S.