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Timing

Timing
/9
    • Timing
    • Idömérés
  • 1973-1980
  • 16mm film, b&w, no sound
  • 10min, 9sec
The plot of this 16-mm film is simple and ordinary: the artist folds a canvas into smaller and smaller sizes. At first, she folds it in half, than into a quarter and then repeats this action five more times until reaching a size of one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth of the canvas. The peculiarity of the film is that Maurer is not only folding a canvas, but the film itself as well—at least apparently. Namely, the simple folding action was repeated three times on a more and more split screen. Actually, the artist masked the objective: at first only exposing half of the film, then the other half, while using progressively smaller masks. Consequently, the original event is represented three more times in a more and more (half, quarter, eighth) split screen. But the second, third, and fourth events are not exactly the same, because the artist as a human being cannot reproduce precisely the first folding, since she did not use a clock to time the action of folding. In fact, with simple, everyday and filming operations, Maurer was able to show the paradox of time and to demonstrate its conceptual complexity (measured vs. lived or objective vs. subjective time). S.H.