Jillian Varani
artist

Explaining is Losing Abstract

This project responds to the metaphor of time as a commodity. ‘Time spent’, ‘time wasted’, are expressions of a culture entrenched in productivity, which transforms time into a burden. This burden manifests as restlessness, boredom, waiting, anticipation, grief, regret: the look toward the future or the past. I have attempted to resist the idea of objectified time by engaging in a reflective, as opposed to productive, method of research. Unlike production, observation allowed me to engage with time in a way that would not anticipate future results: instead of looking for something, just looking. As a result, the work that I have generated often appropriates components of other stuff: the internet, television, books—the things that I look at on a regular basis.

Consequently, this work is largely concerned with sight and its relation to being in time, and blindness and its relation to knowledge. Both of these relationships are metaphorical, and they usually imply that to be able to see is to know what to expect—‘to look ahead’. On the other hand, the blind seer is a common cultural figure—Tiresias who sees the future. Depending on the narrative, sight has power to reveal or deceive. These metaphors suggest how language brings sight, knowledge, and time together.

This project attempts to subvert the notion that language ‘illuminates.’ The work simultaneously engages multiple ways of looking—e.g. reading and watching—in an attempt to generate a sense of knowing which could be undone. A mixture of ‘truthfulness’—a kind of straightforward style, or first person text—and the surreal or unexpected also works to that end.

The work could be framed as existential, especially within the dialecticism of enlightenment versus ‘non-being,’ or more simply, the infinite and the temporary. The videos engage with the ambitions of a kind of present tense existence: heterogeneous duration, freedom in each new unattached moment; yet they also concern the anxiety of being firmly cemented to a single unrepeatable life–short and desperate.

This work can also be situated in relation to performance art which values immediacy, self awareness, and confrontation. Practices like those of Teching Hsieh or Klara Liden who both use video to document conceptually confrontational and political activities have been influential. Opposition has been a useful tool for this project, which ultimately hopes to be political in the way all contemporary art is, as if it could have relevance to this particular moment.