A durational performance confronting the emptiness of time.
The Marking Time performances were undertaken to examine the question of how to face emptiness. Our future is, in actuality, a void. And the past no longer exists.
I think about how we operate in time, through time, in so many different ways. Sometimes it is as if we are in a race against time, trying to accomplish as much as possible, scheduling our activities strategically to make the best and most efficient use of it. Then again, we often waste time, squandering it and letting it slip away. But sometimes we are just trying to get through it.
I began the Marking Time series because I needed to think about time more radically than I had in the past. Certain experiences had led me to reconsider how I was going to continue through the rest of my life. With each version, I chose to work with sparse materials, and what might be considered an excessive amount of time in which the minimal actions unfold.
Each time I have done this work I have to negotiate the pressure to ‘do’ something or express something. I learn again how to simply be present – with the time, in the time. Marking its passage with my full attention.
And each time I have done the work I have understood my relation to time and to the future differently. It is revealed both through the materials that I choose to use as well as the choices that I make in performance.
These performances have profoundly altered my understanding of how to perform, even after 35 years of work. They have also influenced the design of my performances.
Marking Time VI was a four hour performance. In the room were two chairs, a black wool shawl, and goose down.
