19 - Video Art and the Elasticity of Duration

Summary

Don DeLillo's novel Point Omega (2010) opens in an unnamed gallery in late summer/early autumn 2006 with a description of visitors entering and leaving an exhibition of Douglas Gordon's 1993 video art installation 24 Hour Psycho. Gordon's work used Hitchcock's 1960 film and slowed the action to two frames per second, so that the film extended to a 24-hour running time, rather than the usual 109 minutes. As DeLillo's opening scene unfolds, the screen is described as ‘free-standing, about ten by fourteen feet, not elevated, placed in the middle of the room’ (Point Omega 3). The detail of the description, including the carefully noted dimensions of the frame containing the images, which are themselves ‘freestanding … in the middle of the room’, presents something at once concrete and abstract, contained within yet transcending parameters. That the screen is also translucent means that viewers can move to either side, observers yet also observed, subject and object, as they enter, linger and drift out of the room.

This initial, brief description introduces one of the primary observations about video art, which is what Gordon's installation essentially is: it is neither plastic nor entirely ethereal, neither tangible nor incorporeal. Video art is an electronic form which presents an audiovisual theme, a form subject to manipulation. As an art form, video art occupies a curious space between states and is in constant flux in its motion between these states. This flux is mimicked in the scene described above in the movement of the spectators, their varying speeds as they wander in and out of the gallery. Motion, speed, ambiguity, temporal displacement, subjectivity, objectivity and relativity: a tumble of nouns and adjectives that might reasonably be drawn upon in describing video art itself, but also words that might be called upon when describing the novel that then unfolds. Indeed, all of these ideas and concepts inform this chapter, which looks at the way in which time, repetition and process, as informed by Teilhard de Chardin's theory of evolution, and mirrored within the ekphrastic 24 Hour Psycho, are at the heart of DeLillo's consideration of video art.