Manon de Boer: Giving Time to Time
The Dutch artist Manon de Boer primarily works with film, and her art often subjects the medium itself to critical scrutiny; for example, she insistently probes the interplay between image and sound and questions the power of pictures as well as their claim to truth. Personal narrative and musical interpretation figure as both subjects and methodological registers of de Boer’s filmic portraits, which she composes as slow-paced fluid sequences of images. Most of the protagonists of her films are actors and actresses, musicians, dancers, and intellectuals. The characters gradually assume definite shape as their recollections unfold, emerging into view like photographic prints in the darkroom, and even the fully formed picture conceals at least as much as it reveals.
A series of works by de Boer investigates the nature of recollection: she films people as they speak about past incidents and experiences, often recording several sessions over an extended period of time. Occasional discrepancies and changing details along the edges of their accounts suggest the pliability of memory. In de Boer’s work, what one might also describe as the fragility or inconsistency of narrative not only draws attention to the mutable relationship between time and language; it also highlights the ways in which perception is dependent on the situational context and subject to subtle alterations. The use of voiceover narration adds another layer that transcends the sitter’s physical presence.
At the Secession, Manon de Boer will premiere her new film An Experiment in Leisure (2016). The writings of the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner (1900–1998), in particular her eponymous book from 1950, serve as a starting point both for this film and de Boer’s artist’s book Trails and Traces, which is published in conjunction with the exhibition. For An Experiment in Leisure de Boer asked artists, dancers, actresses, and art historians to respond to Milner’s ideas. Fragments of these conversations interrupt the silence of a vast, void landscape that serves as a backdrop.
Reflecting the artist’s growing interest in the preconditions for creativity, the artist’s recent projects have dealt in one way or another with repetition, rhythm, reverie, the perception of (endless) time, (spaceless) space—and the idea of emptying one’s mind. On view at the Secession is a small selection of films that represent this concern, such as the recently completed and never-seen ‘film sketches’ The Untroubled Mind (2013–2016) and the 16mm film installation Maud Capturing the Light ‘On a Clear Day’ (2015). For this piece Manon de Boer asked an art collector to film her Agnes Martins whenever she looked at them. The paintings are mounted on a hallway wall, and as the daylight coming in through the facing windows shifts, they come alive with subtle modulations. In the film, the play of light and shadow builds a peculiar rhythm.
