Michaela Gleave
'Waiting For Time (7 Hour Confetti Work)' - explosion edit
Video performance executed live via KZfaq, 10 May 2014
'Waiting For Time (7 Hour Confetti Work)' was a live video performance, streamed from the artist’s studio in New York and screened at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane on Saturday May 10 2014, 10am - 5pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time. Corresponding with one day of museum opening hours, the performance involved the artist setting off one, hand-held confetti cannon for every minute of the seven-hour duration, the action comprising of little more than waiting for the passing of time. Referencing the history of endurance performance, and the now outdated idea of the standard working day so integral to the advent of “clock time”, the performance explored compressions and expansions across time and space. Locational and temporal fixity of both performer and audience were skewed as space contracted via the screen and multiplied out through the web; the artist performing in her time while the results were made visible in another. In 'Waiting For Time (7 Hour Confetti Work)' the artist both became a clock as well as being a slave to it, repetition rendering an ordinarily short-lived moment of celebration absurd. The excess, beauty and violence of the confetti explosions served as nothing more than a marker of time, the fleeting action repeated ad infinitum until it was rendered meaningless beyond the frame of the work. The performance was viewable live on KZfaq for the duration of the stream.
This edit captures one second for every minute in real time.