I arrived 11 hours late to the movie. I asked the ticket-man if I’d missed anything. Yeah, he said, you missed the really dirty parts.

Jesse Cain‘s Parts and Labor is 13 hours. It is his hands replacing the engine of a car, piece by piece. The work is shot in sparkling HD, with steady close-up shots. The compositions are arresting. The depths of field are shallow. His hands, the moving parts, the parts his hands are moving shift in and out of focus as he works. It is a durational film, certainly. It is the length of time it took him to perform the action–over two years. The labor dictates the form, the length, the shape.

Parts and Labor showed in a traditional theatrical space, the mainstay Anthology Film Archives. People were welcome to come and go as they pleased (as one might during any other movie), and did. Audience members left to eat a meal, to drink a drink, perhaps, even, to perform their own labors.

The film is tremendous. My brain was abuzz with the ways we can ensure the cinematic experience is maintained when moving images are brought into visual art contexts. The world of art has never been so formally or materially diverse, of course, but not all presentation strategies are utilized equally. I am continually surprised and annoyed by curators, artists and exhibition-makers’ insistence on showing films and videos with integral trajectories on a loop. There are, obviously, makers whose works are meant to be looped and meant for gallery contexts. I don’t know how effective Tony Oursler‘s puppet projections would be on a screen, in a traditional cinematic environment (actually, I bet it’d be amazing). There are also, of course, pieces that can function (and change meaning, etc.) through a variety of exhibition strategies. However, for works meant to be seen in their entirety (and, as obvious as it sounds. starting at the beginning and ending at the end), it’s a travesty to not even allow audiences the chance to experience them in their intended state.

It is, then, with great excitement that I believe the 2012 Whitney Biennial has pulled it off. Along with Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, the show’s curators, Thomas Beard and Ed Halter (who also run the recently moved and renovated Light Industry) have not only assembled an excellent calendar of screenings, but with the Biennial’s staff have done a wonderful job of presenting films in a museum in a way that honors the unique capacities of both of the traditional exhibition models. On the day attended (Friday), Jerome Hiler‘s quiet, beautiful Words of Mercury began every half hour, on the half hour. There is a sign at the tightened curtain requesting audiences wait until the next half hour to enter. There were still the types of conversations one might rather not hear during a screening, but those mostly died off within the first ten minutes. I sat near the front and absorbed very few of the stings of walk-outs. Noise from other rooms was minimal and Hiler’s hypnotic, textural superimpositions were given the space to breathe they needed.

One hopes other exhibition organizations will follow the lead of the Whitney in their exhibition of time-based works. Through very simple means (in many cases more suggestive and informative than anything else), viewers were able to see the works as they were intended. And, with a show as vast as the biennial, the time until the next screening just means a greater, longer consideration of works whose temporal strategies are less oblique.

Last week Duncan, Richard and I traveled to New York City to install Bad at Sport’s first NYC exhibition entitled  Don’t Piss on Me and Tell Me it’s Raining at apexart. Although stressful at times, as any exhibition can be, I can safely say that we were all excited to work with the lovely team at Apex and exhibit work from 180+ artists that have been on the show. This week I will be posting mostly photo recaps of our experience putting together the show and some photographs of work I saw when traveling around New York city. Our first group of photographs encompass the beginning install.

When we were first asked by apexart if we would like to have an exhibition in their space one of the first concerns was, “how do you take a web project and create an exhibition?” Many of us have thought of Bad at Sports as an archive of what is currently happening in our communities. With that in mind we decided to ask participants of the show to send in a piece that would create a physical archive. Receiving the work was not an issue but properly cataloging it became a task of its own. The first couple of days we archived, well, the archive with photographs and a numbering system. Once that was finished we began arranging the works in clusters.

Unpacking all of the work

Duncan and Tom documenting some work

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Photographer Richard Prince’s photo “Spiritual America” was removed from the upcoming Tate Modern exhibition “Pop Life” (opening tomorrow) after a warning from Scotland Yard that the nude image of actress Brooke Shields aged 10 and heavily made up could break obscenity laws.

The officers spoke to the Tate after seeing promotional material in the newspaper and not via complaints that were issued to the office.

Read more about the history of the photo and it’s background at the Guardian article.