now and then, or the eternal moment is an ongoing, multi-part transmedia project that includes a lecture essay, a series of recorded conversations, original text compositions, and slideshow presentations of images.
The project is centered around notions of archival fluidity and futurity and a sustained engagement with the artistic output and archival materials of the photographer Alvin Baltrop. Artistic and academic research methodologies have informed an exploration of the reframes that collaborative dialogue might assume, with multiple possible pathways of access to and from it.
a cross - temporal collaboration:
now and then is concerned with notions of fluidity: considering the nature of gaps, flow, and fluidity in the archive and in art making; the life and work of an artist engaged in a sustained photographic practice at the river’s edge and at the fluid edges of society’s margins, and with a fluid movement between works of scholarly and artistic research projects. Rather than attempting to resolve or create a container or chain of relations, I offer fluid movement as a method of writing, means of artistic production, and an element of knowledge synthesis where estuaries are noted as ever moving states of attention. In the absences between clear answers and in the spaces that surround verifiable truths, we might focus on the formulation of interesting questions: perhaps there is something profound to be understood by acknowledging that there is always more information that we simply may never have.
image at right: sarah bricke, 2023
David Hammons’ Day’s End, at the site where Pier 52 once stood.
This work in progress engages with the work of the photographer Alvin Baltrop. The artist’s life and work form the basis of an ongoing project, titled now and then, or the eternal moment which has evolved through study of, and produced work in conversation with, Baltrop’s artistic output, biography, and professional and personal archival materials. This project will continue to develop as a sustained work-in-progress, with many points of realization.
image at left: Alvin Baltrop (undated) © 2023, Estate of Alvin Baltrop
Gordon Matta-Clark’s work Day’s End at Pier 52.
The title now and then references the project’s relationship with notions of time and temporality, troubling the notion of linear time and engaging a sort of temporal fluidity by approaching the work of the artist as both an academic research project and a visual/textual/performative cross-temporal collaboration.
Among the pathways to and from the work and life of Baltrop are points of intersection and departure for further considerations of multiple other methodologies themes, and topics, including: archives and archival practices generally, artist’s archives specifically, cross-temporal collaboration, artistic and conventional research methodologies and how they may entwine, themes and depictions of sexuality and gender (especially in connection with the subject matter of the work), the importance of the site in such work, and how these sites are represented in art and in the archive, and nonlinear narrative, electronic literature, and performative lecture as less conventional means by which research may be given artistic form, discussion may be instigated, and information may be disseminated.
image at left: sarah bricke, 2023
pier pilings ( all that remain) adjacent to Pier 52.
