Euan Macdonald

July 19-September 30, 2006
Times Square
Image: Euan Macdonald

Part of Creative Time’s summer group exhibition Strange Powers, Euan Macdonald’s simple video raised questions about whether seeing is in fact believing. A woman emerges through an orange curtain and slowly proceeds to the middle of the stage. She stands alone, perfectly still, hands clasped. Her fixed glance is direct and intense, yet unthreatening. Depicted in real time from a fixed camera angle, with the most minimal of action, the video’s simplicity and focus compelled viewers to watch in anticipation for more to be revealed.

But as in much of Macdonald’s meditative work, almost nothing happened, at least nothing that appeared immediately visible. It is the title of the work—Healer—that leads one to consider the possibility that this seemingly mundane and elusive performance might be something more. Indeed, the video’s subject was a psychic healer whom Macdonald met in New Zealand, and who has practiced healing for most of her life. Whether or not they had time to consider whether they believed in such a practice, those who crossed Times Square under Macdonald’s video received some small gesture of her healing work.

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Brian Alfred, Ara Peterson, Mark Titchner

March 7-June 5, 2006
Times Square
Image: Mark Titchner

Even before the term “hypnosis” was first used by Scottish physician James Braid in 1843, the medical profession had experimented with ways to ease patients into trance-like states for therapeutic purposes. From the turn of the last century, therapies involving subliminal messaging have gone in and out of favor, while the creators of advertising and their critics have debated the market-motivated use of these “subthreshold effects,” as pop sociologist Vance Packard termed them in 1950s. Presented on a revolving schedule in the middle of Times Square during the last minute of each hour, videos by Brian Alfred, Ara Peterson, and Mark Titchner evoke the fraught history of images as they are used for their effect on our minds for healing, political, and economic purposes.

All three of these emerging artists use video as part of practices that span a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, print, and installation. Ara Peterson’s Energy Fields recalls the psychedelic light shows that accompanied live music events in the 1960s but in Times Square Peterson’s pulsing and rhythmic editing brings to mind the aggressive seduction of today’s savvy advertising, along with its hypnotic aspirations. In Voices you cannot hear Mark Titchner explores the faith we place in ideologies, often combining the visual traditions of propaganda and self-improvement regimens, while Brian Alfred, whose animated videos grew out of his work in painting and collage, references both the chaos and regimentation of our digitally-networked era: Help Me! mimics the insistent visual tone of the real-time news tickertape scrolling beneath the Astrovision screen.

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Aïda Ruilova

December 20, 2005–March 6, 2006
Times Square
Image: Aïda Ruilova

Aïda Ruilova’s psychologically charged and visually striking video Countdowns gave a dynamic twist to the tradition of countdowns, an infamous annual event, particularly in Times Square. Projected onto the giant Astrovision screen where the infamous New Years Eve ball has dropped since 1907, Ruilova’s work presented a jittery, rapid sequence of counting images or references, culled from sources such as the children’s television show Sesame Street, rockets blasting off into outer space, the countdown at the beginning of films, and of course, the international tradition of boisterously counting down the last ten seconds of the year. Caught within the format of video however, Ruilova’s frenetic images created an antitheis of countdowns—never climaxing, never ending, always waiting, and fated to repetition at the fifty-ninth minute of every hour.

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Song Dong

September 26–November 30, 2005
Times Square
Image: Song Dong

In Broken Mirror, Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong destroys one reflective scene to reveal another, shattering the viewer’s conception of reality and juxtaposing China’s modern cityscape with its traditional landscape. Through a rapid succession of images, Song Dong exposes a rapidly modernizing China and explicates notions of transience and illusion in contemporary society. Watching Broken Mirror, the viewer is at first duped into thinking he is seeing nothing more than a foreign street scene and, like the passersby in the film, he too expects only to give the piece a momentary thought. Suddenly, a hammer wielded by the artist appears to smash through the busy street, in fact a mirror which was only reflecting the street scene. At the mirror’s destruction, the viewer is left with an image of a rural countryside. The opposing images are visually pitted against one another, demonstrating the proximity of the antiquated and the modern in our rapidly evolving cities and the vulnerability that lies beneath the facade. Song Dong’s act of destruction exposes the struggle of Beijing culture to maintain its traditions despite inevitable urbanization.

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Kimsooja

March 10-June 10, 2005
Times Square
Image: Kimsooja

Creative Time’s The 59th Minute was the perfect venue for Kimsooja’s Conditions of Anonymity, a collection of one minute segments culled from the South Korean artist’s lauded video work, including A Needle Woman, A Beggar Woman, and A Laundry Woman. In each video, the artist sits, reclines, or stands completely still with her back to the viewer, illuminating by contrast the vibrancy of the locales and the intrusions of the world around her. Kimsooja’s depiction of a stationary individual surrounded by a hectic crowd suggestively mirrored the experience of an observer of the video amongst the throngs of tourists and passersby in Times Square.

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Carlos Amorales

November 1, 2004-January 31, 2005
Times Square
Image courtesy of Carlos Amorales

Carlos Amorales’s The Forest, screened as The 59th Minute video throughout the winter of 2004 and 2005, represented the artist’s first foray into the realm of animation. Shifting from the performance arena where he had gained international attention for his Devil Dances and Amorales vs. Amorales wrestling performances, the artist utilized the graphic medium to expand upon the live-action aspects of his previous work. The result was a new kind of virtual performance.

The piece, a dreamlike, occasionally menacing sequence of symbolic images, created a pervasive sense of apprehension and foreboding in the viewer. The imagery was drawn from Amorales’s archive of Mexican iconography and symbols from his previous apocalyptic installations combined with universal icons of pop culture. Purposely designed to confound any attempt at linear narrative analysis, the animation encouraged the audience to free associate and explore the concepts of identity and the language of art. With its frenzied pace and stark, broadly drawn imagery Amorales’s video thrived in the chaotic atmosphere of Times Square.

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Günther Selichar with Atomicelroy, John Spiff, and Anne Wolfius

June 24 - September 30, 2004
Times Square
Image courtesy of Creative Time

In early 2004, in preparation for The 59th Minute video, Günther Selichar began Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red, and Green?, an online competition and public art project based on the elementary visual building blocks of modern video, computer, and television screens. Tipping his hat to Barnet Newman’s 1960s “zip paintings,” Selichar invited participants to design a digital animation comprised of fifteen vertical compositions in blue, red, and green. Three winning entries by Atomicelroy, Anne Wolfius, and John Spiff were chosen by a jury, and their work was featured at the last minute of every hour on the Times Square Astrovision throughout the summer of 2004.

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The Neistat Brothers, Hiraki Sawa, Janaina Tschäpe

January 21-April 30, 2004
Times Square
Photo courtesy of Creative Time

In celebration of the third anniversary of The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Astrovision by Panasonic, Creative Time proudly presented three videos by emerging contemporary artists. The three works, Mousetrap, Dwelling, and Dream Sequence I by The Neistat Brothers, Hiraki Sawa, and Janaina Tschäpe, respectively, recast everyday objects–a mousetrap, an airplane, a bed–with an absurdist and dreamlike spirit, displacing their commonplace qualities with unlikely circumstances to produce an eye-catching blend of reality and fiction.

The 59th Minute showcased the works of emerging and established artists in the heart of Times Square. The Neistats, Sawa, and Tschäpe continued the series’ tradition of offering exposure to artists in the world’s media capital and, in doing so, presenting artistic content as an antidote to the entrenched commercialism of Times Square.

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Marina Zurkow with Julian Bleecker and Scott Paterson

October 9-December 12, 2003
Times Square
Photo courtesy of Creative Time

PDPal (Personal Digital Pal) was an interactive public art project that allowed audiences to map their own version of a public space, specifically Times Square. Using a PDA, the Internet, or paper maps, users could create a playful log of the area to mark a personal history, respond to the architectural or historical environment, or even imagine the future. Via the website, users could further their participation in the project by adding their designs to others or augment or modify existing maps. Bridging the digital and physical worlds via its three locations at PDA beaming stations throughout Times Square, pdpal.com, and The 59th Minute video, PDPal allowed users multiple points of entry into a new vision of their everyday environment.

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PDPal online

Jeremy Blake

July 1-September 30, 2003
Times Square
Image courtesy of Jeremy Blake

Jeremy Blake’s Cowboy Waltz drew inspiration from the legend of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, an eccentric gothic mansion of the eponymous rifle heiress Sara Winchester. The legend holds that ghosts of Winchester firearms victims haunted Ms. Winchester to her death. For The 59th Minute video Blake created a surrealist depiction of the Winchester legend by blending historic 16-millimeter photographs of the house, florid ink drawings, and animated imagery to create a dreamlike environment. The ravishing abstractions of Blake’s work starkly contrasted the ubiquitous and often blunt product placements of Times Square.

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Thomas Struth

February 4-May 18, 2003
Times Square
Photo © 2003 Thomas Struth

In conjunction with his first major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Struth’s Video Portraits aired as part of Creative Time’s video series known as The 59th Minute. In its American debut, Video Portraits showcased carefully selected subjects–an art dealer, an architect, a student, and Struth’s godson–gazing calmly at the camera, and, by extension, at us. Struth’s subjects endure the scrutiny of the camera for an entire hour, steady and unmoving except for the occasional blink of an eye. After their initial self-consciousness passes, Struth’s subjects sink into a fascinating meditative state, gradually revealing barely perceptible changes in mood and emotion evidenced through shifting eyes or even a stifled yawn. By subtly balancing distance and intimacy with the camera’s perspective, the videos reduced the entire vocabulary of art to its simplest premise–to look, to see, and to self-reflect–inviting the audience’s discernment, receptivity, and calm consideration.

For the Times Square venue, Struth appropriately selected the final, 59th minute of each portrait to calmly hover over the endless movement of the mediapolis.

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William Wegman

November 6, 2002-January 22, 2003
Times Square
Photo © 1995 William Wegman

Creative Time and Panasonic proudly announced two seminal video works by William Wegman–Dog Duet and Front Porch–as part of The 59th Minute video series. Wegman, a pioneer in the fields of moving image, performance, and photography, has used irony, wit, and Weimaraners to comment on American culture since the 1970s. Dog Duet (excerpt, 1974) and Front Porch (1999) were deceptively simple videos that managed to captivate public audiences within the frenetic, theatrical context of Times Square. Reflecting on society’s contemporary routines and the cultures from which they stem, both videos presented Wegman’s iconic dogs performing habitual human behaviors such as reading the newspaper on the front porch. Transformed by the performance of dogs, these mundane acts charmed viewers and presented a comment on the daily hustle and bustle of Times Square.

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Geneviève Cadieux

March 1–May 30, 2002
Times Square
Image credit Charlie Samuels

In the winter of 1998, Montreal experienced a mammoth ice storm which crippled and even killed many of the area’s trees. Canadian artist Geneviève Cadieux found a badly damaged survivor the following spring and was struck by the tree’s personification of many of the qualities necessary for human survival: sovereignty, independence, and resilience. In her video for The 59th Minute, Cadieux simply depicted the lone tree, offering a metaphor for the isolation of solitude but also, more importantly, the hope of regeneration and the renewal of spring. The horizon on which the tree stood, its branches tossed by the wind, served as a reminder that even in New York City, where the horizon is invisible, nature’s influence is everywhere.

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Gary Hill, Mary Lucier, Michael Snow

December 2, 2001-January 27, 2002
Times Square
Images courtesy of Gary Hill, Mary Lucier, and Michael Snow

Fast Forward, a new series of The 59th Minute videos, aired in conjunction with the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977 . The selection of videos by artists who were also featured in Into the Light complemented the Whitney exhibition’s exploration of the rich, experimental spirit of the projected image during a particular period in art history. Each artist’s video had a unique relation to time, evoking the nuances of experiencing time, addressing how we perceive time, and exploring the possibilities of what can happen in a single minute. This theme has a particular relevance to Times Square as a site that witnesses various documentations and celebrations of time, from streaming news headlines to the arrival of each new year.

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Jeff Gibson

December 1, 2001
Times Square
Image courtesy of Jeff Gibson

On December 1, 2001, Creative Time presented its annual observance of World AIDS Day/Day With(out) Art with a new work by artist and writer Jeff Gibson as part of the ongoing The 59th Minute series. Gibson’s video project gave voice to the complex psychological issues surrounding living with HIV/AIDS and other long-term illnesses as it presented a series of coined terms and phrases comprised of neologisms, puns, and satirical wordplays that reflected stigmas and attitudes related to disease. The texts also addressed the psychological effects of living with uncertainty and imminent threat, a pervasive condition for New Yorkers since September 11.

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Bruce Yonemoto, Norman Yonemoto

October 29-November 30, 2001
Times Square
Image courtesy of Bruce and Norman Yonemoto

In an effort to broaden public discussion around the impact of September 11th Creative Time presented ahistory (1992), a powerful work addressing the complexities of national identity by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, as The 59th Minute video throughout November 2001. ahistory used national monuments and symbols from around the world to explore notions of American history, national identity, and collective memory, striking a resonant chord at a time when our nation’s psyche was heavy with questions about ourselves and our futures.

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William Kentridge

May 21-June 30, 2001
Times Square
Image courtesy of William Kentridge

The third video for Creative Time’s The 59th Minute featured South African artist William Kentridge, internationally recognized for his handcrafted animated films, drawings, and theatrical productions. Shadow Procession depicted a haunting pageant of black puppet-like figures made from cardboard cutouts. The figures, hunched and crippled, moved from left to right across the screen while hauling their belongings—donkeys, carts, chairs, sacks, even whole towns on their backs—as if in exodus from an unidentified place. Influenced by the brutality of South African apartheid, Kentridge’s Shadow Procession conveyed the drudgery and instability of living among prolonged violence, even as it humbled onlookers with its astonishing simplicity amid the cacophony of Times Square.

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Fischli & Weiss

April 16-May 20, 2001
Times Square
Photo © 2001 Fischli and Weiss

Since the late 1970s, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have collaborated in producing cunning, devious, and very funny works that play with viewers expectations of the everyday. In their video for Creative Time’s The 59th Minute, Fischli and Weiss elevated the common house cat to near mythic status as the heart of the spectacular imagery of Times Square. Past works include sculptures made from cocktail sausages, installations of painstakingly refabricated construction materials, and a manic film depicting a perpetual-motion machine created from the contents of their studio. This delightful sense of irony comes through in The 59th Minute as they monumentalize the domesticated house cat.

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Marco Brambilla

February 28-April 15, 2001
Times Square
Photo © 2001 Marco Brambilla

After the success of 2000’s Tibor in Orbit, Creative Time launched a new series of video works entitled The 59th Minute: Video Art on the Astrovision by Panasonic. Since 2001, The 59th Minute has offered artists the rare opportunity to insert their voices within the commercial frenzy that is Times Square. Airing during the last minute of every hour on the Astrovision by Panasonic LED screen, the ongoing series has featured more than twenty-five video artworks by international artists. In their unique way, these works offer reflections on the environment that range from the poetic to the ironic, while encouraging millions of passersby to pause and consider their surroundings anew. Astrovision by Panasonic is the visual centerpiece of New York City’s Times Square, the crossroads of New York culture and commercialism. Measuring nearly three stories high and four stories wide, the screen, which contains 1.5 million light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is capable of displaying more than a billion shades of color.

Marco Brambilla manipulates time-based work with cinematic precision and elliptical narratives, eliciting both suspense and sensory overload. In this excerpt from his video Superstar, an image of a modern skyline descends into the frame. A few moments later, a man’s hands, then his feet, then his entire body enter the top of the frame. The subject is frozen in mid-air, at the center of a centripital spin, nearing the conclusion of a free-fall. Perpetually suspended only a few feet off the ground, he braces himself for the impact. As the image falls into blackness the motive and outcome of his fall remain unresolved. Brambilla, like Times Square, subverts time with the distortion of media, scale and, consequently, context.

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Tibor Kalman

May 23, 2000
Times Square and citywide
Photos © 2000 Ferdinando Scianna, Jeff Mermelstein, and Guenay Ulutuncok

In conjunction with The New Museum, Creative Time and Maira Kalman presented Tibor in Orbit, a public art project that posthumously honored Maira’s husband Tibor Kalman. The project fulfilled Tibor’s unrealized dream of creating an “un-advertising” campaign to question social and economic equality. Tibor in Orbit appeared on one million Parmalat Sunndydale milk cartons in supermarkets in the New York metropolitan area, and was displayed on the video screen in Times Square. Featuring four “Tiborisms” (images and sayings characteristic of Tibor Kalman) every hour at fifty-nine minutes past the hour, the frozen Tibor in Orbit images functioned in stark contrast to Times Square’s chaotic bonanza of advertising, sound bites, and spectacular media images. Additionally, M&Co, Kalman’s design firm, created milk carton panels that read: “Tibor says money isn’t everything.”

Tibor Kalman initially worked with Creative Time on the Everybody installation in Times Square during The 42nd Street Art Project (1993), and he was responsible for creating the organization’s orange dot logo and identity campaign. He was an active board member of Creative Time for many years, sharing his youthful spirit and unique approach to creativity with the public.

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