23.1.09

We're Killing Time, Time's Killing Us


Tishkov's installation, "We're Killing Time, Time's Killing Us" (2003)
is made of glass, sand, metal, sculptures, plastic, a side table,
a stuffed animal, and a motor (170dX240h).

"In his unfinished text number seven, "The Sorrowful Remnants
of Events," Aleksandr Vvedensky wrote: "Everything breaks down
into its last fatal parts. Time eats away at the world.
I don't " What was he going to say next?
I think he meant to say, "I don't eat away at time."
That's how the idea of an installation dedicated to time came up.
A couple, sitting at a table, are just killing time - they're eating
away at time. Then time eats away at them - time kills them.
The piece has to change with the passage of time, and so that's
how the idea of a kind of installation I called
'temporal' came up. Every day, every hour, even every
moment of its existence it doesn't look the same as it did before.
At first the couple were killing Time, then Time will kill them.
That's the way Sand and Time work. So now both we and
the sand itself are being swallowed up by the
penetrating azure light of Time - you can't even see
any distinguishing features through the glass."

At first the sand falls on the table, as if it were supposed to be
eaten; then it starts covering up the figures of the man and
woman, and gets almost all the way to the neck by the end
of the exhibit on June 23rd. The sand weighs 2 = tons.
The inner glass is triple-layered, while the outer glass is
"magic," darkening to the color of the Lethe,
the river of oblivion. It darkens to 95% opacity and grows
translucent again in 10 minutes, and the sand falls
ceaselessly. A special built-in vacuum carries small amounts
of sand up to the well on top, so that it doesn't need to be
refilled by hand. For the first time anywhere in the world
you can see this glass in action! Everything changes
every day, every hour,every minute, and never repeats itself.

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